St. Dale

by Sharyn McCrumb

Cayle Warrenby gave Ray Reeve a bright smile, and cast about for some topic other than Dale Earnhardt. “I was checking my e-mail last night, and one of the engineers from my company had sent me one of those redneck quizzes. They know I hate those things.”

  Ray Reeve grunted. “In Nebraska we get pretty sick of hearing about the heartland, too,” he said. “The Flyover Zone crap.”

  “But the quiz did have one interesting question, I thought,” said Cayle. “‘Which of these cars will rust out the quickest when placed on blocks in your front yard? A ’65 Ford Fairlane, a ’69 Chevrolet Chevelle, or a ’64 Pontiac GTO.’ I’m an environmental engineer, so of course I wondered if there’s a way to determine the answer.”

  Ray Reeve considered it. “Don’t bet on the Fairlane,” he said. “They’re duller than ditchwater to look at, but they didn’t call them sixties iron for nothing.”

  Jim Powell, who had overheard this exchange, said, “What year’s Fairlane? ’65? Okay. Wasn’t that the fourth year they used that same structure?”

  “Different sheet metal from the roof down, though,” said Ray Reeve. “But I take your point. The Ford folks must have got the hang of making ’em by then.”

  “I never did see many of them rusting in junkyards,” said Jim Powell. “And it’s not like anybody would bother to rescue one.”

  “So not the Fairlane,” said Cayle. “Okay, y’all agree on that?”

  They nodded.

  “Me, too. So that leaves the ’64 GTO and the ’69 Chevelle.” She considered it. “Both GM A-bodies.”

  “Yeah, but not the same,” said Ray Reeve. “Remember they designed a new from-the-ground-up A-body in 1968 for all GM intermediates, which included the Chevelle.”

  “And the Skylark, the Olds Cutlass, and the Pontiac Tempest,” said Cayle, nodding. “We had a burgundy Cutlass when I was a kid. Well, my dad had it, but the rest of us got to ride to church in it.”

  “That’s an awful lot of makes and models,” said Jim Powell. “And then the government started throwing all those safety regulations and pollution controls at the manufacturers, so maybe things began to slip a little at the factory.”

  “So which rusts first? The Chevelle?”

  Jim Powell and Ray Reeve looked at each other and nodded. “In a junkyard? Chevy first,” said Ray Reeve. “I can see it. There’d be some rust at the base of the back window. It’s a steeper angle, so the water would collect there, and after the water took hold in there, more water coming in would rust the rocker panels and the lower rear fenders.”

  Jim Powell gave him a thumbs-up. “The GTO would be the next to rust out. In a junkyard.” He smiled. “Unless-”

  “Unless a car buff chances upon them and decides to rescue one,” said Cayle, grinning. “And he sure wouldn’t pick the Fairlane. He’d save the GTO, I think.”

  “Would, if he had any sense,” said Ray Reeve.

  After a moment’s silence Jim Powell said, “Didn’t know you knew so much about cars.”

  Cayle laughed. “Doesn’t my name tell you?” she said. “I was daddy’s ‘boy.’ I used to toddle around the garage after him and my uncles, learning car talk. Can’t fix ’em, though.”

  Jim Powell sighed. “I couldn’t even teach our Jean how to drive a stick shift.”

  “Cayle,” said Ray Reeve thoughtfully. “Cale Yarborough. He was all right. If he was still around I might root for him. But he’s not Dale.”

  “I know how you feel,” said Jim. “Nobody was hit any harder than we were when Dale was taken, and Arlene spent last season crying through damn near every race, but you know, like I told her, I don’t think he’d want you to give up the sport for him. He wasn’t into giving up, was he?”

  “I wonder which one of those cars Ralph Earnhardt would have salvaged?” said Cayle.

  The three of them spent another hundred miles rehashing memories of sixties’ iron, and when Cayle drifted off to sleep Jesse Franklin was telling Ray Reeve a war story about a soldier’s wife named Dora Jean who was afraid her husband’s ship would sink in the harbor when it came home to port, so she had an affair with the captain of the minesweeper.

  “How are you liking the tour?” said Terence politely to his new seatmate.

