Super Bowl of NASCAR they called it, but he had begged off, saying he had paperwork to do. Instead, he promised them that he would watch the race by himself while he worked. An easy promise to keep, since he usually did turn the television on for noise while he wrote.
He was looking forward to a relaxing evening alone with his slides and lecture notes: pilgrimages in the medieval Church, an erudite and obscure pursuit that had long afforded him a retreat from all things modern and confusing, like church sound systems and word processing software. He hoped to work up a lecture on the pilgrimage of Santiago de Compostela, and so he told himself that the bookish evening might indeed be considered “work” or at least the preparation for work. He would skip the Daytona parties with a clear conscience but, in deference to local customs, he knew that he must not skip the race itself. It was a restrictor plate race-whatever that meant.
The culture of stock car racing took some getting used to for someone who had heretofore believed that any major sport must end in the word “ball.” When Knight had first arrived, so many people asked him to remember 19 -year-old Adam Petty in his prayers that he had looked up the name in the church directory to see which of the boy’s relatives belonged to his congregation. Finally, someone explained to him that Adam Petty had been a novice driver, NASCAR royalty-the grandson of Richard Petty himself-who had been killed in a wreck at New Hampshire International Speedway that summer. People grieved for this famous stranger, killed in race practice in their vicinity, much as they would have mourned a local high school quarterback killed on I-93. For Bill Knight, it was a mindset that he was still trying to master.
With barely a glance at the race already well under way, he had settled in behind his desk with an NHIS coffee mug (a legacy from the parsonage cupboard) and a stack of note cards and photographs. He thought about muting the sound of the race so that he could concentrate on his work without distraction, but he decided that this would not be quite in keeping with his promise to watch the event, so he left it on. Later, he came to think of this decision-or indecision-as a sign that some higher authority than his parishioners had meant for him to watch this race, but he never shared this pious thought with anyone. His flock of New Hampshire Protestants might believe in messages from heaven as a general principle, but they frowned upon modern-day citizens-particularly their own clergymen-claiming to receive them. As befitted their Puritan ancestry, his congregation preferred a faith of austere simplicity, one in which visions and prophecies were as suspect as incense.
A native of western Maryland, Bill Knight was still charmed by the Christmas-card prettiness of the countryside, and of Canterbury itself with its colonial homes, its village green, and the Shaker Museum, all a few miles north of Concord, off I-93, and-as if in apposition to all this colonial simplicity-one exit away from the New Hampshire International Speedway. Loudon, as the track was usually called for the sake of brevity, after the town closest to it, was a major regional attraction, bringing in tourist dollars and turning traffic into a nightmare one weekend each July and September. Then 50,000 people converged on the area for the NASCAR Winston Cup races. He soon realized that the sport would affect him whether he followed it or not, just as residents of Wimbledon or St. Andrews cannot be indifferent to tennis or golf.
On the whole, he was pleased with the area and with the cadence of life in New England. Less than a hundred miles from the amenities of Boston, but well out of the city sprawl and traffic-he had the best of both worlds. No one had objected to a divorced pastor, and none of the unattached women in the congregation had made any strenuous efforts to change his marital status. He found the people kindhearted, 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
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.
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.
