A Day In The Life: Martin Tadeusz (1)

A blessed half-minute was all of the extra time Martin could spend in his sack-bed stuffed with hay and feathers before the deep church bell clamored and the loudspeakers crackled to life, spilling a river of prayers and commandments into the valley. It was so routine that he could only faintly remember his plush bed, groping blindly around the nightstand until his fingers crawled up the alarm clock and stilled its infernal ringing. Now, he was rising out of bed. His room, such as it was, consisted of said bed and a floor of thankfully cold, dry dirt for his sore toes to wiggle against. He pulled his tunic off of a wooden hook above his bed and put the woe-begotten burlap sack over his scabrous, dry skin.

"Blessed morning, God has seen fit to bless us with clear skies for a day of labor. Field sector three will be planting barley, one and two will have wheat, four and five await delivery of cornseed from granary seven."

In the first year, he would have been happy to have a fallow field or waiting: certainly it would mean no work. Now, the news elicited only a huff of exasperation as Martin stumbled into his combination kitchen and living room, where a squat bench in front of a rough slab of wood stood aside a big, black cauldron suspended over embers. Scooping up a wooden bowl carved over in one of the forestry hamlets and a dirty wooden spoon, Martin ladeled out a few chunky scoops of off-brown gruel. Would he not be lashed for impropriety he would have shambled over to the church while slurping the tasteless concoction. Instead, he sat at his bench and looked out of his window. Crisp white uniforms marched in unison in groups of three, bristling with arms. One group, like a specter of death, passed by his window, looming over him: briefly swinging their rifles to point as they casually went about their business.

"I already know..." He murmured, only once he was sure God's eyes-on-Earth were averted.

Stomach not nearly filled enough, covered his eyes and stepped beneath the oppressive sun, pulling on his rough leather work boots and standing up straight to pop his back into alignment. His eyes turned to the imperious church atop the hill, the only bastion of concrete, the one splash of man-made color and artistry. The structure, as dreadful as it was, never failed to impress Martin. He remembered seeing something like it in Omaha on his way to work each morning, though its name escaped him. Unlike this one, though, it was never slaked in blood or encircled by the bandits and outlaws of the day, perfect strangers hanging in wrought iron cages or hunched over in stocks. There were no skeletons hanging from spires or an abattoir's runoff puddles suctioning his feet to the concrete.

". . . Ensure your timely arrival to the church to prepare it for the day's event. Your cleaning supplies will be present." He must have spaced out the passages of the day, plucked from the Old Testament or the Book of Rejuvenation: justifications of brutality and demands that people work sixteen hour days had become so rote that they joined the typical noise of chattering birds or gusts of wind causing trees to sway and creak ever-so-lightly. None were coming to save him from the mundane nature of this evil.

Cresting the hill, Martin squinted to behold Father Chester in his resplendent raiment of a purple scarf of some sort draped around either shoulder, stretching down white and gold robes that seemed to shimmer in the morning light. Flanked on either side by a chevron of rifle-armed guards and watched over by a machinegunner up in the parapets, it almost seemed comical that the priest was wielding a dagger ornately crafted and shaped to the point of ludicrousness. Before him knelt a slender black man wearing a ruddy, stained tank top, green fatigues and a pair of worn boots. A bag was thrown over his head, and his hands were bound tightly behind his back. Martin could only issue a short prayer of pity for the soul, since the loudspeakers had been droning on for days about the Order's campaign against the Black Panthers. Each time they caught *anybody* that was the focus of such vigorous and frequent condemnations, the mandatory show that followed wasn't pretty.