Now (Ten Years After the Massacre)
The graduating class of Delta Heights, 2031, will push close to two-hundred new men and women out into the civilian populace. Of the one-hundred-and-two male graduates, an all-time-low number have already signed up to enlist in the military, just fifteen people. Among the ninety-six female graduates, the number is even lower, at seven. This is quite unusual for Deertrack, but rest assured, more will sign up for enlisted service in the year that follows.
From the time I spent walking the school’s exterior grounds with Brenda Matheson, one might be excused for not quite being able to envision the carnage that was committed on the grounds. But last night, curious to see if any security measures had been implemented since the event, I headed out to the school in my rented car. To my pleasant surprise, I discovered a Deertrack Police Department cruiser parked with its engine and lights off directly across the street from the soccer field, the officer inside staring daggers at me when I stepped out of my vehicle to look around the area. Though this may have cut an intimidating moment under normal circumstances, I found it encouraging.
While there had once been a great number of Republican, conservative and ‘good ol’ boy’ kind of bumper stickers and lawn signs posted on the vehicles and front lawns of the residents of this suburb, especially back when I was growing up here, there presently seems to be a kind of subdued neutrality, at least in outward presentation. I cannot say with authority that this is a result of the somber self-reflection that hit home with most of the citizenry of Deertrack, but it seems to coincide on a timing level.
Talking to various locals, one gets the impression that, while nobody has genuinely forgotten the Massacre and its cascade of effects on the townspeople, very few people want to take the time to look back on and think about it at any kind of length. I cannot blame them; who would want to dwell on the most horrific thing to happen to their sleepy little hometown?
**
One of the measures of a town’s success and vitality is its population density. Another measure is brought to us compliments of the Department of Labor, information regarding how many people who live in an area also happen to be employed in that same location. Back in 2021, the population of Deertrack, Georgia, was pegged at approximately 9,000, with adults comprising roughly 6500 of those persons. Of those 6500, 3200 were employed in the town itself or the immediate surrounding vicinity.
Nowadays, in 2031, the town’s total population hovers just above 7000, with 4800 adults. Of those 4800, only 2100 are employed in the township of Deertrack proper. Close to three-hundred of those folks work at the Wal-Mart on the south side of town. The numbers don’t lie; since the Massacre, Deertrack has experienced a slow, steady decline that doesn’t seem to show any signs of letting up.
The closure of the Harding Brothers Lumber Mill on the town’s west side surely accounted for a massive loss of residency back in 2024. With one of the town’s largest employers out of the picture, folks seeking to remain residents had to start considering commuting well beyond the normal boundaries of their comfort zone to find employment.
Many of the members of the resultant exodus ended up relocating entirely to Storkhaven, to the south, which has seen an equivalent population and business boom in relation to Deertrack’s decline. The ratio from 2024-2027 was a near-exact 1:1, though since the establishment of several tech start-ups in Storkhaven’s downtown area, along with the arrival of the Howerton Trade School, that ratio has been blown out of proportion.
It should be noted here that fifty-eight members of the Delta Heights graduating class of 2031 have already signed up for courses at Howerton. The resurgence of trade schools since 2020, particularly in parts of the American South, has been immensely beneficial to a generation that grew up assuming they’d never be able to pay off their post-secondary educations in their lifetimes. Or, at least, not before it was time to realize that the Social Security Administration had gone bankrupt and wouldn’t be able to help them survive their golden years.
This trend shows no signs of slowing, either. Clayton’s, a small, family-owned-and-operated department store situated on the town’s east side, has an enormous yellow ‘GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE’ sign draped over its entrance, a sight I didn’t even see when I first arrived at the TransAmerica Inn for my extended stay. The current crop of grammar school-aged children enrolled at the area’s two elementary schools numbers only three-hundred and seventeen in total; considering this accounts for all children attending kindergarten through the eighth grade, I suspect it’s only a matter of a few months, a year at most, before the town’s school board convenes to hold a vote on combining the entire student body into a single school.
Teacher and staff layoffs are almost assuredly coming to a theater near me.
Adding to the downturn in Deertrack is the afteraffects of something which happened even before the Massacre- the farmlands surrounding the town are not all being tended to. Owing largely to the clownishness of the Trump-era trade tariffs, many of Deertrack’s satellite farms and farmers were damaged so thoroughly on a financial angle that they simply couldn’t stay afloat, the lands once belonging to generations of proud farmers returned to the ownership of banks and hedge funds. I don’t know if you’ve ever met a dyed-in-the-wool banker, but I can tell you almost without fear of contradiction that most of them could not tell you the difference between a garden hoe and a backhoe. They know little and care less about the vitality, labors, or importance of American farmlands, beyond the dollar value of the properties those lands stretch over. Those farm families and their handful of employees ended up departing from Deertrack, and I don’t honestly think anything else could bring them back.
The other local businesses that relied upon the expenditures of farm operations have, of course, subsequently suffered. The brutality of Norris and Sitanski alone did not author the decline of this humble, sleepy suburb. But make no mistake, it certainly seems to have accelerated it.
**
At the end of the day, if you’re eager to pick out a single spot that can almost overlook the entirety of the township of Deertrack’s interior, without the outlying farms, there’s one spot you can head to, locally referred to as Jacob’s Hill. Back in June of 1971, a local young artist by the name of Jacob Flemming took an easel, a blank canvas, and a toolbox filled with his various paints and brushes up to a high elevation hill on the west side of the downtown area, secluded in some of the sparser woods that connected to the greater surrounding Georgian woodland that serves as a kind of timber blanket wrapping around Deertrack. Flemming was a well-known and popular young man among the townsfolk, an athletic fellow whom everybody had assumed would end up going on to do big things in collegiate athletics.
But those who knew Flemming best knew that, at his core, he was a painter, an artist. His capacity to recreate what he saw visually before him and imbue it with a sense of the ethereal, the otherworldly, had been much-ballyhooed by the handful of academics, scholars, and artistic sorts who lived in the area. Many saw him, even at only nineteen years of age, as possibly the most artistically talented person the town of Deertrack had ever produced.
On that June morning, Jacob Flemming painted the sunrise over Deertrack, adding in what would later be described as ‘shadows from a faraway and dangerous place, shadows in the form of smoke-like hands, reaching out to claim the artist where he sat’. After finishing his painting, Jacob Flemming took the .38 caliber snub-nosed revolver he’d packed with his paints from his toolbox, and shot himself in the head. When authorities arrived on the scene, they found the young artist, his equipment, and his final painting. In the bottom-right corner of his canvas, he had attached with a thumbtack his Selective Service Card; his birthdate had come up in the draft for the Vietnam War.
I headed up to Jacob’s Hill about an hour before sunset yesterday, just to take in the view, as I had done a few times when I was younger. What struck me was not how much the town had visibly changed since the last time I had been up atop that hill, its lone, rough-barked elm standing sentinel silently and casting its shadow gently over me, but rather, how much it had remained exactly as it was all those years ago.
The view would have been far more idyllic, I believe, had it not allowed me a clear if long-range view of the town square, and the mysterious tarp covering the memorial that would revealed for the citizens of Deertrack.