St. Dale

flying over to watch a friend doing practice runs, all right? Anyhow, Davey Allison and another driver in the Alabama Gang, Red Farmer, flew over to the track in Davey’s new helicopter, and they were just about to touch down-a foot from the ground, people say. Close enough to step out, except, of course, you wouldn’t. You’d wait for the touchdown, for the engine to be turned off…” Harley’s voice trailed off then. He was replaying an image that had come to him many times over the years: a smiling, dark-haired young man, jumps out of the hovering helicopter and sprints away. But he hadn’t. Of course, he hadn’t. The thing must have cost most of a hundred thousand dollars, serious money even if you’re Davey Allison. He would have landed it properly. Apparently the voices at Talladega weren’t warning people that day.

Bekasu didn’t know this story, but she saw the somber faces of the others and Harley’s stricken look as he remembered. “What happened?” she asked.

“I can tell you what. But not why. The helicopter shot up into the air-thirty feet or so, I heard. And then it just slammed back down to earth on its side, with Davey and his passenger inside. Like someone spiking a football. And Neil Bonnett-the driver he had flown over to check on-Neil was the one who pulled him out.”

“He didn’t make it, did he?”

Justine touched her sister’s arm. “No,” she said. “They got him to the hospital, but he died a few days later.”

“The race the next week was at Pocono,” said Jim Powell softly. “And Dale Earnhardt won it. So when it was time to take his victory lap after the race, Earnhardt drove to the start-finish line on the track and it looked like he and his pit crew were saying a prayer. Then somebody handed him a Number 28 flag-that was Davey’s number-and Earnhardt drove a Polish victory lap-backwards, the way Alan Kulwicki used to do it-and a-waving that 28 flag out the window, to honor the both of them. Alan had died back in April and Davey only a week before.”

“It’s no wonder that Talladega is haunted,” said Bekasu. “The wonder is that all the tracks aren’t.”

The memorial to Davey Allison was a circular park of green lawn and young hardwood trees bisected by a brick path, and encircled by a walkway. Two white marble walls flanking the brick walkway on the circular path displayed information about Davey Allison and his racing career. In front of the wall, a slanted checkerboard platform symbolized a winner’s circle, and in its center was the Texaco star, acknowledging the oil company that had sponsored Davey Allison and now honored his memory with this park. It was so green and peaceful that to Bill Knight it seemed at first to be the very antithesis of a speedway, but then he considered the shape of the park, and realized that its configuration was indeed that of a racetrack. Perhaps it was an Elysian field of a track, someone’s idea of racing with the angels.

At intervals around the encircling paved walkway, set on poles at reading height for visitors, were rectangular bronze plaques, each bearing the bas-relief bronze likeness of a legend of motor sports, and a few sentences describing the man’s achievements. The first plaque to the left of the entrance to the circle bore the name of Donnie Allison, the uncle of the young driver to whom the park was dedicated. According to the plaque, Donnie Allison was the first NASCAR driver to complete a lap around the Talladega track. Bill Knight read that plaque, and the one after it-Dale Earnhardt. As he moved away to the next one, several of his fellow travelers were grouped around the Earnhardt plaque posing for a group photo.

Fireball Roberts…Dale Jarrett…Ned Jarrett…To Bill, the exercise of reading these commemorative plaques felt a bit like reading someone else’s hometown newspaper: the facts were still there, but devoid of any emotional content for the casual stranger.

Many of the other names were unfamiliar to him, so he contented himself with a glance at each bronze plaque and stopped trying to take in all the new information. This was, after all, a memorial, not a trivia contest. He admired the beauty and the restraint of the landscaping. Here there were no angel statues or topiary race cars, only a cozy little park of well-tended lawn, dotted with young oak trees, and bisected by a simple rose-colored brick path cutting across the middle. Slender trees with branches like upraised arms lined the path, an arboreal honor guard. A few feet back from the entrance a flagpole had been set in a wrought iron semicircle in the walkway; from it a new American flag rippled in the slight breeze.

