St. Dale

Chapter XIII

The Richard Petty Museum and DEI

“North Carolina loved Dale Earnhardt so much they even named a county after him.” Harley Claymore had been saving up this joke for more than three hundred miles. “And here we are-in Our Dale County.”

The sign at the side of the highway welcomed travelers to Iredell County, but given Harley’s accent, there was a good chance he’d have pronounced it “our dale” even if it wasn’t a play on words. Bekasu looked up sharply, and Harley could see her gearing up to explain to her fellow passengers that, in fact, the county had been named after some prominent North Carolina family in colonial times, but Justine must have also anticipated that speech, because she elbowed her sister in the ribs, all the while smiling sweet encouragement for Harley to go on.

“It’s odd, isn’t it, that two of the most legendary drivers in motor sports are commemorated less than forty miles apart? We visited Richard Petty’s museum this morning in Randleman, and now we’re headed southwest to Mooresville, headquarters of DEI, and shrine to the man himself. Anybody know what they call Earnhardt’s building?”

In a burble of laughter, Jesse Franklin called out-“The Garage Mahal!”-but most of the other passengers had said it softly in unison with him.

“Why do they call it that?” asked Bill Knight, whose voice had been conspicuously absent in the reply.

Harley sighed. “Wait’ll you see it.”

After a pancake breakfast that morning in Martinsville, Virginia, they had set off, taking highway 220 past Greensboro, and into the heart of Carolina racing country. As they’d headed south toward the North Carolina border, the mountains fell away behind them, dwindling to foothills, and finally to the rolling country of the North Carolina piedmont with its red clay and pine forests. This was the land of textile mills and furniture factories, of tobacco fields and hog farms-and race tracks. Before Bill France had organized the informal beach races of Daytona into an empire back in the forties, North Carolina had been the home of fast cars and daredevil drivers. But at the very beginning, it wasn’t a sport. It was a living.

Up on the mountain farms that straddled the high peaks of the Smokies west of Morganton, economic necessity coupled with inclination inspired the making of moonshine. The tradition and the recipes for whiskey-making had come over from Scotland and Ireland in the eighteenth century with the settlers who homesteaded Carolina’s wild mountain region. In the twentieth century, the pioneers’ descendants found themselves on the losing end of an agricultural equation, in which steep mountain land couldn’t produce enough crops to support the family farm-at least the crops in their traditional form weren’t profitable. But if you took a few acres of corn, dirt cheap by the bushel, and distilled it through copper tubing, turning it into high-proof whiskey sold by the gallon, then the corn would yield the farmer a living wage. Such subsistence innovation was illegal, of course. The country had passed a whiskey tax in 1792, and bootleggers, who didn’t feel like letting the government siphon off their profits, had been dodging the law ever since. Faced with a choice between accepting charity in order to survive and breaking the federal tax law to take care of themselves, they chose the latter without a qualm.

Fast driving came into the picture when it became necessary to get mountain-made moonshine to the big city markets in the Carolina piedmont-to Charlotte, Raleigh, Fayetteville, Durham-without getting stopped by the law and having the cargo confiscated. Those routes and their east Tennessee counterparts were the original Thunder Road, and a generation of drivers in the early days got their start on back country roads instead of at race tracks, when outrunning another car meant more than just a trophy and a kiss from a beauty queen: it meant food on the table, and not going to jail.

By the time Richard Petty took the wheel in the late fifties, those days were over, but the love of fast driving in a motorized battle of wits had seized the Tarheel imagination, and dirt tracks were built to cater to that obsession: Rockingham, Wilkesboro, Hickory, Asheville. Only Rockingham retained its place on the NASCAR circuit these days, but all those tracks loomed large in the history of Carolina motor sports.

There wasn’t time to crisscross the piedmont to visit all those legendary tracks, so as far as the tour was concerned the Monday afternoon trip to Rockingham would have to represent all the early days of the sport. First, though, the bus would stop in Randleman and Mooresville so that the group could pay its respects to the only two seven-time champions in the history of the sport: both sons of the North Carolina piedmont.

As the bus rolled down the highway from Martinsville, Harley consulted his notes while most of the passengers read or dozed, sleeping off the effects of the pancake breakfast.

“Two seven-time champions-both Tarheels,” he said into the microphone. “Petty and Earnhardt. They’re alike in a lot of ways, and totally different in almost as many others. So let’s compare these two NASCAR legends. First of all they were both sons of well-known race car drivers on the circuit-that would be Lee Petty and Ralph Earnhardt. But Richard Petty won 200 races in his career, while Dale only won a total of 76.”