  Karen sighed. “I wanted to go to the beach,” she said. But she was too worried to make small talk. With a tentative smile she said in her smallest voice, “I need to ask you a question. I mean, since you’re a guy. I need some advice. Before we get to Daytona.”

  Terence Palmer closed his magazine with no apparent enthusiasm. “I hope it’s about your stock portfolio,” he murmured.

  “No.” She glanced around to make sure that no one was listening. “But it is kind of an ethical question.”

  Terence blinked with alarm. “Why ask me then? There’s a minister on board.”

  Karen wrinkled her nose. “He’s nice, but he has to be older than Mark Martin. You’re the only guy on this bus who’s anywhere near Shane’s age.”

  Terence turned away, rattling his magazine. “I can’t help you.”

  “Well, you could listen,” said Karen. “You don’t have anything better to do. Maybe it would help me just to talk about it.”

  Terence closed his eyes and sighed deeply, which was what his family did instead of shouting and throwing plates, but meant the same thing. “All right,” he said. “Talk about it.”

  “Okay, suppose you tell somebody a lie because you love them and you don’t want them to feel bad, but now you think they might find out the truth and be mad at you for keeping it from them.”

  “Okay,” said Terence.

  “Oh, good, so you think it’s all right?”

  “No. I thought you just wanted to think out loud. Now you’re asking me to say what I think?” His eyes drifted back to the open magazine.

  Karen snatched his copy of Fortune and stuffed it into the seat pocket.

  Terence reached for the magazine, but he succeeded only in pulling out the letter that had been the bookmark in Karen’s book about the Irish princess. He opened it before she could snatch it back.

  “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t mention that to anybody,” she said. “Especially Shane.”

  “Why would I?”

  “Well, you might not realize it was a secret. He doesn’t know. Listen, I need some help here. I’ve only been married six days, and I’m afraid I’ve ruined things already. Or I will have, when Shane finds out.”

  “About the letter?”

  She shook her head. “Something else.”

  “Something else? What-no-don’t tell me. Doesn’t matter. You sound like my mother.”

  “Your mother?”

  “It’s the sort of thing she’d do. One year-I think I was nine or ten-they sent me off to camp for two weeks, and I had a pet hamster. I wasn’t allowed to have a messy cat or a smelly dog.” He did a passable imitation of his mother’s Tidewater Brahmin accent. “The only reason I had the hamster was that we’d had it in the classroom at school, and the teacher asked for a volunteer to take it home over the summer. So every day from camp I called home to ask about Chip, the hamster, and Mother always said he was fine. Was she feeding him? I’d ask. Giving him a little lettuce or a peanut? Oh, yes, all taken care of. So-two weeks later I get home from camp-”

  “And the hamster is dead?”

  “Gone, anyway,” said Terence. “I don’t know if she let it go, gave it away, or forgot to feed it. Anyhow, it was gone. The cage was gone. Like it had never happened. And when I started to cry, she said, ‘I did it for your own good, dear. You really didn’t need any bad news to make you sad while you were at camp.’” He shrugged. “You know how that made me feel?”

  Karen shook her head.

  “Enraged, of course. But insulted, too. Who was she to decide what I was capable of handling? Who was she to lie to me and then expect me to be grateful?”

  She studied him for a moment. This was the longest speech she’d ever heard Terence make. His voice shook with anger. �
�You’re still mad about that hamster after all these years, aren’t you?” she said.

  He shrugged. “I don’t think about it.”

  “But you wish she’d told you the truth, even if it hurt you at the time?”

  “Look, don’t try to solve your problem based on a dead hamster. I don’t know what you did or how upset Shane would be about it, so my advice would be useless.”

  Karen leaned over and whispered a few words into his ear.

  Terence’s eyes widened. “You told him what? You’d never get away with that.”

  “If he ever heard any different, it didn’t sink in. It’s what he wanted to hear.”

  “Well, if it matters that much to him, I hope I’m not around when he finds out,” said Terence.

  Karen, looking shaken, went back to her novel about the princess of Ireland. She didn’t notice Terence staring at the book cover, lost in thought.

  Harley thought there was something a little depressing about entering Florida via the Interstate. Maybe it was all the tourist-trap exits, luring motorists to buy fresh oranges or come and see the real fifteen-foot alligator (deceased and leathery, displayed on a ledge surrounded by knickknacks and more oranges). It made him want to get away from there as fast as he could. He could forgive some drivers for hoping that the “95” signs posted along the way meant the speed limit.

