Spare Parts
Part Three
Half mad self-mutilators, torturers, indoctrinated cattle willing to do anything their shriveled Elders told them to do. Garrett shed no tears for these people as he observed them toiling through their largely joyless lives. When some of them eventually got around to asking him his name after his time in the noose and his time of being guarded as he went about his daily routine, he didn’t have to think long on a lie. “Call me Jo.”
Jo became their pail man.
The grassy plateau had no water to call its own. New initiates and those deemed to “unfortunate” to serve the community in other ways became pail men. Hauling buckets and pulling barrels of water from the creek below was hard work but it was that first haul down the hill every morning that had them all leaving well enough alone and not bothering Garrett.
The pail men had to carry all the waste for the Believers down the hill and past the creek to a spot near the entrance to their old ancestral bunker home. The place was called the “well of ghosts” by the Believers. The other pail men didn’t need to be told to stay clear of the place, to dump their soil and walk back to the creek to rinse them and then fill the water barrels and buckets for the day.
Garrett was guarded for weeks, and more weeks still while he led the diseased and the disabled down with their buckets of waste and back up with their barrels of clean water for the day. He looked at how they suffered with him, how those who failed to haul enough were beaten, how they were malnourished and barely kept alive.
He stood silent while one of the guards beat a girl with palsy for dropping her morning pail. No good would come of intervening. His purposes wouldn’t be served by getting himself killed in this place. Later he thought about ways to irrigate the grass valley. He even toyed with the idea of gaining enough trust to convene with the Elders and explain to them the simple concept of using pumps and channels to bring water to the plateau from the creek below. Then he considered the nature of these people, these Believers.
The Heatherites were sick hypocrites. Preaching perversions of the words of older religious texts and using their deranged idol as a means of conveying their will. These Elders cleaved to the idea of survival of the fittest, they had no qualms with deploying social Darwinism on their people. The disabled were only kept alive to dump waste and fetch water, without the miserable job and the miserable conditions the Elders would let the less than fortunate starve to death and they would employ their cruel overseers to do the dirty work for them when the time came.
Garrett carried shit and piss and trash down the hill and hauled water up it, day in, day out. He watched the cruelty around him and kept his thoughts at bay. He slept in his corner of the small barn were the pail men/people slept and lived and he closed his ears to the world when the overseers came in to get their jollies picking at and humiliating the less fortunate at night.