Still Burning

In honor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factor Fire, here's Wil Haygood from 2002 (thanks, Mara):

HAMLET, N.C. — It seems as if the dead are still dying here.

Everyone had mentioned "time" to the survivors. It would be a tonic against the grief, it would cure things. But what to do if the grief keeps outwitting time? What to do if it is deeper than time itself?

Eleven years ago in this beaten-down town, a chicken plant called Imperial Food Products caught fire. Twenty-five people died. Mostly mothers, many of whom had become young grandmothers. Slipping the arms of children into coat sleeves. "We got six bodies," says Chip Knotts of Nelson's Funeral Home. "That's pretty tough — even for a mortician."

Fifty-three were injured. And a good many who survived now sleep like owls at 3 a.m., which is to say they barely sleep at all.

Some of the children who lost parents went loping off into the night, setting fires. "Burning fields," says Conester Williams, a plant survivor.

It can seem, at times, like the town of Hamlet is still afire. In the aftermath came bankruptcies, addiction to painkillers, suicide, murder. All the bullets that followed seemed to backtrack through the smoke, into the building, through the fire. For some, it was fire, then off to the hospital, and not long after the physical healing, right into the small rooms over at the mental ward in Pinehurst.