St. Dale

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “This isn’t much like the Petty Museum, is it?” said Karen, looking around her. “Mr. Petty’s museum looks like a branch bank in Mayberry. But this place feels like the Lincoln Memorial.”

  “Richard Petty isn’t dead,” said Shane with a catch in his voice. When they first arrived he had stood in the foyer, staring at the black number 3 car on display, and wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. Karen had pretended not to notice.

  “Well, no, Mr. Petty isn’t dead, Shane, but Adam Petty is, and yet they had his car out there on display with that little knee-high picket fence around it, right alongside the cars of his father and grandfather. With his tricycle parked next to it. I got the feeling there that they remembered Adam fondly, but that they weren’t wallowing in their grief.”

  Shane turned on his bride with glistening eyes. “Wallowing?” he said. “Wallowing? Dale was a seven-time Winston Cup champion. He deserves all this respect and more!”

  “Richard Petty was champion seven times, too,” Karen said softly as her new husband stalked away. Maybe she ought to run after him and tell him she was sorry, but she couldn’t figure out what she ought to be sorry for, except telling the truth when he didn’t want to hear it. Maybe it was a good thing she hadn’t made a habit of that.

  She watched him for a few moments. Better give him time to get over it, she thought. Shane always took things to heart. Instead of following him down the hallway, she wandered over to the back of the foyer where Sarah Nash and Terence Palmer were standing in front of a floor-to-ceiling glass wall at least twenty feet high.

  The room behind the glass wall, the size of a school gymnasium in an electric twilight, contained an exhibit of several incarnations of Dale Earnhardt’s rides-the black number 3, each emblazoned with sponsor stickers, all set many yards back from the glass, so that the cars were too far away for sight-seers to tell much about them.

  “We’re not allowed up close to the cars?” Karen asked, still thinking of the knee-high picket fences at Richard Petty’s cheery public attic.

  Terence shrugged. “Can’t even photograph them through the glass. I suppose it’s a security thing.”

  “Like Princess Diana being buried on that island at Althorp,” said Sarah Nash in that expressionless drawl that made it hard to tell when she was being sarcastic. Karen thought she probably was.

  A new thought struck her. “Where is Dale Earnhardt buried? He’s not here, is he?” She looked down the long, dimly lit nave as if she expected to see a marble sepulchre at the end of it, past the glass cases that housed rows of Winston Cup trophies and the guitars presented to Dale by Brooks and Dunn and Alabama.

  Terence Palmer shook his head. “I checked that out online before I came. They’re careful never to say. I suppose it’s not inconceivable that some distraught racing fan would try to practice suttee on the grave site.”

  The three of them paused to watch Shane McKee wandering alone down the hall, barely glancing at the exhibits. After a moment of silence, Karen said, “I guess you can tell that Shane’s mad at me. I said this place reminded me of the Lincoln Memorial, and that Richard Petty’s was homier, and now Shane’s furious. Was Dale Earnhardt really that much more famous than Richard Petty?”

  Sarah Nash smiled. “Part of being a legend is knowing how and when to die,” she said. “That’s the difference. If Richard Petty had been killed in the last lap of the Daytona 500 instead of retiring into a peaceful and revered old age, I expect his face would be the back of the North Carolina state quarter.”

  “I wish I could tell Shane that, but it wouldn’t improve his mood any,” said Karen. “He was complaining that we went to Mr. Petty’s place at all. Said it was disrespectful of Earnhardt. I’m trying not to upset him any further.”

  “You’ve been married, what? Three days? I’d say the sooner he learns to handle a disagreement without making a federal case out of it, the better off you’re both going to be.”

  Terence Palmer, who was beginning to look uneasy at the prospect of being trapped in a “relationship” conversation between two women, strolled away, willing himself not to hurry, in search of a less embarrassing discussion. He saw Harley Claymore heading toward the gift shop, and he walked faster to catch up with him.

  “Surely you’re not buying souvenirs?” he said.

  “No. Just looking at this pot of gold,” said Harley. “You going to get another badge while we’re here?”

  Terence grinned and touched the Bristol and Martinsville pins on his hat. “Can’t stop now. When I get back to Manhattan, this is how I’m going to find out who the cool people are. The ones who recognize the logos. Screen my dates.”

