St. Dale

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.”