St. Dale

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “Well,” said Harley, “he’s sorely missed.”

  The straw hat bobbed in agreement. “I was in the museum there with some of the guys. They let us look around after the race. Couple of cars in there for sale. I was thinking about getting one to put on display back at the shop, you know? That’s how I happened to notice you outside. Good to see you around again, Harley. You back to speed after that crash you had?”

  “Right as rain.”

  They walked on a few more paces, with Harley almost afraid to breathe for fear of jinxing himself. Then the man, who was so rich and powerful that his ordinary middle-aged appearance was practically a secret identity, said, “Speaking of the shop…you know, I could use a test driver. If you feel like you’re up to it, why don’t you come see me when you get back?”

  Harley nodded. “I’ll do that, sir,” he said. “I’d be honored.” Suddenly he remembered a scrap of newspaper that had been riding around in his wallet since the night in the bar in Concord. He fished it out and handed it to the man in the hat. “Speaking of Dale, sir, this article’s about a young man who started a program called Driving for Dale to help senior citizens get to doctors’ appointments and so on. The fellow is going to take automotive courses at Northeast State in Tennessee, and since he’s a newlywed, I think he might need a little financial aid or an internship at Bristol. Can you see that the right people get to see this write-up?”

  “I’ll do that,” said the man, pocketing the clipping. “And I’ll see you at the shop-when?”

  Harley hesitated. “Would Wednesday be okay? I have something to finish up.”

  Well, she worked in Charlotte. If she didn’t start screaming at a hundred miles an hour, and if she didn’t order anything with fruit in it at the roadhouse, and if she hadn’t said anything about a community college by Wednesday, then…then they’d have to see.

  “Hope to see you down the road,” said Harley as the man walked away. But he was talking to the sky.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Dale Earnhardt deserved a book not just for his excellence on the speedway, but also for the extraordinary effect he had on thousands of people he never even met-the people who mourned him by leaving flowers at the nearest speedway that February night, or by writing memorial poems in his honor and posting them on the Web, or by displaying the number 3 with sentiments like “God needed a driver.” I’m sure that Dale would be the first to tell you he wasn’t a saint, but I think the outpouring of grief that followed his death would have moved him.

  For years, I have been fascinated by the idea of secular sainthood. When I was in graduate school, I cornered Dr. Charles Kennedy, who was then chair of the religion department at Virginia Tech, and asked him why Elvis had become the new saint, rather than, say, John Lennon, who seemed much more spiritual to me. Dr. Kennedy said that perhaps Lennon was too avant-garde for the general population, but that Elvis, who had served his country, loved his momma, and given away Cadillacs, exemplified a level of righteousness that ordinary people could grasp. We talked about the qualities in the twelfth-century saint Thomas Becket that we could recognize in his twentieth-century counterparts: a rise from humble beginnings to a position of wealth and influence; a pattern of remaining true to one’s roots and not losing touch with the common man; an untimely death that dashed the hopes of admirers who lived vicariously through the hero’s exploits.

  I wanted to do a book on the canonization of a secular figure-a Canterbury Tales with a modern saint-but I lacked the proper inspiration to do justice to the idea.

  Then on February 18, 2001 a new saint entered the pantheon.

  Dale Earnhardt, who was from my home state and my generation, was deeply mourned, even by people who had not been his supporters in life. When the memorial number 3s began appearing everywhere I looked (even in Christmas lights on a neighbor’s roof), I thought I could understand the substance and the underlying sorrow of his loss, and that I could at last write about this theme. Perhaps because my dad was a football coach, I had not grown up as a fan of motor sports, but I knew the time and place of Dale’s story. So I began to study racing, and now I get it.

  Since this is a novel, I have taken small liberties with chronology, most notably: the Earnhardt Tower was completed at the Bristol Motor Speedway a few days after the 2002 Sharpie 500; the Richard Petty Museum moved to its present quarters on Academy Street a few months after the Number Three Pilgrims’s visit in the fall of 2002; and Route 136 in Iredell County became Route 3 six months after Cayle’s car trouble. In each case, since the time discrepancy involved was only a matter of days or months, I have described the place as you will find it now if you visit.

  My friend Jane Hicks, a published poet with two master’s degrees, has been a lifelong fan of stock car racing, so in the early days of my research-back when I thought that Kurt Busch was the governor of Florida-she took me in hand and introduced me to the world of NASCAR. I could not have done it without her. Now she has to put up with e-mails from me raging over the points standings or the outcome of the last race.