  The DEI gift shop was an Aladdin’s cave of NASCAR related merchandise, devoted not only to Dale Earnhardt, but also to the current drivers for DEI, Inc., including Dale Earnhardt, Jr. and Mike Waltrip, but the majority of the items offered were mementos of the Intimidator. Racks of Dale Earnhardt shirts and jackets lined the wall, and his face glared out at passersby from calendars, posters, playing cards, coffee mugs, mouse pads, and keychains. The image of the black Monte Carlo frozen in acceleration zoomed across a hundred different items within the shop. Visitors, who had toured the memorial hallway in respectful silence, regained their voices in the gift area. In small groups they stopped at each display, examining the exhibits and checking price tags against whatever their budget allowed for the acquisition of souvenirs.

  Terence examined a metal coffee mug emblazoned with a replica of Earnhardt’s signature and the number 3. “I wonder if I should get my mother something from here,” he mused.

  “You think she’d like that?” asked Harley.

  “No. It would drive her up the wall. But it would be worth-how much is this thing?-twenty bucks to see her face on Christmas morning.”

  “So NASCAR doesn’t run in the family?”

  “Well, not on that side of my family,” said Terence. “My dad was an Earnhardt man, though. Funny, that’s almost all I know about him.”

  “Well, it might tell you more than you think. Different drivers attract different types of fans. The Earnhardt anthem would be ‘I did it my way.’ Mark Martin is big with older, serious guys who don’t like flashiness. The Labontes are family-friendly. The characters on Friends would root for Jeff Gordon, if NASCAR was on their radar screen at all. Find out which driver a person supports, and you learn a lot about him.”

  “Who do you root for, Harley?”

  “Back in the day, I was a Darrell Waltrip fan.”

  “And what does that say about you?”

  “Damned if I know,” said Harley.

  Bill Knight wondered if anyone ever forgot and genuflected in this dimly lit shrine. He had never seen anything like it. Well, he had-shrines were his hobby-but nothing that wasn’t consecrated by some theological authority. A strange and powerful place.

  “What do you think of it?” asked Cayle, who had appeared at his elbow.

  “Why, I feel right at home,” he said. “Opus DEI.”

  “Oh-church, you mean. Yes, I guess it is rather somber. People still miss him so much. They come every year, you know, on his birthday. Justine and I drove over this past April. It was amazing. There were tough-looking guys out there in the parking lot-looked like they ought to shave with a hacksaw-and they were crying. Just bawling. I’ll bet Dale is embarrassed-well, I almost said embarrassed to death-seeing his old supporters still carrying on like that.”

  Bill Knight gave her a puzzled look. “Embarrassed? So, you think Earnhardt is up in heaven looking out for his old supporters?”

  Cayle shook her head. “No, I guess I don’t,” she said.

  “Ah. Well, I suppose that most of the people who do think-”

  “I mean, I don’t think he’s away in heaven, because I met him on that road out there. The one that runs right by this place.”

  “Really? You knew him?”

  “Not exactly.” Cayle looked around to make sure that no one else was close enough t
o overhear them. “Listen-I met him this past spring-the year after he died. I was driving alone one night coming back from Virginia, and I took a wrong turn trying to find Justine’s shortcut. My car broke down on a country road, and I was stranded with a dead cell phone. Then suddenly out of nowhere this black Monte Carlo pulls up behind me, and he gets out, and he fixes my car. Good thing I drive a bow-tie.”

  “A what?”

  “Chevy. They call them bow-ties because of the Chevrolet emblem.”

  He stared at her, waiting for the punch line to her story, but she still looked perfectly serious. “Dale Earnhardt? A ghost, you mean?”

  Cayle shrugged. “He wasn’t transparent or anything. He was just acting…well, ordinary. Fixed my car, told me how to get back to the Interstate, and left.”

  “You said it was late at night and you’d had a long drive.”

  “I didn’t dream it, Bill. He fixed my car.”

  “Have you told any of the other passengers about this? Or Harley?” He almost smiled, picturing Harley’s reaction to the further sanctification of his racing colleague. Harley Claymore would be horrified.

  “No, I don’t talk about it much,” said Cayle. “Justine and Bekasu know, of course, but I don’t talk about it. I don’t want to end up in a tabloid.”

