He liked people who exhibited class. He spoke contemptuously of upper-class women with whom he had slept on a first date, but was full of praise for a woman who had allowed him to kiss her on the cheek only after several dates. “She’s a lady,” he bragged to me. I think that redefining himself in terms of his idea of Charlottesville society was very important to Breece, even if that idea had no basis in the reality of the place. Yet there was also an antagonistic strain in him, a contempt for the conformity imposed on people there. We once attended a movie together, and during the intermission, when people crowded together in the small lobby, he felt closed in and shouted, “Move away! Make room! Let people through!” The crowd, mostly students, immediately scattered. Then Breece turned to me and laughed. “They’re clones!” he said. “They’re clones!”
He loved the outdoors—hunting and fishing and hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Several times he took me hiking with him. During these outings he gave me good advice: if ever I felt closed in by the insularity of Charlottesville, I should drive up to the Blue Ridge and walk around, and that would clear my head. He viewed this communion with nature as an absolute necessity, and during those trips into the mountains he seemed to be at peace.
He also loved to play pinball and pool and to drink beer. He was very competitive in these recreations. He almost always outdrank me, and when he was drunk he would be strangely silent. He sat stiff and erect during these times, his eyes focused on my face, his mind and imagination elsewhere. Sometimes he talked about old girlfriends in Milton who had hurt him. He related once his sorrow over the obligation imposed upon him—by a librarian in Milton—to burn and bury hundreds of old books. He liked old things. He talked about hunting in a relative’s attic for certain items that once belonged to his father. He recollected letters his father had written, to his mother and to him, in the years before his death.
Breece Pancake drank a great deal, and when he drank his imagination always returned to this same place. Within that private room, I think now, were stored all his old hurts and all his fantasies. When his imagination entered there, he became a melancholy man in great need of contact with other people. But because he was usually silent during these periods, his presence tended often to make other people nervous. “Breece always hangs around,” a mutual friend once said to me. He almost never asked for anything, and at the slightest show of someone else’s discomfort, Breece would excuse himself and compensate—within a few hours or the next day—with a gift. I don’t think there was anyone, in Charlottesville at least, who knew just what, if anything, Breece expected in return. This had the effect of making people feel inadequate and guilty.
Jim, “Bullshit” was one of B’s choice sayings—in fact he used to say he wanted his short stories entitled “Bullshit Artist.” Love his heart!
—Letter from Mrs. Helen Pancake, February 5, 1981
The mad director knows that freedom will not make you free,
And what’s this got to do with me?
I declare the war is over. It’s over. It’s over.
—“The War Is Over,” Phil Ochs
In the winter of 1977 I went to Boston and mentioned the work of several of my students, Breece included, to Phoebe-Lou Adams of The Atlantic. She asked to be sent some of his stories. I encouraged Breece to correspond with her, and very soon afterward several of his stories were purchased by the magazine. The day the letter of acceptance and check arrived, Breece came to my office and invited me to dinner. We went to Tiffany’s, our favorite seafood restaurant. Far from being pleased by his success, he seemed morose and nervous. He said he had wired flowers to his mother that day but had not yet heard from her. He drank a great deal. After dinner he said that he had a gift for me and that I would have to go home with him in order to claim it.
He lived in a small room on an estate just on the outskirts of Charlottesville. It was more a workroom than a house, and his work in progress was neatly laid out along a square of plywood that served as his desk. He went immediately to a closet and opened it. Inside were guns—rifles, shotguns, handguns—of every possible kind. He selected a twelve-gauge shotgun from one of the racks and gave it to me. He also gave me the bill of sale for it—purchased in West Virginia—and two shells. He then invited me to go squirrel hunting with him. I promised that I would. But since I had never owned a gun or wanted one, I asked a friend who lived on a farm to hold on to it for me.
Several months later, I found another gift from Breece in my campus mailbox. It was a trilobite, a fossil once highly valued by the Indians of Breece’s region. One of the stories he had sold The Atlantic had “Trilobites” as its title.
There was a mystery about Breece Pancake that I will not claim to have penetrated. This mystery is not racial; it had to do with that small room into which his imagination retreated from time to time. I always thought that the gifts he gave were a way of keeping people away from this very personal area, of focusing their attention on the persona he had created out of the raw materials of his best traits. I have very little evidence, beyond one small incident, to support this conclusion, but that one incident has caused me to believe it all the more.
The incident occurred one night during the summer of 1977. We had been seeing the films of Lina Wertmüller, and that evening Seven Beauties was being shown at a local theater. I telephoned Breece to see if he wanted to go. There was no answer. When I called later I let the telephone ring a number of times. Finally, a man answered and asked what I wanted. I asked for Breece. He said I had the wrong number, that Breece did not live there anymore. There was in the tone of his voice the abrupt authority of a policeman. He then held the line for a moment, and in the background I could hear quick and muffled conversation between Breece and several other people. Then the man came on the line again and asked my name and number. He said that Breece would call me back. But then Breece himself took the telephone and asked what it was I wanted. I mentioned the movie. He said he could not see it because he was going to West Virginia that same evening, but that he would get in touch with me when he returned. I left town myself soon after that, and did not see Breece again until early September. That was when he gave me the trilobite, and shortly afterward he made me promise that I would never tell anyone about the night I called him the summer before.
