St. Dale. Sharyn McCrumb
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but a bit shy with newcomers, and he was still finding his footing with the local customs. When people asked if he found New Hampshire to be very different from Maryland, he would smile and say, “Colder, but I’ll get used to that.” He resolved to learn how to ski, for his own pleasure and for winter exercise, and to take an interest in stock car racing as a gesture of goodwill toward his congregation.
For the next hour or so, he sifted through photographs of churches in southern France and Spain. He kept encountering himself in various seasons and outfits, standing, hands in pockets, trying to look earnest as he posed squinting in the sunshine in Ardilliers or holding up a souvenir of St. Martin in Tours. There were well-composed photos of church architecture in which he stood in the foreground for perspective, but he was still tempted to remove those shots from the collection. He kept staring at the image of his old self, knowing that he had been looking at Emely. There were no photographs of her in the pilgrimage program. He had been careful to remove them, so that he would not come across them unprepared and be blindsided by the memory. Emely was gone, and he had gotten over it.
He worked on his notes, scarcely glancing at the television screen as the rainbow of race cars streaked past. He paid little heed to them beyond thinking that the sight of a balmy day in Florida made a pleasant contrast to the New England winter evening fading to black outside his window.
As he wrote, with half an ear tuned in to the rhythmic voices of the announcers, newly-familiar names like “Waltrip,” “Labonte,” and “Bodine” slid past. And Ricky Craven, of course. Craven, who was from Maine, was a favorite son on the New Hampshire track. Occasionally Bill Knight glanced at the screen, but the blur of cars told him nothing about the progress of the race. With the cars racing in an oval, you couldn’t tell who was winning by which car seemed ahead of the rest: it might be on a different lap from the others, and the race consisted of 200 laps. Hours and hours of going round in circles. Much like a church council meeting, he thought to himself.
It was the change in the tenor of the voices that made him look up. The race was nearly over—twenty-six laps to go, according to the posting on the screen—but the proceedings had been halted because of a wreck. Some driver had ventured too close to the next vehicle in the throng of cars, jockeying for position at 180 miles per hour. That contact between bumpers had caused a chain reaction. Cars collided with others, blocking the passage of the approaching vehicles, so that they, too, skidded and spun.
Seconds later, an orange car, emblazoned with the number 20, left the track and sailed upside down above the crush of cars, spiraling over and over like a football until it landed in the grassy oval at the center of the speedway, joining a dozen other cars also taken out in the crash.
Bill Knight found himself staring at the screen, even as he reproved himself for watching the violent spectacle. He felt reproached by St. Augustine, who had been so enthralled by the games in the coliseum that he had been forced to exile himself from Rome to overcome his obsession. Even in his desert refuge, the saint’s sleep had been troubled by dreams of chariot races and gladiatorial combat.
As the television replayed the crash over and over from different angles, the race itself was stopped so that the wrecked cars and injured drivers could be tended to. “Surely that man is dead,” Knight thought, watching for perhaps the fifth time as the orange car went flying above the rest.
Apparently not, though. The announcer kept insisting that the driver was not badly hurt, and that he was only complaining of a pain in his shoulder. I should think he would, thought Knight. The trip to the hospital appeared to be little more than a formality for the driver of the orange car: Tony Stewart, according to the announcer. The other drivers were equally unscathed, but their cars were out of commission. Presently, with the dozen drivers sidelined by mechanical problems and minor injuries, the track was cleared of debris and the race resumed.
Knight supposed that the excitement for the day was over, and that with fewer cars to contend with the final twenty-six laps would play out peacefully, but he did wonder if that Stewart fellow could really have escaped with so little injury.
According to the commentators, the big drama of the race now centered on whether the winner would turn out to be the brother of the television announcer, himself a retired stock car driver. He kept hearing the excitement in the broadcaster’s voice, anticipation mounting with each lap as the younger brother maintained the lead, on his way to winning his first Daytona 500. How pleasant for the television network, thought Knight, a happy occasion to focus on, rather than a tragic death. The after-race interview was sure to be unique, because for once the television personality was really part of the story. The human interest angle of the two brothers would no doubt increase the news value of an otherwise routine sports story, and it would make it easy for him to find something pleasant to say about the event. He still wondered, though, about the spectacular wreck on lap 26 that had shut the race down for so many minutes. That car had sailed through the air, flipping over the other contenders. Could it really be as inconsequential as they said it was?
The lap numbers went down every minute or so, until at last the remaining cars were on the homestretch, or the last lap, or whatever they called it, and sure enough the yellow car, number 15, driven by the announcer’s brother, kept its lead. The announcer was shouting excitedly into his microphone as if his brother, and not 20 million viewers could hear him: “You got him, Mikey! Come on, man! Oh, my! Get him in the fold!”
Bill Knight wondered what that phrase meant. Get him in the fold. To his ministerial ear it sounded like a phrase from a revival. As he was making a mental note to ask about this term, the lead car crossed the finish line, followed by great jubilation over the airwaves. Seconds later, though, Darrell Waltrip in the skybox mentioned that another wreck had taken place a hundred yards or so down the track from the finish line only seconds before the end of the race. A footnote to the race, it seemed: this incident was not as spectacular as the previous pileup.
Knight looked up again as the network showed an instant replay of the latest collision. A black Monte Carlo with a white number 3 painted on its side—that was Dale Earnhardt, he knew—had collided with a yellow Pontiac emblazoned with the number 36 and a logo for M&M’s. The black Chevy had been ahead of a knot of close-packed cars, when it seemed to lose control, veering sideways into the path of the oncoming cars. It was hit broadside by the approaching M&M car, slammed into the wall, bounced back, and then both the Chevrolet and the Pontiac slid across the track and came to rest on the grassy oval infield. As before, there were no flames. Both cars were right side up, parked peacefully on the grass, as the race went on without them to end eleven seconds later. The television cameras kept cutting back to the crash site and the voice-overs said several times that Dale Earnhardt was one of the drivers involved, but the focus now was on the ecstatic young driver who had won his first Daytona victory.
“I just hope Dale’s okay,” the television announcer remarked as he looked out the window of the sky box.
Dale. Oh, well, that was all right, Bill Knight thought. Today’s little mishap would have been all in a day’s work to him. Indeed, after a few more replays, the coverage went back to the winning driver, whose car, it turned out, had been owned by Dale Earnhardt’s company. An ecstatic Mike Waltrip was thanking everybody and marveling at his victory. The race was over. Credits rolled up the screen.
Earnhardt. People either loved him or hated him. The men seemed to root for him; most women thought he was too rough, but like him or not, they all knew him. He was big. His face looked down at you from the walls of half the restaurants in the area. On race weekends, there was a waitress in a local diner who wore an Earnhardt cap, and she would count out your change, “One, two, Dale, four, five…” Probably doubled her tips doing that.
Dale Earnhardt.
Bill Knight kept staring at the television, waiting for news that the drivers were all right or that the Stewart fellow in the previous wreck was out of the hospital, but the broadcast ended without further comment on any of the other drivers. On the back of an old envelope, Bill Knight scribbled the words “Mike Waltrip won Daytona500. Announcer’s brother” as a reminder to himself in case anyone of his acquaintance should try to talk about racing in the week ahead, then he turned off the television and went to the kitchen to make more