Georgia Earth
by Jan Starkey
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
XIV. Patch
The children charged up the four ladders of the red contraption to the platform square at the top of The Lookout, she along with them. Then she was there, and she couldn’t get out.
Someone started to push the others around, so that the crowd was one moving body. Out of the center up popped Nash, and he was coming right for her. She held out her arms so as to stop him but, when his force met her hands, she retaliated and pushed him back into the small swaying mass of skirts and shorts and screams and laughter. His eyes opened wide when he flew through a parting in the throng and nothing at the precipice met to resist him: he fell off, almost like a back dive cannonball.
He dropped to the bald patch of ground with a sickening thud.
She thought of the time when she and Cal and Jimmy McClellan collected half-formed frogs, frogs in their embryonic states, from the silt at a pond behind his house — scores of them — that they put into a hole that they had dug to pen them in. Then after the pen filled up — their wiggling and jittering bodies, full heads but no legs yet — she started to feel regretful because she didn’t know what to do with them.
They weren’t whole frogs because they didn’t have their legs yet, but they weren’t tadpoles, either, because they were too big for that, and their faces and heads had emerged.
She decided to throw them back, far out into the middle of the pond. One by one she aimed, like flinging a slimy rock — plunk — into the murky tan water. She would sometimes look at their eyes right before she tossed them — they were ugly, surprised and chastising, under the viscosity of parted lids.
Nash’s eyes were full of merriment when he flew off, and even though she was looking at him, he seemed not to see her, inebriated on his own, or the crowd’s or her aggression.
The children stopped the game and peered over the chain that kept them safe. There lay Nash, unconscious on his back, the breath knocked out of him. The air, a spooky stillness.
Then came a procession of men in khaki suits carrying a stretcher. They picked up Nash, placed him in the center, his head bobbing until it rested on the canvas pouch, and the men hurried him away through a red door in the side of the building that Claire had never noticed before.
XV. Dust
She knew she was the one who pushed Nash through the crowd, but the only other person who knew was Nash.
The next day at school, the children said Nash had broken his arm and wouldn’t return for a while. Claire was relieved for the moment, and she set herself to her school tasks: first the multiplication tables, then addition, and then subtraction.
She worked without pause moving almost effortlessly from one page to the next until it was time for reading groups.
XVI. Mountain
A week before Christmas, Old Scratch returned, the night after Claire and Cal viewed a movie at the mall, while their parents shopped for presents. Scratch’s brother, Pitch, starred on the big screen, larger than life, as one of the many devils who popped in and out of an underground mountaintop, always leaving a puff of sulfur in his wake.
Pitch started out as a doll that two children found and brought to Santa, who lit the toy with a sparkler and it spun and changed into Pitch, the red-orange devil, in another realm where Pitch and his attendant devil-friends, packs of them, danced around a firepit in front of the orange-red mountain Claire figured they lived in.
The king of Hades, Lucifer, told Pitch to ascend through the mouth of the mountain to earth and work evil. “Tempt the children to do evil.” The mountain and Pitch were orange in the same way as the Georgia red clay. And in the mountain’s mouth, boulders for teeth jutted up in fire licks, so that their facets were peach and yellow.
Hades looked like a dreamscape, a labyrinthine underworld deep in the earth’s center, to where Bugs Bunny had traveled digging his way too far into his rabbit hole. She imagined if Bugs Bunny had been to Hades, he would reason his way out with his cleverness, outsmarting monsters, demons, devils and the Devil.
She thought how Looney Tunes opened with a hole framed by concentric circles of red-orange, yellow-orange that Bugs Bunny sat in like sitting in a barrel swing.
That evening, Claire dreamed Old Scratch sat in the rocking chair by her window as she colored his picture in a book.