  Daytona International Speedway was within sight of I-95, at least from the overpass at the U.S. 92 exit. International Speedway Boulevard was as urban a setting as you could imagine for a noisy, traffic-spawning speedway. A Holiday Inn and a Hilton stood across the road, and the sprawling Volusia Mall took up much of the next block. Harley had a spiel written out on yellow index cards: the Daytona 500 is the Superbowl of NASCAR, the first Cup race of the season; the highest paying win and the event that makes you a celebrity. (In these days of David Letterman and Good Morning, America, anyhow, he reminded himself. Sorry, Bodine.) A 2.5 mile super speedway, restrictor-plate track…Daytona is where NASCAR began, back in the forties when drivers raced along the hard-packed sandy beaches, racing tide as well as time. Harley nearly had the hang of this lecture business now, and he thought he could do a good twenty minutes of Daytona stories without too many slipups, but nobody wanted to hear it. Not the folks on this bus.

  Oh, maybe Bill Knight would have been all courteous attention, because he would be anyway, even if the lecture was on Sanskrit…in Sanskrit. But the folks who really cared about Daytona probably knew the note card trivia as well as he did and, judging from their expressions at the moment, they didn’t give a damn about any of it.

  Maybe someday the excitement would return, and the thrill of Speed Week would matter again, but right now, row upon row of somber faces said it all. This was where he died. Just now, for Earnhardt’s supporters, a visit to Daytona evoked not the excitement of seeing, say, Yankee Stadium, but the somber reflection one might feel at the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.

  “Park anywhere in the front lot, Ratty,” said Harley. “You know where we’re going first.”

  As he turned into the parking lot, Ratty looked over the facade of the Speedway with its adjoining museums, and then he saw what Harley was talking about. “Right,” he said. “I’ll get as close as I can.”

  The solemn little group assembled on the sidewalk a few yards from the entrance to the building labeled “Daytona USA.” Beside the white building was a raised flower bed encircled by a knee-high white cement wall. In the center of the circular garden stood Dale Earnhardt on a bronze pedestal, trophy in one hand, and the other arm upraised in a gesture of triumph.

  There he was. So many hundred miles they’d come, all the way from Bristol, where he’d won his first race back in ’79, to here, where it all ended twenty-two years later. But the moment frozen in time in that bronze statue was a happier one: February 15, 1998, the day he finally won the big one.

  “That’s the Harley Earl Trophy,” said Harley. “My dad had high hopes, I guess, naming me that. Anyhow, that’s what you get when you win the Daytona 500.”

  “It was the only race he won that year,” said Jim Powell, nodding to the man in bronze.

  “I’ll bet he didn’t care,” said Sarah Nash with a fond smile. “It took him so long to finally win this race, I’ll bet he felt like getting dipped in bronze right on the spot, so that he’d never have to put that trophy down.”

  “This is where we ought to put the wreath,” said Cayle.

  “That’s what we decided,” said Harley. “But I thought we’d look around first. We’re taking the tour of the Speedway here. They put you on a little tram and drive you around the track. There’s so much history connected with this place we couldn’t cover it in a week. Who won the first Daytona 500?”

  “Petty!” said Cayle.

  “Lee Petty,” Jim Powell corrected her. “That was the year after young Richard started racing.”

  “Okay, that was a hard one. Now for the younger crowd,” said Harley, putting a hand on Matthew’s shoulder. “Who won the last Daytona 500, back in February?”

  “Ward Burton,” said Matthew.

  Shane shook his head. “Sorry, Matthew,” he said. “It was Little E. Last year Mike Waltrip, and this year Dale Junior.” He looked around for confirmation, but no one met his eyes, except Karen whose stricken look puzzled him. “What?”

  “Sorry, Shane,” said Harley, sounding puzzled. “Matthew’s right. Little E. won the July race here in 2001. I expect that’s the race you were thinking of, but Ward Burton did win the 2002 Daytona 500.”

  “No! He couldn’t have!” Shane reddened at the looks of pity and confusion on the faces of the others. Were they teasing him? It wasn’t funny. “Junior won,” he said again. “It’s part of the miracle.”