“Apples and oranges,” said Sarah Nash, looking up from her newspaper. “They raced in different eras. Things were a lot more competitive by the time Earnhardt came along-and the NASCAR rules on modifications were stricter, too.”

“No argument there,” said Harley. “I’m just spouting numbers, is all.”

Karen McKee sighed and leaned back in her seat with her eyes closed, but she wasn’t asleep. The wedding had gone off as planned-at least as Shane had planned-and now that the milestone was passed, she had an empty feeling as if someone had forgotten to write The End across the sky. Mrs. Shane McKee. That phrase, which had seemed so complete in itself in all the months leading up to the ceremony, was unfailingly followed by “Now what?” in the unending conversation she had with herself inside her head.

Because there would have to be a Now What. Maybe in Karen’s grandmother’s time, a woman could get married and that was it-a permanent job with long hours and no pay, maybe, but still an identity and a profession entirely unto itself. But those days were past praying for, and even if you did marry somebody who could afford to support you (which she hadn’t), there was no guarantee that you’d stay married to him forever, so you’d better not risk your future on his account. Karen had derailed that topic of conversation every time her mother or one of the Friends of the Goddess had tried to bring it up, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t heard them.

Shane had his headphones on, listening to his new Linkin Park CD-she made a mental note to get more batteries out of her suitcase when they stopped for the night. First wifely duty: Keeper of the Batteries. Karen wasn’t sleepy, and she’d finished the magazine Cayle had passed on to her. Across the aisle, Terence Palmer was also awake and restless. Karen watched him for a few minutes. She’d never seen anybody as young as he was who actually looked comfortable in a necktie. He looked like he forgot he had it on, while Shane, who could seldom be persuaded to wear one, even for church, would pull constantly at his collar, wriggling like a chained-up dog. “He looks like you had to throw him on his back to get his shoes on,” one of the Friends of the Goddess had remarked once, but she hadn’t said it to be mean. The Friends were all in favor of flouting conventional social customs.

There was no use trying to get Shane to look like a preppy, though, because even if you got him in a necktie and a tailored suit, Shane would still lack that carved-in-marble look that Terence Palmer was born with: a small, straight nose and light brown hair like a cap of loose curls that made you think that’s what Michelangelo had been trying to depict when he carved the head of David. Karen thought he put her in mind of that poem she’d read in senior English, the one about Richard Cory: “He glittered when he walked.”

She felt shy around him, and she realized that she had been carefully avoiding him, sitting at a different table at each meal stop, and keeping her distance when they had walked around the track at Martinsville. She told herself that she was being overly sensitive. It was a NASCAR tour, for heaven’s sake-if Terence Palmer was such a prince, what was he doing here?

She was still looking at him, thinking all this, when he turned back from the monotonous sweep of pines, and met her gaze. Flustered, she said the first thing that came to mind.

“I bet Dale Earnhardt himself would be surprised to see you on this bus.”

He looked puzzled for a moment, maybe trying to decide if she’d meant to be insulting, but then he said, “I don’t believe he would have been surprised. Not by the end of his career, anyhow.”

Karen nodded. He was probably right about that. Maybe in the beginning, when he was still a raw high school dropout from a mill town, maybe then Earnhardt would have been surprised to have fans among the wine-and-cheese people. But not later. President Reagan was in the stands when he won the Daytona 500. And the year Earnhardt died, he was on a list of the country’s richest people. Compared to that level of success, Terence Palmer, for all his airs and graces, was a shoe-shine boy.

“So, how come you’re here then?” she said.

He was silent for a few moments. Karen thought that maybe they didn’t ask personal questions in his crowd. At last though, he said, “My dad died.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Well, I am, too, but only because I missed the chance to know him. My folks split up when I was a baby.”

Karen nodded. There was a lot of that going around. Then she smiled. “For a second there, I thought maybe you were Kerry Earnhardt.”

Terence considered it. “No,” he said. “He looks a lot like his dad-at least in the photos. I think I’m probably taller. My dad bought tickets for this tour, and I came in his place.”

“I guess you want to know why I’m here,” said Karen.

He studied her for a moment, and Karen squirmed, wishing she had worn something dressier than jeans. “Not really,” he said. “You got married at the Speedway. I figure this is your thing.”

Something in the way he said it made Karen want to deny all interest in motor sports, but she thought that doing so might be disloyal to Shane, who hadn’t a trace of irony in his soul, and who had been so proud and happy to make this pilgrimage. “Yes,” she said. “Our thing. I guess it is. I’m just trying to figure out what comes next.”