For nights after, Claire placed dolls and stuffed animals atop the blanket, all along the contours of her body — so that if Old Scratch or Pitch or the Devil or one of his other helpers came for a visit, she would wake up, alerted on all sides. She even put their rat-terrier Tweedle Dee in her doll carriage and rolled her next to her bed, telling her, “You stay here with me all night,” so they could communicate in a pinch.
XVII. Grit
The day before Nash returned, Mrs. Gladstone stood before the class and let them know he was coming back. “I need someone to volunteer to be his tutor, to help him with his work because he won’t be able to use his arm for several weeks,” she said.
Instinctively, Claire raised her hand.
“Claire,” Mrs. Gladstone called on her, “thank you.”
Claire nodded. It was decided. She didn’t want the other children to think she had a crush on Nash, and she didn’t want Nash to think she did, either. She felt responsible, that was all.
XVIII. Dirt
In the first weeks after her family moved into the neighborhood, Claire and Daphne and the Dunleavy children, on the way home from the swimming pool, took a circuitous route back to their houses; they walked through a piece of land behind and between the backyards, separated by rows of trees, half in forest and half out. There were tree stumps and open spaces as if the dirt had been pushed down so it was hard in spots — it looked like a fort where teenagers enacted clandestine rituals.
One of the littlest boys plopped down on a smooth part of the ground and started scratching the dirt up to make a pile of dust.
“Why don’t you eat it?” said Mark, Scott’s twin brother. Claire froze. She didn’t know what to do or say, it was happening so fast, it was almost as if it weren’t happening, so she just watched. “Go ahead,” he continued.
The littlest boy pulled a fistful of dirt up to his mouth and shoved it in. Then he started moving it around with his tongue, his mouth half open.
Daphne chastised the child, “Don’t do that — it has rocks in it!”
He spit it out, as much as he could — wet dirt on dry dirt.
“Come on,” she grabbed him by the arm and pulled him up. “You shouldn’t have done that!” she said to the child. It was too late — it had happened so quickly. Mark was laughing.
“It’s not funny. You should take him home. There are rocks in there!”
All the fun was gone. The group scattered down the hill and lost track of each other as they dispersed to their houses.
XIX. Bark
One Saturday morning out of nowhere, near the end of her first school year, on the tree in front of the Van Deveres’ house, furry orange-and-black caterpillars glutted the knot and the thick bark.
The children rushed to a ray of sunlight that shone down on the hordes of caterpillars; at a distance they appeared as a pulsating mass of splendorous fuzz, like the paw of a colossal cat.
At first, Claire was delighted and fascinated. The children plucked single caterpillars from their tribe and held them in the air. A girl handed one to Claire who took it into her hand like a piece of candy, then watched the insect crawl along her forefinger. Suddenly, the caterpillar took on a changed, monstrous appearance; as it came to the edge of her nail, it jutted its body up, its black eyeless head, bending, worming towards nothing.
Claire shuddered in horror; then put the insect back. Then she tried to put it out of her mind.
Nash didn’t remember who pushed him off The Lookout, and Claire said nothing. He was eternally grateful to her, he told her, because without her help, he might have had to repeat First Grade.
XX. Quicksand
The ladies lounged by the swimming pool in chairs of striped, green-and-white plastic like spearmint sticks. They were always there, drinks in hand, chain smoking cigarettes. The pool was full of children and the seats abounded with mothers.
Claire dove underwater into the silent realm of private blue. She heard her mother’s voice in her head telling her that her father had been promoted, and they would move again, north this time, to Delaware. Claire couldn’t imagine leaving Georgia, but she felt a tinge of relief.
Claire encountered Donna Langley under the water; they were mermaids in a world all to themselves. They surveyed the pool together underwater. They saw something on the bottom that looked like rocks, Donna touched it — ooze — and when she came up, she told the lifeguard. Someone had defecated in the pool.
The lifeguard blew the whistle and made everyone get out so that he could clean the entire bottom of the pool, telling us the water needed more chemicals and everyone had to wait or leave and come back. What was left? To stay cool in the circular kiddie pool. It was empty at the time, but it hardly satisfied.