Bill noted that Matthew was posing for a group photo with Harley and the McKees. Shane was holding Matthew up so that he could read the bronze plaque, and Ratty, camera in hand, was waving directions for them to pose. Pleased to have a few moments of solitude, Bill walked alone, keeping to the outer path, glad of the sunshine and the chance to stretch his legs. He decided that when he reached the midpoint of the outer walkway, he would enter the brick walk on the back side of the park and follow it to the beginning. A quarter of the way along the path, he sat down on the Valley Electric Co-op bench, nestled in the shade of a large tree. He settled in to study the scene, while the other passengers continued to make their way around the park, reading the plaques and taking turns photographing the scene and posing for more snapshots. As he watched, a bobtailed ginger tom cat emerged from the shrubbery and jumped on the bench beside him. The cat bumped his arm with its head, intent on having its ears scratched by anyone who would sit still long enough. Obligingly, Bill scratched its head, and was rewarded with a rasping purr.

Justine motioned for him to come and join in the photo session, but he smiled and waved her way, pointing to the cat, and mouthing “Later.” Perhaps, though, he ought to ask one of the others to take a photograph of the park for him. It would make an interesting slide to accompany his lectures about pilgrimages, for surely this was a modern-day shrine to the faithful. He was pleased to see that there were no souvenir stands, no hawkers of postcards or commemorative badges-quite unlike some of the European shrines he had visited, in fact. For some reason, he found himself thinking of a little shrine in Cornwall that he’d visited on a walking tour during his student days. The place was a holy well, consecrated to a saint, of course, but really a remnant of the old Celtic beliefs that had been in place before the Romans arrived. After all these years, he had forgotten when he’d visited it and exactly where it was, but the image of the path to the well was still clear in his mind. It was a narrow winding track that led from a roadside field through a dense thicket of trees and shrubs into the woods to the clearing where the well was. Impossible to miss the path, though, for at shoulder height, the branches bloomed with a rainbow of colored rags and ribbons, tied among the leaves by pilgrims on their way to the sacred water. Some of the bits of cloth were tattered and faded from the winter rains and the glare of long summer days, others were as bright and crisp as if they had just been left that morning. Did people bring these scraps of red and blue and yellow with them when they came, or did they, seeing the profusion of ribbons lining the path, tear a strip off a sleeve or a scarf to add to the offerings. Those bright bits of cloth-were they tangible prayers, left behind by hopeful believers or were they simply a custom like saying “bless you” when someone sneezes, a shadow of an old belief, shriveled now to a hollow ritual, its significance long forgotten.

Two ideas slotted together in his mind. There was another ritual associated with holy wells. The “pattern.” You had to say prayers the requisite number of times-usually a multiple of three, of course-and you had to walk in a circle around the site of the holy well, also for a designated number of times. Sun-wise. You had to walk your laps in the sun-wise direction, because if you went around the other way, it would negate your prayers, even bring down bad luck upon you.

What was it Jim Powell had been saying about Alan Kulwicki going the wrong way around the track? The Polish victory lap, he’d called it. And then Earnhardt had duplicated the maneuver in memory of Kulwicki at the race following Kulwicki’s fatal plane crash. Two drivers going the wrong way around in the ritual-both died violent deaths.

Bill Knight sighed. He must not voice that ridiculous thought to anyone on this tour. Surely there were many other drivers who had driven the Polish victory lap over the years without fatal consequences. He was being fanciful.

There were no tokens of faith in this memorial park-no ribbons on shrubs or beads draped over statues. There were the inscribed bricks, of course. He had noticed that the center walkway was studded with personalized bricks inscribed with messages from people who still mourned Davey Allison or from those who wanted to express love or luck to someone else. Tangible prayers.

Bill smiled. In some ways people changed very little over the centuries. In Roman times in Britain, they had thrown small objects into pools as offerings to the gods, small incentives that prayers should be granted, and the impulse to reach out to the hereafter had not gone away. It had only taken a new form. What prayer would he write on a sacred brick, he asked himself. Asking for material goods-a new car, perhaps-seemed at best childish to him, and those beauty pageant wishes, like “world peace,” seemed to reduce complexity to a platitude and he would have felt foolish expressing such a wish. Perhaps the greatest gift one could hope for was the ability to believe that