  “Yes, I expect a supermarket newspaper would salivate over a story like that. I’m surprised they didn’t invent it themselves.”

  “Well, I didn’t invent it,” said Cayle. “But I can see how people might think I had, which is why I don’t talk about it. I certainly don’t want any publicity. I just wondered what you’d think about it, being a minister and all. Give me the benefit of the doubt. Trust me that it happened. So-what do you make of it?”

  Bill Knight hesitated, searching for a diplomatic answer, partly as a kindness to Cayle, and partly because he felt it would be rude to ridicule her story while standing in the shrine of the man himself. A breach of hospitality-like making atheistic remarks on a tour of Notre Dame-bad taste. “Well,” he said at last, “if I had been alive in the fifteenth century, and Joan of Arc had told me that some angels had ordered her to go and save France, I might well have thought her mad. The English certainly did. So it’s a bit hard for me to respond. If amazing things were easy to believe, they wouldn’t require faith.”

  “I guess you’re right. I can’t prove it, but it did happen.”

  He smiled. “Well, somebody once said that in a world where Jewish carpenters come back from the dead, anything is possible.”

  “I was surprised to see him, you know. I didn’t really expect him to come back or anything. He was a Lutheran.”

  Bill nodded. “Yes, one feels that Martin Luther would not approve.”

  Cayle headed back toward the gift shop to buy a badge for her collection, and Bill continued his walk to the end of the long hall. He was standing with a group of silent visitors, studying an enlargement of a black-and-white photo of soldiers in Desert Storm, posing beside the plane they had decorated in imitation of Dale Earnhardt’s “Black Number 3” when Shane came up beside him. “Awesome, isn’t it?”

  “He touched a lot of lives,” said Bill, still thinking of Cayle’s story.

  “It’s hard to believe he’s gone.”

  Bill nodded, but he was thinking, It’s not hard to believe he’s gone when you’re standing in this place. It’s a mausoleum.

  “You’re a minister. Do you believe in saints and miracles and stuff?”

  Again? Bill Knight studied the boy’s earnest face. “Well, that’s a pretty general question,” he said, stalling for time. Modern clergy didn’t really deal in miracles. They were more into homeless shelters and social justice issues, but old traditions die hard. Two supernatural confessions in one day was almost more than he could manage. What next? An exorcism? “I suppose it would depend on the miracle,” he said carefully. “Did you have some sort of supernatural experience concerning Dale Earnhardt?”

  Shane’s eyes widened. “Me personally? Of course not. But there is something sort of…cosmic…about Dale. Karen doesn’t believe me. Well, she knows it’s all true. She just doesn’t think it adds up to a miracle, I reckon. Thought maybe I’d ask you about it.”

  Bill Knight looked around for Matthew. The boy was walking with Bekasu Holifield, examining the trophy cases in the center of the hall. He seemed to be explaining the significance of each one to her, and, bless her heart, the judge was allowing herself to be instructed with the meekness of an apprentice. He ought to be all right for the next ten minutes or so. Bill glanced at the worried face of the young man beside him. “All right,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

  “Okay. Dale was a seven-time champion, right? Same as Richard Petty. But Richard Petty won the Daytona 500 seven times as well, and Dale couldn’t seem to win that race for love or money. It was like a curse, you know?”

  “Perhaps he found that particular track difficult?”

  “No,” said Shane. “Dale was great on restrictor plate tracks. The master. He won lots of races at Daytona. Thirty-four of them, in fact. They’d have a week’s worth of races before the big one on Sunday, and some years Dale would win every single one of the preliminary races, and still he would lose the one that really counted.”

  “Why?”

  Shane shook his head. “That’s just it. It didn’t make sense. He was never outdriven, and most of the time he had as good a car as anybody on the track. Sometimes it just seemed like the finger of God would come and push down on the hood to keep him from winning.” He paused, perhaps waiting for a theological quibble, but Bill merely nodded for him to go on. “One time he hit a seagull. That was in ’91. Another time he ran out of gas. Or he’d hit a piece of debris and go into the wall. And it wasn’t on just any old lap, either. Most of the time he’d be leading the race and he’d be on the very last lap of that 500-mile race-I mean just seconds from the end of it-and then when it looked like he couldn’t possibly lose, disaster would strike.”