  Bill Knight patted Karen’s arm. As soon as he’d heard the name “Ward Burton,” he had remembered his conversation with Pvt. Alvarez back at DEI and he had known what was coming.

  “What miracle?” said Jim Powell.

  “Overcoming the curse. You know how the Intimidator tried twenty times to win this race and lost from ’79 to ’97, right?”

  Nods from the Number Three Pilgrims.

  “Ran out of gas. Cut a tire. Hit a seagull, for God’s sake. And then the little girl in the wheelchair gave him the lucky penny in ’98 and he won the race.”

  “And he lived three years and three days after that,” said Bill. “We know, Shane.”

  “Okay, but since he died he hasn’t lost the Daytona500. Because the drivers of his company DEI have won every year. And they’ll win next year, too. Three times. That’s the miracle.”

  A bewildered Jesse Franklin stared at Shane for a moment, as if waiting for a punch line or for someone else to speak up. When no one did, he said, “But, hold on there, son. Ward Burton doesn’t drive for DEI.”

  “Ward Burton didn’t win!” Shane said it so loudly that passersby turned to stare at them.

  The others looked at him in awkward silence.

  Then Justine said gently, “You didn’t see the race, did you?”

  He blinked. “Of course, I…well…I…”

  Karen was shaking her head. “You made it through the first couple of laps, I think, Shane. Until they showed Kevin Harvick’s car up close, anyhow. The Goodwrench logo. Remember? And then you walked out of the den, saying you couldn’t stand to watch it. You went off to the garage and you spent the rest of the afternoon tuning up my mom’s car, which it did not need. And later you made me tell you who won.”

  “That’s right. And you said Junior won it.”

  “I know, Shane,” she murmured. “I know I said it. It just wasn’t true, that’s all. But you were so sure that the miracle was going to happen…” Her voice quavered. “I couldn’t tell you any different. I’ll bet half a dozen times since then people have mentioned that Ward Burton won. We even saw a program on television where they said it, but it seemed like it just went right over your head. You didn’t want to be wrong, Shane.”


  He stood there, fists clenched, taking heaving breaths, while the other passengers stood in embarrassed silence, contriving to look elsewhere. Karen looked as if she might burst into tears at any second.

  The seconds ticked by while they glanced at each other, wondering whether to try to comfort the young man or to pretend it hadn’t happened.

  “You got the wrong miracle, man,” Terence Palmer said at last. He stepped up beside Harley, concerned but not distressed by the public scene playing out before him. He managed a reassuring smile at Shane. “The first miracle was Kevin Harvick.”

  Distracted now, Shane simply stared at him. “Huh?”

  Terence nodded, and went on in the earnest voice he might have used to discuss mutual funds. “Look, after the Intimidator was killed in the 2001 Daytona 500, his Goodwrench car went to Kevin Harvick, right? And it was Harvick who won the 3rd race after Daytona that year. There’s your number three, Shane. The third race A.D. That made it the fourth race of the season. What’s Harvick’s number, Shane?”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “Right. Okay, in that race at Hampton, Harvick started in the fifth position. But he came in first. Fourth race. Twenty-nine car. Starts fifth, finishes first.”

  “So?” Shane was no longer angry, just confused.

  “What was Earnhardt’s birthday, Shane?”

  “April 29, 1951,” said Shane without a second’s hesitation. Then it hit him. “Four. Twenty-nine. Five-one.”

  “Right. There’s your sign.” Terence glanced up at the bronze features of Dale Earnhardt, forever in victory. “But as for Junior winning Daytona this year, he’d never stand for that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Intimidator. Well, think about it. Dale Senior tried twenty times to win that race, and got jinxed every time. You said so yourself. So do you think he’s going to let Little E. win the big one the third time the kid ever tries? At the age of twenty-seven?” Terence gave Shane a pitying smile. “Oh, please.”

  Shane nodded, not happy yet, but on the verge of being handed back his dream. No one else moved, for fear of breaking the spell.

  Terence pulled a checkbook out of his hip pocket, and looked at the three-year calendar on the back of the deposit record. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll bet you want to know when Junior is going to win it, don’t you?”