  Michaela Hamilton, my wise and fearless editor, took on this project when more timid souls at other publishing houses assured us that no one would buy a novel about stock car racing. Her encouragement and willingness to back this book has been a miracle in itself.

  My thanks to Junior Johnson and to Leonard Wood of Wood Brothers Racing for their wisdom and patience; to East Tennessee State University and Bristol Motor Speedway for offering the NASCAR Experience course, which I took, and to Mark Martin, whose book NASCAR for Dummies was my starting point; step one of a long journey.

  I’m grateful to the Junior League of Bristol for their help and encouragement. Mike Smith of the Martinsville Speedway let me observe two races from the press box, and he very kindly shared his reminiscences with me on the Earnhardt Era of racing. Thanks, too, to Dean and Teresa Mayer, Henry Knight, Kyle McCurry, JoAnn Reeves, Cal Royall, Amelia Townsend, Tresha Lafon, Chrissie Anderson Peters, Linda Wilson, Gale Whigam, Kathy Calaway, and Laree Hinshelwood for their help and enthusiasm on various facets of this project.

  Jerry Bledsoe, the greatest expert on stock car racing that I knew, heard me out at the very beginning (“You’re doing what?”) and was an inspiration and a great critic. Jerry’s Down Home Press also published an early biography of Dale Earnhardt by Frank Vehorn that was most helpful in documenting races that happened decades ago.

  Tom Deitz, who knows more about cars than a medievalist and fantasy novelist has any right to, kept me straight on mechanical details and the fine points of drag racing.

  And thanks to you who are reading this, for being willing to read a novel set in the world of NASCAR-that makes you part of the miracle.

  Sharyn McCrumb

  How I Came to Write St. Dale

  An Interview with Sharyn McCrumb

  1. Why did you write a novel about a pilgrimage in honor of a NASCAR driver? Where did you get that idea?

  When I studied The Canterbury Tales in grad school, I was struck with the idea of grassroots canonization, and I thought that lately saints were being popularly elected. Like Elvis and Princess Diana. I toyed with that idea for years, but never really felt moved to write the book, until Dale Earnhardt died. He was from my state and my generation, and even though I wasn’t a NASCAR fan, I thought I could understand his world and the reasons for his secular sainthood.

  Ultimately this is a story about people’s search for something to believe in. Living in a secular age has not made that yearning go away. It has simply produced a collection of unusual saints. Like Dale.

  2. Wasn’t Dale Earnhardt “The Intimidator,” known for knocking people out of his way in a race? A saint? Him?

  Dale Earnhardt? A saint?…Well, no more so than Elvis or Princess Diana, I guess, but like them, he has mourners who continue to grieve long after the date of his death. Cars to this day bear memorial stickers on the rear window-a number 3 with wings.

  Although Dale Earnhardt dropped ou
t of the ninth grade, when he died he was ranked #40 on the Forbes List of 100 Richest Americans. Despite his wealth and fame, he continued to live a few miles from his birthplace, and to act as unpretentiously as ever. He is a twenty-first century St. Thomas a Becket: a poor boy who made good in a system stacked against him, and who retained his humility to the last.

  3. But doesn’t there have to be some sort of miracle connected to a saint?

  Oddly enough, there really are mystical elements to the tale of Dale Earnhardt.

  Although Dale Earnhardt won the NASCAR championship seven times, the Daytona 500-the crown jewel of the sport-was always his nemesis, almost to a supernatural level. Out of twenty-three tries, Earnhardt won only once. The thing was, he didn’t lose because people outraced him. Some years he’d win every race they ran at that track, except the one that mattered.

  He’d hit debris that wasn’t supposed to be there and wreck. He’d run out of gas. His engine failed. Once he hit a seagull. (A seagull?) Many of these accidents happened only a few yards from the finish line in the final lap of a 3½ hour race-as if he were fated always to lose it.

  His one Daytona 500 victory came when a little girl in a wheelchair visited him before the race and insisted on giving him a lucky penny to help him win. Earnhardt glued that penny to the dashboard of his number 3 car-and that day he won the Daytona 500. He lived for exactly three years and three days after that victory, and died in the 2001 Daytona 500-eleven seconds from the finish line on the last lap.

  There are other miracles in the book, and I wish I could tell you the ones that happened to me while I was writing it!

  4. In what sense is ST. DALE a departure from your previous books? In what ways is it consistent with them?

  St. Dale is certainly a departure from the Ballad novels. But remember that I also have a smartaleck side. In tone St. Dale is reminiscent of some of my other books, most notably If I’d Killed Him When I Met Him, so I think that my readers will like it. The ones who have read it so far certainly do. This is also an opportunity to reach many new readers, who will be interested in the motor sports setting of this book without caring who I am.

