HELEN HASTY’S LAND exemplified the rise and recession of Accomack County. The acres she lived on used to be known as Smith Brothers Farm. The Smiths were her ancestors. They had grown potatoes, and on Sunday afternoons half a century ago, her grandfather would take the family on long drives to judge whether the crops had been planted in straight lines. In those days, the potatoes on the shore were harvested by migrant workers, who arrived each season and stayed in a labor camp on the property. As a girl, Hasty was afraid of their cussing but still loved accompanying her grandfather when he doled out the farmworkers’ weekly paychecks.
Then crop prices dropped and the money for those paychecks started coming in more slowly, until it dried up altogether. The last year of the Smith Brothers’ incorporation, Hasty was their only employee. The year after that, the family started leasing the land out to corporate farms. When the corporate farms switched from potatoes to corn and soybeans, which don’t need to be picked by hand, the migrant labor camps went unoccupied. Occasionally, tourists stopped by to inquire about the history of the buildings, or amateur photographers who thought the camp had a sort of haunting beauty.
Hasty now found herself part of another defining Accomack story. At half past 1 a.m. on November 13—twelve miles away from where Deborah Clark had called in the first fire three hours before—Hasty went to let out her dog, who wouldn’t stop barking, and saw that those old migrant camp buildings were now aflame.
“It’s two houses, and it’s right on the turn,” she told the 911 dispatcher, trying to give directions for the buildings that no longer had an address. “We didn’t hear nothing, we didn’t see nothing. We let the dogs out—they go in there all the time . . . I mean, the buildings are not insured, they’re vacant, they’re just old shacks that been there a hundred years. Oh, it’s getting bright now, it’s lit up both sides of the road. Oh my God. There she goes.”
The house on Dennis Drive had been the first fire. The one on Helen Hasty’s land was the second.
Eight minutes later, another call came into the 911 Center: “I’m down at Arthur Lane,” the caller explained. “And there’s—the woods are on fire. I was riding by, and it’s on fire, and it’s spreading. It’s two minutes down Arthur Lane at Greenbush.”
That was the third fire.
The members of the Tasley Volunteer Fire Department had just pulled back into their station, down on Tasley Road about half a mile from the decaying remains of the esteemed Whispering Pines resort, which hadn’t operated as a restaurant in two decades and as a hotel in even longer than that, and which loomed dark and creepy and big by the side of the road.
The firefighters were sweaty and tired from the fire on Dennis Drive, but there were protocols to be followed. They hung up their coats on the assigned hooks lining the wall of the engine room and arranged their boots and suspendered pants on the floor directly below. Their hats went on the shelf above. All of them were yellow or black except for Shannon Bridges’s because, when she’d determined that she wanted to become a firefighter, she also determined that she would do so wearing a pink hat. Her brother Richie’s hat was the largest in the row and his coat was, too. Richie, twenty-six, had been volunteering with Tasley for seven years, and was built like a refrigerator. The company was always having to order him special-sized uniforms and then even more special sizes when the shoulders of the XXLs were still too tight. He drove a Richie-sized truck, and it was while borrowing this truck one afternoon that Shannon, twenty-eight, decided she would join the fire company like her brother. His equipment had been lying on the floorboard; she kept looking down at it and thinking, I want to do that.
After removing their uniforms, the Tasley firefighters climbed on the red and white engine, and began repacking the hose with a precision that most of them would have deployed anyway but upon which Chief Jeff Beall absolutely insisted. Firefighting was his second career. He’d served a full five years in the Air Force and fifteen years in the Coast Guard before moving to the Eastern Shore, and while some of his volunteers thought he was a hard-ass, his military training had taught him that there were right ways to do things and wrong ways, and getting small things correct was the only way to make sure the big things worked when it mattered most.
They had scarcely finished repacking the hoses when the air around them split with noise. It was their pagers, all of them, going off at the same time. They all looked at one another. The brush fire on Arthur Road belonged to them: they were first due.
So it would be one of those nights, Shannon thought, as she grabbed her gear again. Two calls in one night was unusual, but not unheard of, especially in the fall when people began turning on their furnaces or holding bonfires in their backyards. For Shannon, it meant it would be a night when she wouldn’t see her husband or her three boys; by now it was after midnight and they were probably asleep. She climbed back into the trucks with everyone else, and Beall called into dispatch to figure out what Tasley was getting into next.
“Chief 8,” he identified himself when the 911 Center responded. “Is this reported to be a large wood fire, or what?”
“We’ve had two calls,” the dispatcher answered. “Neither one was able to tell how much woods was burning.”
“Okay,” he said. “Notify Forestry and have them respond.”