In the early summer of 1978 I left Charlottesville for New Haven, Connecticut. Carter was still President, but my ideas about the South had changed dramatically. I hoped that, with luck, I would never have to return to Charlottesville. I began making plans to resume my old life-style as a refugee from the South. But if life has any definition at all, it is the things that happen to us while we are making plans. In the early fall of that year I found out that I would be a father before spring arrived. Around that same time, a package from Breece, mailed from Charlottesville, arrived at my apartment in New Haven. I did not open it. I knew there would be a gift inside, but I also knew that renewing my connection with Breece would take my memories back to Charlottesville, and I wanted to be completely free of the place. The package from Breece remained unopened until the late evening of April 9, 1979.
On the evening of April 8 I had a dream that included Breece. I was trapped in a room by some menacing and sinister people and they were forcing me to eat things I did not want to eat. Breece was there, but I cannot remember the part he played in the drama. I woke up before dawn to find that my wife’s contractions had begun. The rest of the day was spent in the delivery room of the Yale–New Haven Hospital. In the late afternoon I went to the Yale campus and taught a class, which earned me one hundred dollars. Then I walked home, happy with the new direction my life had taken as the hardworking father of Rachel Alice McPherson. At my apartment, however, there was a telegram from John Casey, sent from Charlottesville. It informed me that on the previous night Breece Pancake had killed himself.
I called Charlottesville immediately and was told certain facts by Jane Casey, John’s wife: Breece had been drinking. He had, for some reason
, gone into the home of a family near his little house and had sat there, in the dark, until they returned. When he made a noise, either by getting up or by saying something, they became frightened and thought he was a burglar. Breece ran from the house to his own place. There, for some reason, he took one of his shotguns, put the barrel in his mouth, and blew his head off.
I have never believed this story.
I speculate that Breece had his own reasons for hiding in a neighbor’s house. They may have had to do with personal problems, or they may have had to do with emotional needs. Whatever their source, I am sure his reasons were extraordinary ones. As a writer, if I am to believe anything about Breece’s “suicide,” extract any lesson from it, that lesson has to do with the kind of life he led. I believe that Breece had had a few drinks and found himself locked inside that secret room he carried around with him. I believe that he had scattered so many gifts around Charlottesville, had given signals to so many people, that he felt it would be all right to ask someone to help him during what must have been a very hard night. I believe that he was so inarticulate about his own feelings, so frightened that he would be rejected, that he panicked when the couple came home. Whatever the cause of his desperation, he could not express it from within the persona he had created. How does one say he expects things from people after having cultivated the persona of the Provider? How does one explain the contents of a secret room to people who, though physically close, still remain strangers? How does one reconcile a lifetime of indiscriminate giving with the need for a gesture as simple as a kind word, an instant of basic human understanding? And what if this need is so bathed in bitterness and disappointment that the attempt itself, at a very critical time, seems hopeless except through the written word? In such a situation, a man might look at his typewriter, and then at the rest of the world, and just give up the struggle. Phil Ochs hanged himself. Breece Pancake shot himself. The rest of us, if we are lucky enough to be incapable of imagining such extreme acts of defiance, manage to endure.
Very late in the evening of the day I got the news, I opened the package that Breece had sent me the previous fall. It contained some old photographs of railroad workers, some poetry, and a letter. The first line of the letter told the entire story: “You are under no obligation to answer this.” But he had hoped anyway that I would. The pictures were from his family collection, given to him in trust by his Aunt Julia, who was soon to die. He wanted to give them away rather than sell them. The poetry represented an extension of this same impulse. “Also enclosed are some poems you might find interesting—again, I’m not asking for response, just sharing news. I went to Staunton Correctional Institution (the pen) and stumbled onto this guy [an inmate]. Not knowing anything about poetry, I gave [his poems] to [the poet] Greg Orr…. He liked them and is doing what he can to help find the proper market thru CODA. Anyway, what was that Latin phrase about the Obligation of Nobility? If it’s what I think it means—helping folks—it isn’t bad as a duty or a calling. We’d both better get back to work.”
Looked at in purely sociological terms, Breece Pancake’s work was helping people, giving to people. I think that part of him, the part of West Virginia that borders on Virginia, wanted to affirm those old, aristocratic, eighteenth-century values that no longer had a context, especially in Charlottesville. He was working toward becoming an aristocrat in blue jeans. But he was from the southern lower-middle class, his accent had certain associations, he could find no conventional way to express his own needs, and while he was alive there were many of us who could not understand who or what he was.
Several weeks later, I sent the fossil he had given me, the trilobite, to the girl who had allowed him to kiss her cheek after several dates. She had left Charlottesville, and was then working in New York.
TRILOBITES
I OPEN the truck’s door, step onto the brick side street. I look at Company Hill again, all sort of worn down and round. A long time ago it was real craggy and stood like an island in the Teays River. It took over a million years to make that smooth little hill, and I’ve looked all over it for trilobites. I think how it has always been there and always will be, at least for as long as it matters. The air is smoky with summertime. A bunch of starlings swim over me. I was born in this country and I have never very much wanted to leave. I remember Pop’s dead eyes looking at me. They were real dry, and that took something out of me. I shut the door, head for the café.
