“That sounds like fun.”
“It has its moments. But I didn’t bargain for a racing tour. What about you? Are you from-” Bekasu cast about for a city associated with racing. “Umm-Indianapolis?”
“Rural New Hampshire. Our town is just north of Concord, about eight miles from the New Hampshire International Speedway. It’s called Canterbury, so you can imagine my delight when I was posted there, but, much to my chagrin, I have since discovered that Thomas Becket takes a backseat to Ricky Craven there. I keep trying, though. Slide shows, lectures at church functions. To no avail-racing fever is rampant. Still, the drivers are very good about coming to the Children’s Home and signing photos for the kids. One of them played Santa Claus for us a few years ago, they tell me. I’m new to the parish, so I’m still getting used to all this. I didn’t really know much about Earnhardt until the day he died.”
“I think we’re being rounded up,” said Bekasu, glancing back at the cluster of travelers. “And here comes Matthew with his drink.”
Cayle appeared beside them. “You’d better come on, Bekasu. Justine is asking whether they have a P.A. system on the bus, and I’m pretty sure she’s going to try to sing Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Earnhardt…”
Bill Knight laughed. “Must be a Southern hymn,” he said. “Not in our hymnal in New Hampshire.”
“Excuse me while I go and rain on my sister’s parade,” said Bekasu.
Chapter IV
February 18, 2001
Some time that week, he could not remember exactly when, Bill Knight had seen a shooting star flame out against New England’s winter sky. He recalled thinking, as he always did at such a time, The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes. You could hardly call it a premonition. Still, he never quite forgot it.
That Sunday morning several big-screen TV owners in his congregation had invited him to Daytona Parties, the 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.