Again, the silence. Terence was looking over at Shane, who was sleeping with his mouth open and his head thrown back against the seat. Fifty years of tuna casserole, he seemed to be thinking.

Karen squirmed in her seat. “Don’t sell us short,” she said. “We may be young, and we didn’t get a fancy education, either one of us, but neither did Dale, and he did all right.” But Dale knew where he was going, she thought. And she didn’t.

Dale Earnhardt, Incorporated was on the schedule for the early afternoon, but the first stop of the day would be a location farther north than Mooresville: the museum of North Carolina’s other seven-time champion, Richard Petty.

Highway 220 south of Greensboro was a four-lane corridor cut through forests of longleaf pines. Once they crossed into Randolph County, official state highway signs directed motorists to Exit 113, which led to the small town of Randleman, home of the Richard Petty Museum, a newly constructed one-story brick building fronted by a white arched portico. The place looked as if it had been designed by a firm of architects who specialized in branch banks. It sat back from Academy Street behind a bank-sized visitor parking lot with only a decorous sign to identify the building as a museum.

Terence Palmer peered out the window, studying the scene with a puzzled frown. “Odd,” he said to Sarah Nash. “It looks so dignified. I was expecting an outside display of cars, checkered flags, neon displays, sort of a circus atmosphere.”

She sighed. “That’s Manhattan talking,” she said. “I don’t know a single driver in NASCAR who wouldn’t crawl under his car and not come out if you tried to show him off in the outlandish way you imagined. They’re not showy people. Mostly not, anyhow.”

Justine, camera in hand, was the first one off the bus. “Anybody who wants to pose outside the Richard Petty Museum, put your caps on, and bunch up over by the door,” she said, waving the other passengers into place, while Ratty parked the bus, and Harley headed inside to arrange admittance for the bus tour.

Cayle obligingly joined the posing group under the white covered porch at the glass-fronted doors of the building. It was an unassuming place, she thought, considering that the museum was dedicated to a man whose nickname was “The King.” It looked like a museum that had come into being by popular demand; not to make money-admission was a nominal five bucks-but to accommodate the kindness of strangers. Cayle imagined a steady stream of Richard Petty fans over the years, arriving in the little North Carolina village in search of their idol, because after years of watching him race, they felt like family. They would be wanting to see something in commemoration of the legendary driver, and hoping to leave with a picture of the 43 car, a tee shirt, a postcard, or Richard Petty’s name scrawled on a napkin. Anything. They would have wanted to pose for pictures of themselves with the most famous face in racing: Richard Petty, whippet-thin, with his big cowboy hat and boots, his palm-sized belt buckle, and the sunglasses obscuring that hawk-billed face. And always a smile like winter sunshine. Cayle pictured an endless procession of shy, but determined race fans. Just one more picture, Mr. Petty! It’s for Grandad who couldn’t come with us. Can you sign this napkin?

So, finally, a kind but busy man with an empire to run had despaired of getting any work done with the endless stream of visitors, and he arranged for the fans to have a place to go. He converted an old furniture store into a showroom to house some stuff he thought visitors would like to see-like seven championship trophies, Chrysler Hemi engines, a selection of his race cars from over the years, and pictures of the man himself, posing with movie stars and presidents. He hired some local people to run it. Five bucks to get in-that ought to cover the light bill and the clerks’ wages, and whatnot. Then The King went back to all the other million things that clamored for his time.

The Number Three Pilgrims filed into the museum, which on a weekday morning wasn’t crowded, and Cayle’s impression of a homey and unassuming visitor center was confirmed. Here, she thought, was the museum equivalent of making your mashed potatoes and pork chops stretch to feed a crowd of unexpected dinner guests. A line of race cars, each surrounded by a knee-high picket fence led the visitor down memory lane, a reminder that Richard Petty was truly a king in the dynastic sense: that is, he was just one cog in a long succession. Four generations of Pettys had driven the NASCAR circuit, an amazing achievement in a sport just over fifty years old.

Bekasu studied the framed photographs that lined the walls. “Here’s a picture of Lee Petty, when he was racing back in the fifties,” she remarked to Harley, who was reading over her shoulder. “Having a father in the business must have helped young Richard get started.”

“I guess it did,” said Harley. “It’s just-” He shook his head and started to walk away.

“Just what?” said Bekasu, hurrying to keep up with him. “Nobody else is listening. What were you going to say?”