I see a concrete patch in the street. It’s shaped like Florida, and I recollect what I wrote in Ginny’s yearbook: “We will live on mangoes and love.” And she up and left without me—two years she’s been down there without me. She sends me postcards with alligator wrestlers and flamingos on the front. She never asks me any questions. I feel like a real fool for what I wrote, and go into the café.
The place is empty, and I rest in the cooled air. Tinker Reilly’s little sister pours my coffee. She has good hips. They are kind of like Ginny’s and they slope in nice curves to her legs. Hips and legs like that climb steps into airplanes. She goes to the counter end and scoffs down the rest of her sundae. I smile at her, but she’s jailbait. Jailbait and black snakes are two things I won’t touch with a window pole. One time I used an old black snake for a bullwhip, snapped the sucker’s head off, and Pop beat hell out of me with it. I think how Pop could make me pretty mad sometimes. I grin.
I think about last night when Ginny called. Her old man drove her down from the airport in Charleston. She was already bored. Can we get together? Sure. Maybe do some brew? Sure. Same old Colly. Same old Ginny. She talked through her beak. I wanted to tell her Pop had died and Mom was on the warpath to sell the farm, but Ginny was talking through her beak. It gave me the creeps.
Just like the cups give me the creeps. I look at the cups hanging on pegs by the storefront. They’re decal-named and covered with grease and dust. There’s four of them, and one is Pop’s, but that isn’t what gives me the creeps. The cleanest one is Jim’s. It’s clean because he still uses it, but it hangs there with the rest. Through the window, I can see him crossing the street. His joints are cemented with arthritis. I think of how long it’ll be before I croak, but Jim is old, and it gives me the creeps to see his cup hanging up there. I go to the door to help him in.
He says, “Tell the truth, now,” and his old paw pinches my arm.
I say, “Can’t do her.” I help him to his stool.
I pull this globby rock from my pocket and slap it on the counter in front of Jim. He turns it with his drawn hand, examines it. “Gastropod,” he says. “Probably Permian. You buy again.” I can’t win with him. He knows them all.
“I still can’t find a trilobite,” I say.
“There are a few,” he says. “Not many. Most of the outcrops around here are too late for them.”
The girl brings Jim’s coffee in his cup, and we watch her pump back to the kitchen. Good hips.
“You see that?” He jerks his head toward her.
I say, “Moundsville Molasses.” I can spot jailbait by a mile.
“Hell, girl’s age never stopped your dad and me in Michigan.”
“Tell the truth.”
“Sure. You got to time it so you nail the first freight out when your pants are up.”
I look at the windowsill. It is speckled with the crisp skeletons of flies. “Why’d you and Pop leave Michigan?”
The crinkles around Jim’s eyes go slack. He says, “The war,” and sips his coffee.
I say, “He never made it back there.”
“Me either—always wanted to—there or Germany—just to look around.”
“Yeah, he promised to show me where you all buried that silverware and stuff during the war.”
He says, “On the Elbe. Probably plowed up by now.”
My eye socket reflects in my coffee, steam curls around my face, and I feel a headache coming on. I look up to ask Tinker’s sister for an aspirin, but she is giggling in the kitchen.
“That’s where h
e got that wound,” Jim says. “Got it on the Elbe. He was out a long time. Cold, Jesus, it was cold. I had him for dead, but he came to. Says, ‘I been all over the world’; says, ‘China’s so pretty, Jim.’ ”
“Dreaming?”
“I don’t know. I quit worrying about that stuff years ago.”
Tinker’s sister comes up with her coffeepot to make us for a tip. I ask her for an aspirin and see she’s got a pimple on her collarbone. I don’t remember seeing pictures of China. I watch little sister’s hips.
“Trent still wanting your place for that housing project?”
“Sure,” I say. “Mom’ll probably sell it, too. I can’t run the place like Pop did. Cane looks bad as hell.” I drain off my cup. I’m tired of talking about the farm. “Going out with Ginny tonight,” I say.
“Give her that for me,” he says. He takes a poke at my whang. I don’t like it when he talks about her like that. He sees I don’t like it, and his grin slips. “Found a lot of gas for her old man. One hell of a guy before his wife pulled out.”
I wheel on my stool, clap his weak old shoulder. I think of Pop, and try to joke. “You stink so bad the undertaker’s following you.”
He laughs. “You were the ugliest baby ever born, you know that?”
I grin, and start out the door. I can hear him shout to little sister: “Come on over here, honey, I got a joke for you.”
The sky has a film. Its heat burns through the salt on my skin, draws it tight. I start the truck, drive west along the highway built on the dry bed of the Teays. There’s wide bottoms, and the hills on either side have yellowy billows the sun can’t burn off. I pass an iron sign put up by the WPA: “Surveyed by George Washington, the Teays River Pike.” I see fields and cattle where buildings stand, picture them from some long-off time.
Stories of Breece D'J Pancake Page 2
