Bill Knight glanced down at the litany of tributes. “I gathered as much,” he said.
“The brochure says it costs sixty bucks for three lines of a message, and Justine said she’d buy me a brick and send in the form for me-is that okay?”
“It’s very kind of her,” said Bill.
“I just told him he has to promise to come back some day and visit his brick,” said Justine.
“So we’re gonna sit down over there and work on what we want it to say,” said Matthew. “You have to count every letter.”
Bill Knight had thought of asking Cayle to elaborate on her experience of seeing the late Dale Earnhardt, but she had walked away. He didn’t believe her, of course. He wondered if he would have believed someone who had claimed to see Thomas Becket in Canterbury in, say, 1171.
It had been a long time since he’d had the kind of faith that kindles saints. He had to think all the way back to childhood to find that reserve of belief. Of sitting beside his mother in church-so small that his feet didn’t even touch the floor yet-and while all the congregation had their heads bowed in prayer, Bill would try to peek out of the slits of his eyelids, hoping-but also dreading-to catch a glimpse of an angel on the sill under the big stained glass window of Jesus in Gethsemane. He had really believed that the angel hovered there during services, but he knew that the sight would be a terrible one. No sappy Valentine cherubs for him. Bill’s dad had been a minister, too, so he knew his theology, even as a kid. Angels were soldiers. They had kicked the devil’s butt out of heaven, so they were not to be trifled with. As a kid, you didn’t know what might be true and what wasn’t. There were rules for everything. Would stepping on a crack break your mother’s back? What if you sneezed and nobody said bless you? What if you died without saying your prayers? There was a belief that was more terror than faith, and he was glad to have outgrown it. How much of the belief in the hereafter was just the fear of letting go or the fear of nothingness?
Before he could consider the implications of selective faith, he saw that Harley was coming toward him, carrying the wreath box. “I thought this would be the best place to leave the Talladega wreath,” he said. “And maybe since this is a memorial park, you ought to be the one to say a few words over it.”
“Of course.” Bill Knight had been dreading this moment, wondering what he could say that would satisfy his traveling companions without trespassing on their beliefs. He took a deep breath and tried to compose his thoughts while the others gathered on the outer path around the bronze plaque dedicated to Dale Earnhardt. What did I say to that congregation of weeping women when Princess Diana died? he wondered.
The wreath this time was a hubcap-sized circle of white silk lilies and eucalyptus. By this time, thought Bill, the florist must have been getting giddy from doing a succession of tribute wreaths to Dale Earnhardt. A black ribbon stretched diagonally across the lilies said in white letters, “#3: Forever In Our Hearts.”
Bill looked out at the peaceful expanse of green lawn with its red brick walkway bright in the afternoon sun. “We’d like to think heaven is like this,” he began, letting the place speak to him. “A familiar place filled with the colors and shapes with which we feel most comfortable. Blue sky. Grass. Trees. A companionable cat.” He smiled a little as he nodded toward the ginger tom, still sprawled on the bench in hopes of more attention from the visitors. “Every now and then somebody will even write a hymn about a heaven for country singers or movie stars. There may be a song like that about NASCAR, for all I know.”
“Tracks of Gold,” murmured several voices in unison.
Bill sighed. It figured. “I don’t know what heaven will be like,” he went on. “The Bible offers a number of images, which, since we are human, may be beyond our comprehension. I do know that the idea of having an eternal place for heroes is a very old tradition throughout human civilization. The Greeks thought that ordinary people crossed the river Lethe and forgot about their earthly existence, but that heroes went on to the Elysian fields with their earthly personalities intact. The Norsemen envisioned the Valkyries swooping down to the battlefield to take fallen heroes back to Valhalla for an eternity of mead and feasting with their comrades. I’m not sure what kind of afterlife I can envision for race car drivers. To me it seems a contradictory proposition at best: trying to accommodate many different people’s dreams of heaven when some of those ideas conflict with others. I think of all the fans who yearn to shake Dale Earnhardt’s hand when they get to heaven, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be much of a heaven to Earnhardt himself if he had to stand around all the time glad-handing strangers. I suppose that if God has set aside a part of His kingdom for heroes, it will be a wonderful place. What that place would be like-well, I’ll leave that to God, because He’s wiser than we are, and I’m sure He’ll manage to sort out all the contradictions. The one thing I am sure of is that if there is a place up there reserved for heroes, Dale Earnhardt is bound to be in it. Let us thank God for the gift of him, and rejoice in his translation to…” What was the phrase they’d used? “…to Tracks of Gold.”
After the visit to the memorial garden in Talladega, Ratty backtracked the ten miles or so to the Interstate, and deposited the pilgrims in a hotel at the Oxford exit on I-20 just east of the Speedway turnoff. In the waning hours of daylight about half the group had gathered at the hotel’s tiny outdoor pool, although only Shane and Matthew were swimming.
Terence Palmer sat at a white metal table some distance from the rest of the group, talking into his cell phone. “No, Mother, I’m fine, really. Lovely weather. A bit warm, but that’s only to be expected this far south. You sent me a package? No, it didn’t reach me before I left New York. What was it? Oh, a book about an Irish princess. Ah, your book group loved it. Well, I don’t have much time for reading this week anyhow. No, Mother, no one in the group chews tobacco or wears overalls. By the way, have you ever heard of Nash Furniture? Really? On a waiting list for a china cabinet? Really? Oh, no reason. Well, I have to go, Mother. Love to Merrill. Bye.”
He closed the cell phone with a sigh.
Chapter XVII
Atlanta Motor Speedway
The journey from Talladega to the Atlanta Motor Speedway would take only a couple of hours, mostly backtracking I-20 to Atlanta and then south on I-75 to Henry County. Since they had passed this way the day before, there was a monotony to the landscape now, and Karen McKee took the paperback out of her purse, because she felt like reading another chapter in the novel about the princess in ancient Ireland. I am reading a book on my honeymoon, she thought. How weird is that. If anybody had told her six months ago that a few days after the wedding she would want to read a book or write a postcard to her mother instead of hanging on Shane’s every word, or holding his hand hour after hour, she would have laughed in disbelief. But it was true. It wasn’t that she loved Shane any less. She couldn’t imagine life without him. It was just that having got the wedding out of the way, there were new things to worry about, and reading was a good way to keep from worrying about them for a while, as long as she ignored the fact that her bookmark was an acceptance letter from East Tennessee State University.
Well, at least they’d be in Florida tomorrow. People actually did go to Florida on honeymoons. Maybe there’d be time to spend a couple of hours on the beach. She wished she could talk Shane out of visiting Daytona-skip the Speedway and come to the beach instead. That wasn’t going to happen, though. Shane had come to pay his respects to Dale, and in his view the holy of holies was the track where he’d died. There was no getting away from it. Maybe it would be all right. So far Harley and the other passengers had been telling stories about races that happened ages ago. They’d hardly said a word about NASCAR-A.D. After Dale. Maybe it wouldn’t come up. She knew she should sit Shane down and talk to him about it. Time he knew. What kind of a world was it when you had to choose between lying to somebody you loved or breaking their heart? Dale had been dead eighteen months now. Time to move on. Start watching racing again, instead of watching old videos of Dale’s old races when the new season was on television. Why couldn’t he just pick a new driver to root for-Matt Kenseth maybe, or Jamie McMurray, who looked like Hollywood’s idea of a really nice guy. She had a feeling that they would never get to the future until Shane let go of the past.