The pillars of creation

Oba turned sideways to fit his shoulders through the small side door into the barn. Rats squeaked and scurried away at his feet. The barn, with a hayloft above, housed their milk cow, two hogs, and two oxen. The cow was still in the barn. The hogs had been turned loose in the oak stand to rut for acorns under the snow. Oba could see the hind ends of both oxen through the larger barn door out to the yard on the other side.

His mother stood on the low hill of frozen muck, hands on her hips, the cold smoke of her breath rising from her nostrils like a dragon's fiery snort.

Mother was a big-boned woman, broad in the shoulders and hips. Broad everywhere. Even her forehead was broad. He had heard people say that when his mother was younger she had been a handsome woman, and indeed, when he had been a boy, she had had a number of suitors. Year by year, though, the struggles of life had worn away her looks, leaving behind deeply etched lines and sagging folds of flesh. The suitors had long ago stopped coming around.

Oba made his way across the black, icy ground inside the barn and stood before her, hands in his pockets. She walloped the side of his shoulder with a stout stick. "Oba." He flinched when she whacked him three times more, each swat punctuating his name. "Oba. Oba. Oba."

When he had been young, such a thrashing would have left him black and blue. He was too big and strong, now, for her stick to hurt him. That made her angry, too.

While he wasn't bothered much by the stick now that he was grown, the condemnation in her voice whenever she spoke his name still made his ears bum. She reminded him of a spider with a mean little mouth. A black widow spider.

He hunched, trying not to look so big. "What is it, Mama?"

"Where are you loafing when your mother calls?" Her face screwed up, a plum long ago turned to a prune. "Oba the ox. Oba the dimwit. Oba the oaf. Where were you!"

Oba lifted his arm defensively as she cracked him with the stick again. "I was getting the eggs, Mama. Getting the eggs."

"Look at this mess! Don't it ever occur to you to do anything round here unless someone with brains tells you to?"

Oba looked around, but didn't see what needed doing-other than the regular work-that would have set her off so. There was always work to do. Rats stuck their noses out from under boards in the stalls, whiskers twitching as they sniffed, watching with beady black eyes, listening with little rat ears.

He looked back at his mother, but had no answer. None would suit her, anyway.

She pointed at the ground. "Look at this place! Don't you ever think to scoop out the muck? Soon as it thaws it'll be running under the wall and into the house where I sleep. Do you think I feed you for nothing? Don't you think you have to earn your keep, you lazy oaf? Oba the oaf."

She had already used the last invective. Oba was surprised, sometimes, that she wasn't more creative, didn't learn new things. When he had been little she had seemed to him a mind reader of inscrutable ability, with a talented tongue that could cut him with knowing lashes. Now that he had grown so much larger than her, he sometimes wondered if other aspects of his mother were less formidable than he had once feared, wondered if her power over him wasn't somehow… artificial. An illusion. A scarecrow with a mean little mouth.

Yet she still had a way about her that could cut him down to nothing.

And she was his mother. A person was supposed to mind their mother. That was the most important thing a person could do. She had taught him that lesson well.

Oba didn't think he could do much more to earn his keep. He worked from sunup to sundown. He prided himself on not being lazy. Oba was a man of action. He was strong, and worked as hard as any two men. He could best any man he knew. Men didn't give him any trouble. Women, though, stymied him. He never knew what to do around women. Big as he was, women had a way of making him feel puny.

He scuffed his boot against the dark, rippled, slick mound underfoot, assessing the rock-hard mass. The animals added to it continually, much of it freezing before it could all be scooped out, allowing it to build in layers throughout the long, cold winter. Periodically, Oba scattered straw over the top for better footing. He'd not want his mother to slip and fall. It wasn't long, though, before the layer of straw became slicked over and it was time for another.

"But Mama, the ground's all frozen."

In the past, he had always scooped it out as it thawed and could be worked. In the spring, when it got warmer and the flies filled the barn with their constant buzzing, it would come off in layers where the straw was. But not now. Now, it was welded together into a solid mass.

"Always an excuse. Isn't that right, Oba? Always an excuse for your mother. You worthless bastard boy."

She folded her arms, glowering at him. He couldn't hide from the truth, couldn't pretend, and she knew it.