  “How many times did that happen?”

  “He lost that race nineteen times in a row. People used to say that if it was the Daytona 499 instead of the Daytona 500, he would have won it every year.”

  Bill Knight considered it. “A kind of negative miracle, you mean?”

  “No. Let me finish. He lost nineteen times in a row, right at the end for stupid, trivial reasons, all right? So in 1998, on the day before the race, a six-year-old girl in a wheelchair is brought to visit the track. She’s a big Dale fan, and so they take her to meet him, and he talks to her for a while, and then she says to him, ‘You’re gonna win this year.’ He must have thought, ‘Yeah, that’ll happen,’ because he never won that race. But this little girl insisted. Then she held out a penny, and she made him take it. Said it was a lucky penny and that if he would take it, he would finally win that race.”

  Bill Knight raised his eyebrows, thinking urban legend. “This is a true story, Shane?”

  “Sure, it is. Ask anybody.” He waved a hand at the gaggle of tourists walking along the hallway. “Everybody knows this story.”

  “So, Dale Earnhardt took the penny given by the sick child?”

  Shane nodded. “He did. I guess he figured What the heck? He took that penny back to the garage and glued it to the dashboard of the race car.”

  “Don’t tell me he won that race?”

  “He did. Old Number 3 finally broke the jinx. That was February 15, 1998. That’s important. That date.”

  “Why?”

  “Because-you know when and where he died?”

  “Of course. He died in the Daytona 500. Last year. 2001.”

  “He died eleven seconds from the end of the race. The last lap, as always. February 18, 2001,” said Shane, emphasizing each word. “Reverend, that is exactly three years and three days after he won the race.”

  “I see,” said Bill, who thought that dying seemed a high price to pay for winning a race, even a race that was the crown jewel of your sp
ort.

  “That’s not all there is to it, though,” said Shane. “Since he died, he hasn’t lost the Daytona 500.”

  “How do you mean, Shane? Obviously if he’s dead he can’t compete-”

  “No, he can. He was an owner. Earnhardt himself drove for RCR-Richard Childress Racing-but a few years back he formed his own company-”

  “Ah. DEI.” He remembered Justine’s story about the castle in heaven with the name on the drawbridge.

  “Right. So in the race in which he died, the winner was Mike Waltrip.”

  “The announcer’s brother? Yes, I saw that one.”

  “The announcer? Oh, you mean D.W. Yeah, Mike is Darrell Waltrip’s little brother, but my point is that he drove for DEI. And then this past year, Junior won it. Dale Earnhardt, Junior-also driving for DEI.” People were beginning to walk toward them now. Perhaps it was time to leave. Shane leaned closer, and said in a low, urgent voice, “If one of the DEI drivers wins again next February that’ll be three wins in a row for DEI, ending in the year two thousand and three. You see what I’m talking about?”

  Bill Knight nodded. “Yes, Shane, it’s a striking set of coincidences. Or facts, if you will. But it’s numbers. And the third win isn’t even a sure thing yet. You can make numbers do anything. I wouldn’t call that-”

  Shane shook his head impatiently. “Don’t you see? Death transformed him. He reached a higher power.”

  For one stricken moment Bill Knight thought Shane was going to compare this transcendent state to the transfiguration of Christ after the resurrection, but before he could object Shane rushed on, “It’s like Stars Wars, you know? When Obe Wan Kenobe is killed, he becomes even more powerful. Or Gandalf the Grey becoming Gandalf the White. A higher power.”

  “Oh,” said Bill, willing himself not to smile. He thought of pointing out that Obe Wan Kenobe and Tolkien’s Gandalf were fictional characters, but he didn’t see what good it would do to bring that up. He’d met people who expected Jesus to look like Kevin Sorbo, and there was no arguing with faith like that. “Well,” he said at last, “I don’t suppose there’s any harm in thinking that. I’m sure that people in a dangerous sport like racing could use a guardian angel looking out for them. Though I’m not convinced that celestial beings are allowed to influence the outcome of sporting events.” A hundred arguments to the contrary spiraled through his mind like a Hail Mary pass, but he ignored them.