Harley turned back to study Lee Petty’s old race car from the fifties-truly a stock car, one that its owner could have driven to the race track, on the race track, and then to the grocery store afterward. Not like today’s seven-hundred-horsepower monsters with the paste-on headlights, the treadless tires and glassless windows, and the doors permanently welded shut. Seeing that old car reminded Harley of his own father’s obsession with racing. The self-made man back in the early days before engineers and wind tunnels and product placement-those old-time drivers had done it all, and all the money they’d spent on those cars wouldn’t buy you a fist-sized decal’s worth of advertisement on the last-place driver’s trunk in today’s sport.

“Racing was almost a one-man operation in the old days,” he told her. “Lee Petty would have worked on this car himself. Modified it. Tested it. Driven it in races in whatever time he could steal from a day job and a wife and kids. And Lee Petty won the first ever Daytona 500, you know. Daytona. Can you imagine the incredible force of will it would have taken to succeed under those circumstances? How much you would have to want to win?”

“Oh, men always want to win,” said Bekasu, still looking at the genial face of Lee Petty. The determination must have been buried beneath that affable exterior. “Men can’t even lose jurisdiction over the remote control for the television. I don’t see why racing should be any more cutthroat than, say, a law practice, which is my family’s profession.”

“Well, maybe it isn’t,” said Harley. “We don’t have any lawyers in my family and I try to avoid them, myself. But I do know about fathers and sons in the racing business. It would put you in mind of a deer herd. The young buck may have been sired by the old stag, but that doesn’t mean the father is going to step down to his successor without a fight. I’ll tell you a story about the young Richard Petty. When he was first starting out, summer of 1958 that would have been, he drove up to Canada to compete in his first Grand National race. So there’s Richard, a few pounds heavier back then, but short on experience, whizzing around the track but a lap back from the front runners, when all of a sudden two cars come up on him-Cotton Owens is driving one, and Lee Petty is driving the other. Slam! Two old pros battling it out, and young Richard can’t get out of their way fast enough, so he gets knocked aside as they go past, and he goes into the wall. Guess who put him there?”

“Not his father?”

“None other. The old man won the championship that year, and flat nobody was going to stand in his way.”

“But that’s terrible!-Maybe he didn’t realize it was his son that he hit.”

Harley shrugged. “I’d have an easier time believing that if there wasn’t an even better story about them. Richard Petty’s first NASCAR win came the next summer, 1959, at the old Lakewood Speedway in Atlanta. But the victory was taken away from him when one of the other drivers, upset about some infraction or other, protested the outcome of the race. Guess who cost Richard his first win.”

Bekasu stared. “His father?”

Harley nodded.

“Well…maybe there was a good reason for it,” she said. She couldn’t think of one. “Maybe he wanted Richard to learn racing the hard way.”

“Maybe old Lee hoped that Richard would quit and go to law school.” Harley laughed. “No, that’s not true. Racing was always the family business. I don’t think Richard Petty considered any other career for more’n five minutes.”

“I still bet Lee Petty was sorry about putting Richard into the wall when he realized the other driver was his son.”

“That’s for sure. Lee was the car owner. Every dent he put in the car that Richard was driving would have to be fixed with money coming out of his own pocket.”

Bekasu shook her head. “Poor Richard Petty.” She had begun to picture The King as a sooty waif in a Dickens novel.

“Richard Petty wouldn’t see it that way,” Harley said. “There’s a saying on the track: ‘Rubbin’ is racin’.’ Dale Earnhardt lived by that motto. You’ve heard it?”

“Yes,” said Bekasu. “But what on earth does it mean?”

“It means that there’s more to competing than just driving a car at high speeds around an oval. There’s conflict with your opponents-that’s the rubbing. Bashing somebody out of your way so that you can win.”

“Your stag metaphor again, huh? Locking horns.”

“Right. It’s all part of the deal. Richard Petty knew that, and if he couldn’t handle the roughness back then, he’d have had no business in the sport.” Harley turned to look at the line of trophy cases, glinting gold in the fluorescent lighting. “But he turned out all right, didn’t he?”

Cayle and Justine had wandered to the back of the museum, where case after case of belt buckles were on display, and behind that was a room full of floor-to-ceiling glass shelves, housing The King’s gazillion pocketknives and the doll collection of Mrs. Richard Petty.

“I used to have that one!” Justine declared, pointing to a round-faced Madame Alexander storybook doll. “Got it for Christmas when I was nine.”

