Brickyard weekend, and Daddy is down from Wilkesboro with the cooler and the pot and a head full of things nobody has asked him about yet. The race is on by early afternoon. He settles in like a man who has somewhere to be and it turns out to be right here.
He never ran Indianapolis. Bullrings were his whole career, North Wilkesboro and Hickory and the little tracks that fit inside your headlights. The big cathedral up in Indiana was somewhere other men went. But ask him about it and you will learn something.
They laid that track in brick in 1909. Three and some million of them, hauled in and set on their sides in sand after the first surface tore the cars apart. That is where the name comes from. The Brickyard, like it was a place that made brick instead of a place that broke hearts.
Most of them are still there. In 1961 they poured asphalt over the whole thing and left one yard of the old brick showing at the start-finish line. That is all of it you can see now. One yard out of all those millions, and the men who win still climb down and kiss it.
Daddy thinks that is about right. A whole speedway of history paved smooth, and one honest strip they could not bring themselves to cover. He would never kiss it himself. He will tell you the kissing started with the stock-car crowd and not his people, and he is correct, and a little smug about being correct.
But I watched him watch that yard of brick come up on the screen, and I know what he was doing. He was thinking about his own years, the ones that got paved over. Nobody keeps the box score from a 1989 late model at Hickory. It is asphalt now, all of it, except the strip that still shows to the handful of people who were standing there.
Mama read her book through most of it. The pot did its slow work on the burner and asked nothing of anybody. Somebody up in Indiana kissed a hundred-year-old row of brick on national television, and down here my father nodded at it like an old friend he does not have to introduce.
That is the thing about history. Most of it goes under. You just have to know which yard to leave showing.