Terence looked around, seeing now not a shabby old farmhouse, but a carefully arranged set piece of American primitives. He thought the furniture must be Stickley. He had seen pieces in the apartments of some of his artsy colleagues. Of course! It was made in North Carolina. The old man must have bought it years ago, probably for a song. Terence wondered if his father had known how much the pieces would go for today. He probably did.
The pottery was more of a problem, though. He didn’t recognize it at all. There was a display of ceramics in the china cabinet behind the table, but one shelf display in particular looked so amateurish that he might have supposed his father had taken beginning ceramics classes for a hobby. More importantly, he wondered if Mrs. Nash had assumed that he had only come for the pickings, rather than out of duty. Perhaps she was testing him.
“I have a trust fund,” he said at last. “And a job on Wall Street.”
The tight smile again. “Well, I didn’t suppose you needed the proceeds from a yard sale, Terence, and I doubt if any of this is to your taste. I can’t say much of it is to mine. I just think it would be a shame if you went away not understanding what you saw. Like these.” She nodded toward the shelf of blue and green pottery decorated with white figures. At first glance he had taken them for Wedgwood: he was familiar with the graceful white classical figures that decorated the English cameo ware of Josiah Wedgwood and Company, but these vases-and sugar bowls and tea pots and coffee mugs-were different both in theme and in execution. The rendering of the puppet-like figures suggested that the artisan had never mastered proportion. Instead of the elegant Grecian themes of Wedgwood landscapes, the clumsy beings on this pottery inhabited a world of log cabins, tepees, and covered wagons. Had his father or one of his friends been attempting to imitate Wedgwood in some American idiom?
“That’s Pisgah Forest pottery,” said Sarah Nash. “Made near Asheville in the first half of the twentieth century by a man named W. B. Stephen. I wouldn’t expect you to know it, but piece for piece it sells for more than Wedgwood, and rightly so, because each piece is the work of just one man instead of a mass-produced factory item.”
Terence peered at a brown coffee mug depicting an Indian on horseback in pursuit of a buffalo.
“I suppose you recognized the Stickley pieces. That desk over there is American chestnut, which was wiped out back in the Thirties, so the desk is irreplaceable. And those five-gallon jugs with jack o’lantern faces on them belong in a museum.”
Terence looked at the leering faces and protruding ears on a row of brown pottery jugs-ceramic jack o’lanterns, he thought. Still wondering if the conversation had a subtext, he made a guess. “Would you like any of these pieces as a keepsake?”
She smiled. “That’s kind of you, but they would wreak havoc with my Williamsburg decor. Your father liked American primitive, but I favor the cavalier-in-denial school of decorating-the furniture of the settlers who pretended they were still in London instead of on the eighteenth-century frontier.”
“What would my father have wanted me to do with all this?” he asked.
Mrs. Nash shrugged. “Enjoy them if you can. If not, there’s a good auction house in Asheville. Brunk’s. Collectors prize these things. Or there are museums and universities that would be glad to have them.”
“I was hoping to get some idea of what my father was like from seeing his things, but this isn’t telling me much, except maybe why he didn’t stay married to my mother. She’s a cavalier-in-denial type, too.”
“Why didn’t you ever come to see him?”
Terence hesitated. “Shyness, I guess. He never asked me and I was afraid to push it. I thought about going when I turned twenty-one, but I had so many other things to do. Job hunting, moving…I thought I’d like to have figured out who I’d grown up to be before I met him. I always thought I’d have time for him when the chaos subsided in my life.”
“We always think that. I guess we’d go crazy if we didn’t. Well, if knowing your father’s interests will get you any closer to him, you might want to take a look in the den there.” She nodded toward a closed door at one end of the kitchen. “That was Tom’s study. Go look.”
Terence turned the handle of the door, wondering if he were about to be inundated with more face jugs, quilts, and wood carvings, but the exhibits displayed in the paneled den suggested quite a different sort of museum.
The pine-paneled walls were covered with color photographs of men in coveralls leaning against brightly painted race cars. A bookcase held volumes of coffee-table books on racing and a shelf of small die-cast cars. There were hats and clocks and calendars. Terence noticed that the white number 3 figured prominently in most of these displays, and the same familiar face-a chicken hawk of a man with dark shades and a caterpillar mustache looked back from most of the photos. Terence barely glanced at the leather sofa, the oak desk, or the big-screen television, afterthoughts in a room devoted to an obsession.
When Terence was nervous, he smiled and smiled, waiting for someone to come to his rescue before he said the wrong thing.
“Tom wanted to do this himself in his younger days,” said Mrs. Nash from the doorway. “He told me he felt deprived because his family was too well-off to run moonshine, so he used to volunteer to make runs for some of the poor farmers hereabouts.”
“Last American Hero,” he murmured, glancing at the wall of racing pictures.
Sarah Nash nodded. “Nearly fifty years ago now. And it wasn’t just Junior Johnson. That’s how most of that first bunch learned to drive. Outrunning the law. Then there were the little races-Wilkesboro, Hickory, Darlington. Your father raced in those a few times-against Ralph Earnhardt, to hear him tell it. Some of them worked in the mills or the furniture factory to support themselves. Raced instead of sleeping, sometimes. He took pride in that.”
“Did you know him back then?”
“No,” she said. “My husband owned the factory. But that was a long time ago. By the time Tom tried to make a go of racing for a living, NASCAR had become big business and it took serious money sponsors and a team of mechanics to keep you in a ride. He said he missed his chance. Always regretted it, I think.”
“But he still followed the sport, obviously.”
“Yes. Especially Dale.” She nodded toward the man with the number 3 car. “Sometimes I think Tom gave up fighting that cancer after Dale Earnhardt died at Daytona. Anyhow, the rest of the items in this house can wait until you’ve had time to decide what to do. The one thing you have to make up your mind about fairly quickly is this.” She walked to the desk and picked up a travel agent’s brochure. “Tom had already paid for this trip. And you need to decide what to do about that.”
Terence took the brochure. A Dale Earnhardt Memorial Tour. He scanned the contents. Ten days, beginning in August…visit Winston Cup Speedways…see the races at Bristol and Darlington…“My father planned to do this?”
She nodded. “Almost enough to stay alive for, in spite of the pain.”
He looked around the room, at all the familiar faces of NASCAR’s heroes looking out at him from signed photographs. The Allisons. The Pettys. Cale Yarborough. At the artifacts of a pastime he had watched only from a distance. Familiar faces whose images had also been taped to his walls at home-much to the consternation of his mother. Funny thing about DNA, he thought. You spend your whole life assuming that your absent parent is a total stranger with whom you have nothing in common, and then one day you walk into a room and discover another version of yourself.
“I wish I had known him,” said Terence.
“I wish you had, too. I think you two would have got along well.”