“I’ll bet this freed up a lot of space for them at home,” murmured Cayle, surveying the size of the two collections.

“I’ll bet their fans just eat this up,” said Justine. “Richard Petty’s stuff. It’s like getting to go upstairs and peek in your hosts’ bedrooms. These exhibits are good for the wives and kids, too. I mean, if somebody in your family is bored spitless by racing, but on the vacation they get dragged to this shrine for Richard Petty, why, the non-race fan can come back here and look at the pretty dolls and the fancy belt buckles, while the menfolk are drooling over the race car exhibits.”

“Speaking of stuff,” said Cayle. “I just had a cute idea for the newlyweds. I think we ought to get them a wedding present. So what if we all take turns buying them a coffee mug from every museum and speedway we visit? I bought a mug in Martinsville, so I can give them that.”

Justine considered it. “You think she’d like NASCAR mugs better than Royal Doulton?”

“I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive, Justine. Shall we do it?”

“Sure. I’ll pass the word,” said Justine. “Oh, look! A Prince Charles and Princess Diana! Aren’t they adorable?”

Cayle sighed. “I wonder if Princess Diana has a Richard Petty doll in her museum at Althorp,” she muttered.

“Nope,” said Justine. “I went there last summer. It’s just dresses and old pictures-stuff like that. This is much more interesting.”

Terence Palmer and Sarah Nash stood at the knee-high picket fence surrounding Adam Petty’s tricycle, which was parked beside Adam Petty’s multicolored race car. Terence thought that the 45 car, a Chevrolet Monte Carlo, looked quite appropriate parked beside a tricycle, because its flamboyant paint scheme suggested that it had been designed by a kindergartener with crayons. The car’s roof and doors were shamrock green, its hood a royal blue, and the bumpers bright red. Various sponsor decals in yellow and white lettering and the 45 on the sides and roof in buttercup yellow gave the car a festive air, as if it ought to have been a parade float instead of a race car. It seemed strange to think that someone so young, driving such an exuberantly colored car, should have died.

“The tricycle is a nice touch,” said Sarah Nash. “It reminds you that the drivers are just ordinary people, not superheroes in firesuits.”

“Seeing his car here in his grandfather’s museum makes me feel that I missed something,” said Terence. “Not family exactly. My childhood was fine. I know people hate it when privileged people complain, and honestly, I’m not. I think what I’m lacking is a sense of continuity. Look at Adam here: the fourth generation in the same family business. It seems to me that he could share much more with his father and grandfather than most people.”

“It’s rare, though, that kind of closeness.” Sarah Nash gave him an appraising stare. “You’re not about to tell me you wish you’d gone into farming with your father instead of being a tycoon in New York?”

“Hardly a tycoon,” Terence said quickly. “More like one cog in a big machine. And after all the education and training I’ve had, it would be a waste to walk away from that. No, I don’t think I’d have any aptitude for farming-or for stock car racing,” he added, nodding toward the car. “I just think it would be nice to feel like a part of something that started before you were born and will continue after you’re gone. Do you think my dad felt that way about his farm?”

“It’s hard to tell,” said Sarah Nash. “We never talked about it. I know that he enjoyed living there. It could have been no more than that. He wouldn’t want you to feel obligated to do anything you didn’t want to do, just out of some misguided sense of family tradition. And if you threw away a high-paying job to go broke farming in Wilkes County, he’d have called you a fool.”

“I used to wonder why he didn’t come and see me when I was a kid,” said Terence. “Why he didn’t try to forge a relationship with me. Do you know why he stayed away?”

“I think so,” said Sarah Nash. “During his last illness, there were days when he was in quite a lot of pain, and I’d go and sit with him. Once I said that I’d be tempted to take an overdose of the painkiller just to get the suffering over with, but you know what Tom said? He smiled at me-as much as he could smile, hurting as bad as he did-and he said, ‘I can’t do that, Sarah. I’ve got too much mountain blood in me to kill myself. Mountain people never go where they haven’t been invited.’”

Terence nodded, and they walked on to the next exhibit. No, Tom Palmer had certainly not been invited to visit his son. He was sure that had he turned up on the doorstep, his mother would have been gracious about it, but Terence knew that without so much as a harsh word or a raised eyebrow, she could make people feel profoundly out of place, so that they took the first opportunity to flee and never come back. He wasn’t sure how she managed it, and his two old girlfriends from his high school days who had been thus exiled would never explain to him exactly what had happened.

