Si Marmut

There has always been an ox in the family.

There has always been an ox to take a deep breath before dawn and release it with a giant moo that startles every set of dreamy eyes from their slumber and forces every pair of limbs to abandon their immobile postures. There has always been an ox to be pulled out of the barnyard and lifted up onto the old truck laboriously, only to be commuted across the river and dismounted back to the ground to commence the plowing duty. There has always been an ox doing all the dirty work from sunrise to sunset, every single day, over and over since the day I became aware of my existence.

I was born into a family whose very life depends on everything that grows, and I grow with it. My mother gave birth to me in this very barn house, helped by the only midwife in our village. She was not a doctor of any kind nor did she learn medics in any type of school, but we called her Inang Dokter anyway. Who cares? It has been decades since the last person from Porsea had the chance to go to STOVIA. The only doctors as we know around here are mostly priests and missionaries of Dutch or Belgian origin who take tours in the region once or twice a month. Of course, we do not care about them either. What would people from small villages stretched along the extensive shore of Tao Toba expect from the white devils—Si Bontar Mata—who took our land and disturbed the centuries-long peace we had maintained in Tano Batak?

My father has been a farmer his whole life. When Opung Doli married Opung Boru, he bought this land and built our home right in the middle of it, on top of a mound, fenced by wild bushes of sesame and protected by a thick canopy from six pairs of gambiri tree. They had just collected their eleventh harvest of rice and corns when Sisingamangaraja the Twelfth, the last of the Batak kings to contest the Dutch colonialist authorities, was killed in the battlefield and his body was marched through the hushed streets of Balige. It was a grave loss for Bangso Batak. The economy was failing and everybody was trapped in poverty with threats of famine growing closer to every household day by day. Si Bontar Mata took everything for the cost of war, so my father had to start working on the fields at the age of nine to help provide food on the table. Since then, every day was just another day of hard work without any promise of improvements in the near future. And it only got worse. It finally came to pass that we must sell our ox in return for money and spare parts.

Opung Doli knew in his heart that if we lost the ox, we would have to replace the role of the mooing tractors with our own human sweat. My father was barely eleven years old, and his younger brothers respectively seven and four years old. There was no way they could pull the two-hundred-kilograms wagon six hours a day for every other day, not to mention they had school to attend. We could use one or two men who were trained and experienced on the fields, but not only did we have too small amount of money to spare, we also could not find anyone willing to take the job. Everybody was too busy saving their own fields. With nine gaping mouths and ambitious tummies to feed every day, Opung had to find a way out.

It did not take very long for Opung Doli to make a decision. Two weeks after the ox was taken and almost all the fields dried out, he took leave from Opung Boru and went walking barefooted to Hutatinggi, a great wood on the highland near the borders of Balige in Laguboti. When his children asked whither and wherefore, he did not answer, not even to Opung Boru. But he knew his wife trusted him. She did. Everybody did. They bid him farewell and took faith, clueless as they were on when to hope for his return.

———

Another two weeks had passed since the day our father left, and everything was just going normally when we heard people shouting from the end of the main village road.

“Oi, Simbolon! You are back! For the love of Debata, how on earth did you find this thing and bring it home all the way on foot? You really are…”

We did not wait until the voice finished the sentence. We threw our collecting baskets aside, leaving all the uncracked gambiri scattered on the ground, and ran like an alarmed fox. We did not think of anything else beside the fact that our father had come home. There he was, by the end of the street walking towards us. He saw us and smiled. He waved his hands high in the air excitedly. We were no less enthusiastic.

“Bapa is back! He is here! He has come …”

I stopped yelling when I realized Bapa was not alone. We stopped running immediately when we saw something walking behind him. We could not believe our eyes.

It was an ox.

———

Now, it was not very common among our people to name our oxen with proper names as we do our children. There was no need for it, since the very purpose of having an ox was to help with the dirty jobs on the fields. They were machines, bred for specific requirements. That was why people were surprised when Opung Doli named the ox he brought home. Si Marmut, he called it—or rather him, as Opung Doli referred to it. Naming and referring to the ox like a person was indeed odd enough for everybody else, let alone to think of the meaning behind the name. I could never tell which part of an ox might possibly resemble those of guinea pigs, but it was just what the name says. Si Marmut the ox. Guinea pig the ox.