  The common factor between St. Dale and the Ballad novels is that I am still exploring traditions of the Appalachian mountain culture-after all, stock car racing started on Thunder Road in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. I have always battled the casual bigotry of mainstream culture against Appalachian traditions, the hillbilly stereotyping, etc. It seems to me that there is no sport more maligned by the self-appointed cultural elite than NASCAR. In this book, I treat the sport and its fans with respect and understanding-fighting the stereotypes as usual. I hope I make a difference in the general perception of motor sorts. Stock car racing is a great sport.

  “My heroes have always been cowboys. And they still are, it seems.”

  5. Will fans of our Ballad novels enjoy ST. DALE?

  I have been pleased to see the overlap between racing fans and my readership. People I never knew were NASCAR fans have turned out to be long-time readers of my work: college librarians, booksellers, historians, teachers, poets. There are 70 million NASCAR fans. You might be amazed at the erudition and sophistication of NASCAR-fan readers, but nothing surprises me any more.

  6. What was the most surprising thing you discovered as you researched this novel?

  My original intention was to learn enough about stock car racing to write a credible novel. I did not expect to fall madly in love with the sport. I discovered that once racing made sense to me, I loved it. A NASCAR commercial asks: How bad have you got it? Oh, let me count the ways. Once I was stuck in the Chicago airport at race time; all the TV’s in the terminal were turned to baseball. So I called a friend on my cell phone and made her talk me through the race until my flight boarded. In June I was in England, on the computer in the basement of thousand-year-old Wroxley Abbey, checking the qualifying results for the Michigan race. My own favorite driver, 2002 Daytona 500 winner Ward Burton, had a run of bad luck in 2004. I haven’t cried this much over a guy since junior high school.

  7. Did writing this book change you?

  I have had so many wonderful adventures. If I have to pick just one, let me tell you about The Outlaws.

  Last March I was invited to Young Harris College in the Georgia mountains to lecture on my Ballad novels. Hearing that I’d be in the area, the local high school asked if I would stay over the weekend and visit there on Monday because the high school English classes had been reading one of my Ballad novels. They put me up in a tourist cabin over the weekend. Saturday night I went dirt track racing with one of my long-time readers who turned out to be a motor sports journalist. On Sunday I settled in to watch the NASCAR race on television, only to discover that the satellite dish was out, the cabin phone was dead, and the mountains blocked the signal to my cell phone. I was in an information vacuum.

  Monday morning at 9 A.M. I walked into the high school class to give my talk on Appalachian Literature to twenty-six bright and eager students-and to five Outlaws. Over in the corner sat five big tough-looking guys in black T-shirts and work boots, clearly not happy about having to listen to a lady author talk about books on a Monday morning.

  I was so glad to see them!

  I said to the class, “Before I start to tell you about frontier justice in Appalachia, I have a question, Who won yesterday at Darlington?”

  The twenty-six eager students looked bewildered, and the Outlaws’ jaws dropped. Was I really asking what they thought I was asking? Finally the biggest, toughest one said, “Jimmie Johnson.”

  I said, “Really? I thought Matt Kenseth might have pulled this one off. He qualified badly, but then he always does.”

  “Naw. He got penalized for passing during a caution. Lost a lap.”

  “How about Kasey Kahne?”

  “Spun out. Finished thirteenth.”

  After the Outlaws and I did three minutes of the racing report, I gave my lecture about The Ballad of Frankie Silver to twenty-six bright and eager students and five “disciples.” One of the Outlaws has written to me once a month ever since, and he always ends his letter with “I want to read your St. Dale book.” He’s getting the first copy.

  8. What would you like to accomplish with ST. DALE?

  I always want to change the world. This time I would like to rescue a wonderful sport from the casual bigotry of people who see the whole country as a theme park, and who assume that any pastime with Southern roots must be a bastion of ignorant rednecks. The drivers are smarter than you think-two of my favorites are Ryan Newman, who has a degree in engineering from Purdue, and Ward Burton, who funded a Wildlife Foundation. NASCAR fans are so numerous and geographically diverse as to defy stereotyping.

  9. Will your next novel be in the vein of ST. DALE?

  When the book first came out, I’d have said no, but NASCAR is very hard to get out of your system. I tried writing an historical novel and felt like I was doing a term paper on dairy products. Fortunately, just after Daytona I got a wonderful NASCAR-related idea about a pit crew, and by now I have made so many friends within the sport that I have a great deal of help in getting the details right in an insider’s look at racing.

  Sharyn McCrumb

  ***

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