The truth was, he hadn’t made any effort to contact his father, either, but he told himself that he’d had no way of knowing whether his father had wanted to see him or not. Terence had always preferred to do without rather than to risk rejection.

Bill Knight had wandered up, reading the label on each exhibit, as if he were going to be tested on the material. “I really must get some postcards to send back to Canterbury,” he told them. “So many folks up there would love to come and see this. Well, this is a colorful car-practically a Christmas tree on wheels.”

“It was Adam’s,” said Terence, indicating the sign.

Bill Knight’s smile faded. “Oh, my,” he said. “Adam Petty. It’s odd, but I feel as if I knew him. My church is near the speedway where he was killed. I wish I could tell him how many people cried for him up there when it happened.”

“I’d like to think he knows that,” said Sarah Nash.

An hour later, and a few miles down the road, Shane McKee stood in a dimly lit entry foyer, beside the roped-off black number 3 car. He gazed down the dark and cavernous hallway, illuminated only by the faint glow of picture lights above each exhibit, and then he began to walk away from the sunshine of the entryway, and down the long dark hall of memories.

The place looked more like church than church, he thought. The visitors were acting like it was church, too. Singly or in pairs, the visitors wandered down the hall with its cathedral ceilings and its glass-encased Earnhardt trophy collections. If they spoke at all, it was in whispers.

“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 to 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 sport.

“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.

“And you know about the goat, right?” said Shane. “Born in Florida. White number 3 on its side.”

“Well, you can’t have reincarnation and transfiguration,” Bill pointed out. “They cancel each other out, you know. You’re either here or you’re there.”

Shane groaned. “It’s just a sign. A sign that he hasn’t left us. Like-like the rainbow.”

“Well…I don’t think Christian doctrine subscribes to the idea of people hanging around after they’ve died. I think they’re supposed to have gone on to heaven. Isn’t that what you were told in church?”

Shane waved away a millennium of theology. “But I’ve seen him,” he said. “At Bristol before the race. I saw him!” Shane walked away before Sarah Nash and Harley could catch up with them.

Bill Knight stared after the boy. He considered going after him, but he saw that Karen had taken the young man’s arm, and they seemed to be heading for the gift shop. Before he could make up his mind to follow them, someone touched his arm, and he looked up into the worried face of a stranger: a dark-eyed young man with a thick crew cut, who was dressed in the uniform of an army enlisted man. “Excuse me, sir,” he said. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop on your friend there, but I couldn’t help overhearing what he said about Dale and the miracles and all.”

“He’s-he’s given it a lot of thought,” said Bill, searching for a remark that was both courteous and truthful.

“Yes sir, I could see that he had,” said the soldier. “Interesting stuff. Just one problem with it, though.”

Just one? thought Bill.

“Yes, sir. Ward Burton.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Ward.”

The soldier heaved a sigh and rolled his eyes. Civilians. “No, sir. I’m not Ward Burton. Name’s Alvarez.” He tapped the label sewn on his shirt. “What I meant was that Little E. didn’t win the Daytona 500 this spring. Ward Burton did.”

Bill blinked. He thought that name had sounded familiar. Ward Burton had won the last race at Loudoun, and his parishioners had talked about it for days. “I know nothing about racing,” he said, “but are you sure? Shane seems quite knowledgeable.”

Private Alvarez shrugged. “Ask anybody, sir. Heck, ask Junior. He sure knows he hasn’t won the big one yet. Your friend was right about Mike Waltrip winning in ’01, and everything else sounded right, too, but not this year’s Daytona. 2002: Ward Burton.”

“But it’s such an important thing. Why would he get it wrong?”

“I don’t know, sir. I wondered that myself. You take care now.” With a wave that was just short of being a salute, the soldier walked away.

“Isn’t this place amazing?” said Sarah Nash. “Look what I bought in the gift shop!” She handed Bill a large, expensive-looking bottle tinted sapphire blue. He examined the label, expecting to see the word Chardonnay or Chablis, but instead the elegant script proclaimed the bottle’s contents to be Dale Earnhardt Spring Water.

He saw the twinkle in her eye, and he smiled back. “You know, Sarah,” he said softly, “if Dale had lived, he would have turned that into wine for you.” Then he thought again of Shane McKee and the legend he’d fashioned out of his grief. Lord of the Rings-and Pistons? “I shouldn’t joke about it,” he said. “People are genuinely mourning this man-even after more than a year. I had no idea that the feelings ran this deep.”

“Well, if it’ll make you feel better,” said Sarah Nash, “I think Dale himself would have thought that remark about the water was a hoot.”