For the people who remained, poultry was replacing produce as the county’s biggest employer. The chicken magnate Arthur Perdue was from the Eastern Shore, just over the border in Maryland. He’d been a railroad agent who left that industry to grow his family’s egg farm into a profitable business in 1920. Eventually he, along with other Eastern Shore farmers, realized that raising broiler chickens could lead to a better profit than raising egg-laying chickens. The land was good for chicken raising: mild climate, sandy soil that facilitated drainage, low building costs. Perdue opened its first mass chicken production factory on the shore in the late 1960s.
By 2012, Perdue and Tyson were the two largest employers in Accomack County. The Delmarva peninsula, which included the Eastern Shore of Virginia as well as parts of Maryland and Delaware, was annually farming 558 million birds, producing 3.6 billion pounds of meat, employing nearly fifteen thousand people (Accomack County, in particular, ranked sixty-fourth of the more than three thousand counties in the United States in terms of its poultry production). Thirteen hundred of those jobs belonged to “growers,” the modern term preferred over “farmers” for the workers who housed and fed the chicks until they were big enough for eating. The growers provided the buildings and the manpower; the chicken companies gave them the birds, the feed, the propane, the vaccinations.
The rest of the fifteen thousand worked directly for the poultry companies. They were members of the “catching crew,” whose job it was to round up the birds by hand and transport them to the factories. Or they were members of the slaughtering teams, or they were janitors cleaning the machinery in the factories, which smelled pungent and burnt when you drove past them but were Clorox-clean inside. There were “deboning” jobs, and “trussing” jobs, and “eviscerating” jobs, which required, as qualifications, only the necessity of being eighteen years old with the ability to lift fifty pounds, and a willingness “to stand for several hours . . . work in wet and extreme hot or cold conditions . . . work around dust, feathers and various cleaning chemicals,” as one Perdue job ad specified. For this a worker might make $9–$12 an hour. A single person could live on that here, if he scrimped.
Those jobs were steady—people always needed to eat, so they were somewhat recession-proof—but they were precarious in other ways: according to one aspiring politician stumping about the economy on the campaign trail, “We’re one bird-flu away from economic destruction.”
People held meetings about the environmental impact of these plants, whole standing-room-only meetings about chicken poop runoff, with half the attendees arguing that chickens were polluting the land, and half arguing that chickens created vital work that might not come otherwise. These meetings were about the county’s economic future, about the soul of the county, and about an old-fashioned place figuring out the best way to adapt in the modern world.
By November 12, 2012, the same thing had happened on the Eastern Shore that had happened to rural communities all across the country: the shift of family farms to corporate ones. The closing of small businesses and the arrival of big-box stores, which brought much-needed convenience but also left main streets emptying. In the 1910 census, the Eastern Shore population had been fifty-two thousand; in the 2010 census, the population was forty-four thousand, a nearly 20 percent decline.
AN AVERAGE PASSERBY wouldn’t have known this about Accomack, any of it. Most outsiders who came to the shore at all were vacationers on their way to Chincoteague Island, home of the swimming horses, where Marguerite Henry had set her 1947 Newbery Honor Book, Misty of Chincoteague. Or they were on their way to Wallops Island, the NASA facility that employed engineers and rocket scientists and had a visitors center for tourists. If vacationers bothered to drive through the mainland, they likely stayed on the one main road, hopping out of their cars only long enough to buy boiled peanuts from one of the summertime roadside stands.
Which was a shame. Because there were many, many beautiful places on the Eastern Shore: a historic movie theater, a picturesque vineyard, and a donut bakery that would have made Krispy Kreme weep with jealousy, if only anyone off the shore knew about it. There was the Onancock Wharf, where sailboats docked and their inhabitants disembarked to eat crab cakes, and where kids participated in fishing competitions. There was Jaxon’s Hardware in the town of Parksley, which sold everything from candy to clothing to butter dishes and ammunition; the kind of authentic general store that posh vacation destinations spend fortunes to reproduce. Not all towns in Accomack were the same, either. Kirk Mariner, a writer who had grown up in the relatively more working-class New Church and then moved to the well-heeled Onancock, liked to demarcate the difference as such: “In New Church, we cut our grass. In Onancock, we mow our lawns.” Of Saxis, a tiny fishing community on the western part of the county, Mariner explained, “Saxis isn’t the end of the world, but you can see it from there.”
Doors went unlocked, bake sales and brisket fund-raisers were well attended, and when two cars passed on the road, both drivers would raise the tips of their fingers off the steering wheel in a wave. The grassy shores and open sky made the land breathtaking—“God’s country,” people said. There’s a reason that the Come Heres want to go there.
But all of the past century’s change had resulted in one particular outcome: the Eastern Shore was no longer the richest rural place in America. It was a place that was falling behind: only 17 percent of adults over age twenty-five had bachelor’s degrees, compared with 35 percent in the rest of highly educated Virginia. A fifth of Accomack’s residents lived below the poverty line; a quarter of Northampton County’s. They were among Virginia’s poorest counties.
Route 13, the county’s main route, ran the length of the Eastern Shore, and it was the only route that was well lit. The other streets veined away from it, winding off at odd angles or ending abruptly, past hundreds and hundreds of now empty houses that lingered and rotted by the side of the road. At night, hardly anybody went on any of these roads. People went to bed early so they could get up early for work—the agricultural jobs that remained required rising with the sun. Besides, even if someone had the inclination or money for a late evening out, there weren’t a whole lot of places to go.
In November of 2012, the Eastern Shore of Virginia was old. It was long. It was isolated. It was emptying of people but full of abandoned houses. It was dark. It was a uniquely perfect place to light a string of fires.
CHAPTER 3
“ORANGE IN THE SKY”