“I’ll get my coat, Bob. Are they still on the highway or are we going to the hospital?”
Henderson shook his head. “The hospital is in Florida,” he said. “But I thought I’d ask if you had any prayers for the dead or Bible verses. Something like that.”
Bob Henderson followed him into the study and perched on the edge of the leather sofa wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. He nodded toward the dark screen of the television. “Didn’t you see the race?”
“I did,” said Knight. He remembered that he had turned off the set when he went to fix his supper. “The Daytona 500, you mean?” Realization dawned. “I’m sorry to hear it, Bob,” he said. “Truly sorry. Though I can’t say I’m surprised. When I saw that car go sailing into the air, I thought, That poor fellow will be lucky to survive that. I’m so sorry to hear that he didn’t.”
Henderson took a gulp of air and stared at him with a puzzled frown. “Sailing through…through the air?…Are you talking about Tony Stewart on lap 26?” he asked.
“Was that the Home Depot car? Yes. A terrible wreck. Such a pity.”
Henderson shook his head. “Tony Stewart is fine, Bill. It’s Dale that got killed.”
“Dale-Earnhardt?-but-wasn’t he in that little wreck in the last few seconds of the race? Are you sure?”
By now, Henderson had the box of tissues in his lap. He was taking deep breaths and dabbing his eyes. “A crowd of us were over at the sports bar watching the race on the big screen. They just announced it over the TV,” he said. “But I knew in my heart already. Knew it was bad.”
“But that first wreck?” Knight was still trying to follow the thread of the conversation. Surely that first multicar pileup…
Henderson managed a damp smile. “I forgot that you were new to racing,” he said. “Flying through the air looks scary, but the force is being dissipated by the rolls before the car lands or hits anything. So Stewart was fine. But Dale went straight at the wall at 180 miles an hour-more maybe, because there was another car pushing him forward as well. I knew it was bad. He didn’t get out, and then I caught sight of a blue tarp being spread over the car, and I knew.”
“I’m so sorry,” Knight said again. “Er-you weren’t a relative of his?”
“No,” said Henderson. “But he was family, all the same.”
“Well, is there anything I can do?” Knight was surprised to see that a driver who wasn’t from here and hadn’t died here had elicited such a powerful response in the otherwise steady and sensible lawyer. He wondered if many people locally would react so strongly-and what was he to do to help them through their pain?
“That sports bar, where I was watching the race,” said Henderson. “Two guys were in there-I didn’t know them. Truckers, maybe. They’d had a few beers too many and they were arguing about something over by the pool table, getting louder and louder. It looked like they were about ten seconds away from a real brawl and I was about to call the police on my cell phone. Just then, though, the special bulletin came on the television announcing that Dale was dead and those two burly guys just froze in mid fight. They stood there for a minute staring at the screen like a couple of pole-axed steers, neither one moving a muscle. Then they started sniffling and finally they just came over and sat down in front of the screen, side by side. One of them kept patting the other’s shoulder and saying, ‘I know, man. I know.’”
Knight stared at him in silence, turning it over in his mind. “I see,” he said. People in the area would be grieving. All those people with number threes on the back windows of their cars. The waitress in the Earnhardt cap. This was the Speedway’s parish as much as it was his. “I guess we’d better go, then,” he said. “Can you show me the quickest way out there?” God knew what he was going to say when he got there. At least Bill hoped He did.
Nearly eight o’clock on a cold Sunday night, and the residential streets of tiny Canterbury were all but deserted. The Interstate would have its usual tide of southbound weekend traffic, but they weren’t headed that way. “I know a shortcut,” Bob Henderson had told him. They drove through dark streets in silence for a few blocks, following the road that skirted the lake. He shivered, wondering how long it would take the heater turned up full blast to warm the interior of the car.
As he drove, Bill wondered if this intense grief over the passing of strangers was a phenomenon of modern times. Did people mourn the death of, say, a Lincoln or a Mozart with such passionate intensity, or did the immediacy of television coverage magnify people’s emotions these days? It is one thing to hear weeks later of the death of some beloved figure, but to see it happen, to follow the events as they unfolded hour by hour, surely this heightened the feelings for many. He had been at his last church, back in Maryland, when Princess Diana died, and he had been surprised at the number of women who reacted as if they had lost a close relative. Of course, he had also seen people who had lost a close relative and hardly batted an eye over the loss. It was hard to tell these days who was close to whom.
But what was it about some people-no more beautiful or talented than a hundred others-that touched a chord in humanity that elevated one person’s death to the level of tragedy? Some quality of glamor or drama that made strangers weep for them. The death of Princess Diana had set off a spontaneous wave of worldwide grief, while scarcely a week later the death of Mother Teresa in India had elicited little more than a collective shrug. Which proved, he supposed, that goodness had nothing to do with it. Why Elvis and not John Lennon? He would have said that Lennon was the more spiritual, the more universal, figure. But it was Elvis who had received the secular canonization. Why after a quarter of a century did weeping strangers still flock to Graceland to mourn the passing of a man they never knew? And now-Dale Earnhardt? His nickname had been the Intimidator. Could there be a more unlikely angel?
Knight felt that he had been given an opportunity to watch something unfold and he hoped that he would be given the wisdom to make sense of it.
“I didn’t know you were a racing fan, Bob.” As soon as he said it, Knight realized that this was an unworthy thought. Just because Bob Henderson was a lawyer, he had assumed him to be somehow above the thrall of stock car racing, but he ought to know by now that you couldn’t pigeonhole people by your own biases.
“Because I don’t drive a pick-up truck with decals on the back window, you mean?”
“I’m new to all this,” said Knight by way of apology.
“Well, you’re a couple of decades behind the times with that image, but, yeah, I was as big a fan of Earnhardt as anybody. He was one of a kind. I have a signed picture of him in my office. You’d be surprised what an icebreaker that is with clients sometimes. Gives us something in common.”
“But why Earnhardt in particular?”
“Because he didn’t take any crap from anybody. It was his way or no way. I think he would have made a hell of a lawyer. I think he could have gotten the devil himself off with a reprimand.”
In spite of the seriousness of the man’s tone, Bill Knight smiled. “I thought that was Daniel Webster,” he said.
“I see you’ve been reading up on New England’s folklore,” said Henderson. “It’s hard to explain the attraction of Dale Earnhardt. You don’t follow racing, so you wouldn’t get it. When I said he’d have made a hell of a lawyer, I didn’t mean that Earnhardt was a silver-tongued orator. He wasn’t. But without looks or pedigree or education, he managed to make himself a celebrity and a multimillionaire-in a profession that the opinion-makers sneer at. That’s quite an achievement. He just wouldn’t give up. It was that certainty that he was right and that nobody else’s opinion was worth a damn. I’ve always thought saints must be like that.”