She waited with Donna Langley for a while and then they both decided to leave, parting ways; Claire left her way home, through the footpath of the forest and Donna, hers, straight up the street.
Midway through the forest, the atmosphere turned dark. Claire felt rain clouds all around her, low. The air grew heavy like water, and then burst with what seemed buckets and sheets of rain through the trees. Claire didn’t mind the feeling at first but. when the path turned to mud, it was too slick to walk fast. She slowed down.
She had never looked at the forest this way, alone in the midst of pouring rain, drops pattering on leaves, a tropical music. She looked at the brambles and flowers and slight indentations of soft dirt and water filled with branches. Then a crack of lightning broke through the sky so that it seemed that lights were rapidly turned on and off and on and off...
Claire reached the end of the path to the opening at the bottom of her street, the construction site across a sea of gravel. A sand-pile had been flattened and spread out so that its surface undulated and vibrated like quicksand. The rain swished in waves, alternating light with heavy waterfalls. Claire had yet to travel the length of her street to her house.
Images flickered like film frames circling the reels over the shuttle. The ladies’ cigarette smoke curling upward in the sunlight, the mosquitoes and their spread of eggs on the orange-yellow water, Claire vomiting her food, the nauseating scent of mud and goo, the caterpillar moving toward her without eyes, a black bulb of nothing, Nash falling in a hard thump, and the side door they took him through, the A, B, C’s on a strip of manila paper above the chalkboard in Mrs. Gladstone’s classroom, pluses and minuses and multiplications, the church cross at the height of swinging up, Scratch and Pitch and the Devil and God. Barnabas, in his black cape, holding up a knife in a futile struggle with the Leviathan. Angelique’s flowing sparkly dresses like the ones her mother kept in her closet, one silver and one gold.
The sun now came out of a grey cloud, but it was still raining. She remembered her secret purple flower. She was near it. She dipped into the hole in the forest wall to the alcove under the canopy of willow trees. There stood the violet wet flower, luminous in the half-light, half-dark, like a figure in a dream. Claire reached for the stem and, with an effort, snapped it, clutching it, the sticky purple bloom in her hand, mirroring her own face in a state of intensity.
XXI. Earth
The liminal rays of the morning sun saturated the Georgia earth along the forest’s edge as the iris eye closed upon the street she would never return to except in her reflections. She felt privy to a secret world, one that, had she not been a witness to it, might never have fully appeared.
As her family rode away in the Bonneville, a light rain dampened her side window; she drew an egg-shape on the mist and cleared it, a camera lens on the fleeting pine trees.
She had known two other houses: her first house in North Carolina, where she played in mud puddles, making Leprechaun pies and ridden her bicycle along the perfect circle her street wound around the neighborhood. There, her mother planted climbing roses.
At her second house, the one she left in Gale City, before she would leave the house in Macon, she had found her forest. Once, there in the winter, she followed the creek out so far, she thought she might be lost. The trees dripped with icicles, and the water trickled over ice and grey rocks. She climbed the snowbanks that led to a clearing all white and sparkling, the trees majestic canopies, the sound of water, soft high piano notes. She felt a presence above her, like God, and she felt God was looking at her.
She wondered if what she saw was real or story: it was a magic land. The sunlight through the winter trees cast faint colors on the snow and frozen ground. It was possible to find the ice palace, she thought, like the one in Dr. Zhivago that jutted up from the white flatlands out of nowhere, all the lattices lacy with the whiteness and, outside, miles and miles of powdery bright white as far as the eye could see.
She had wished that Lara and Yuri could have lived there forever, happily ever after, like Cinderella, whose prince always found her other glass slipper in the end.
Claire played in her childhood forest, losing time until the moon rose, the opaque luminous sphere suspended in its place beside the sun, like a pair of eyes or sky lamps, like a spirit watching over her.
Copyright © 2026 by Jan Starkey