Nevertheless, soon everybody got used to the name and the practice of referring to it as him. Si Marmut became a part of the Simbolon family, and was present during the birth of all of my Namborus, the six daughters of Opung Doli. Every day after the heavy work of ploughing and tending the crops, Si Marmut would play with them and let them ride on top of his grey mantle, embarking on little adventures together. Namboru Bene and Namboru Dorlan would lift Namboru Ida and Namboru Friska from the ground up to Si Marmut’s back (although Namboru Ida always insisted that she could hop on by herself), and each of them would hold on to Si Marmut’s giant twirling horn on either side while holding Namboru Udur and Namboru Renta in their other hands. Si Marmut behaved as if he understood the nature of children and took good care of them while Opung Doli watched from afar, trusting his ox like he did his sons.

It did not take long until Si Marmut gained his fame around the neighborhood. People started greeting Si Marmut whenever they passed by him on the road to the fields. My father even said that Si Marmut would moo to the passerby and perform a nodding gesture whenever greeted. People were fond of his gentle temper and treated him kindly. He had become everybody’s favorite until one day a neighboring farm owner, Amani Janter, rushed into the village’s main building—Sopo Gorga—and disturbed the weekly farmers meeting, claiming that a third of his corn plants area were damaged by a wild beast.

This happened overnight. Amani Janter and his family had always been our nearest neighbor. They lived in the foothill below us, just 500 meters away from our frontmost gambiri tree, and we could see the view of his corn fields on our left even as we walk uphill towards our house. The next nearest neighbor, Ompu Saragih, lived one kilometer away in a shack where he ran his small lapo. 

Opung Doli was called to the crime scene with the rest of the men. They went straight to Amani Janter’s field and examined the traces left by the intruder. It was indeed in utter disarray: corn stalks were toppled and torn apart here and there, and kernels were scattered everywhere on the ground. It was pattern-less.

“This is insane. What could have possibly done this?” exclaimed one of the men, joined by the others in bafflement.

“This is no work of any man, indeed, but a wild beast!”

“What kind of beast? It has been decades since we had attacks from tigers. They don’t live in the woods around here anymore.”

“Yeah, our fathers have hunted and eliminated them!”

By this time everyone was already arguing with each other. Even Amang Saragih had left his lapo and joined them, curious about the rioting noise. They examined the footprints on the ground, the width of the area and the bite marks on the remains of the corns. Some even developed their own theories. None could reach any agreement. Silence came at last, and Amang Saragih offered his assumption.

“Could it be a boar?” he asked. “I’ve hunted some myself, and a very large hog could leave this kind of trace, or it could as well be…”

“…  An ox,” Amani Janter concluded with his reply. “It could be an ox.”

Silence fell once more.

“You surely know really well that every ox in our village is tamed and is either tied to a pole or locked up in a cage every evening after work,” said Amang Saragih who was immediately replied by Amani Janter, “not all of them. I’ve seen one that is left unattended and roamed freely in our village all the time.”

Everybody knew Amani Janter was talking about Si Marmut, and they started arguing again, this time in murmur. Truly, Opung Doli had never tied nor caged Si Marmut ever since he arrived. Why should he? Si Marmut was obedient and, in a way, independent. And Opung Doli loved him dearly, even as to his own child. My father used to tell me about his childhood memory, that on a very lazy Sunday when he was lying around in the morning after church and going for a stroll after lunch until dusk, he had forgotten his daily task to take Si Marmut to graze on the green pasture beside the river. Finding out that Si Marmut had not been fed for the day, Opung Doli was furious. So great was his wrath upon my father that in the morning my father was forced to leave without Si Marmut and plow the fields by himself. He was not given provisions for lunch either. “Go and think about how hard it must have been for Si Marmut to work all day without being fed!” Such is the love of Opung Doli to his ox.

“Alright! Nobody blames anybody!” exclaimed Ompu Silalahi, the eldest in the village, trying to placate the crowd. “Now let us help Amani Janter clean up the mess and go home while we wait with hope that the problem would reveal its own solution. Night is coming. We shall discuss further investigations tomorrow in Sopo Gorga.” With that, everybody set to tidy up the field and went home afterwards.

———