Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

by Pancake, Breece D'J

  He remembers standing in that creek with Old Gerlock. He almost knew again the cool sweep against his knees, felt the hand cover his face, then the dipping into a sudden rush. Only that once he prayed; asked to stay, always live here. Sheila’s arms go around his waist.

  The ground is thick with fruit: some ripe, some rotten, some blown by yellow jackets. Ottie pulls a knotted apple, bites into dry meal. Even the pulp has no taste, and he sees the trees need pruning. He tosses the fruit away. “We used to cut props for the branches.”

  “Mom worked me all week making apple butter, but it’s been a while.” She snorts a small laugh, holds the back of her hand to her forehead, mocks: “Oh, dear. What shall we do in the dry?”

  “Blow away, I guess.”

  “Yes,” she says, pulls on him. “Asses to asses and bust to bust.”

  Ottie feels too close, lets go, and watches as she picks up something, holds it out to him. It is the pale blue half of a robin’s egg left from the spring.

  He says, “They throw it out if it don’t hatch.”

  “You told me that before. I thought you saved such stuff.”

  He thinks of the low table in his room, the arrowheads, the plaster angel. Again he sees the buck-skull sailing, turning through the branches, shattering. His smile falls away. “No, I quit saving stuff.”

  She crushes the shell in her palm, makes it blue-white paste. “I ain’t never been loved.”

  “Bullshit, Sheila. Buster loved you.”

  “Bus?” Her hand shades her eyes against the last sun.

  “He thought we was making it down at the creek.”

  She clasps her hands around his neck, smiles again. “I ain’t never even had a man, but I wanted both of you. Didn’t you ever want to?”

  He shakes his head.

  She squints, and her hands slip from around his neck; she backs away, turns, hurries toward the house. Watching her go through timothy and trees, he hopes she will not look back, and hopes she will be lost to him in the crowded yard.

  He sits against the cemetery’s fence, scratches up dead moss with a stick, and feels the back of his shirt ripping on ribbed bars. The sun makes an ivory scar in the sky behind the hills; from the creek, a killdeer cries flying from marshes into the line of sun. A blue-brown light creeps up from the ground, and the leaves make patterns against a shadowy sky.

  One by one, he picks up the fallen leaves nearest him, gathers them to himself with the years of hurried life. Feeling the crinkled edges of a scorched leaf, he sees, in the last of light, colors still splotching its skin. Everything is so far away, so buried, and he knows more than any buck-skull turned them all.

  He walks the darkening fields alone. Heat lightning flashes, and he hears the slow drone of locusts cooling in the trees. He wonders how many deer have died in all the winter snows, how many mice have become the dirt. Walking the fencerow, Ottie knows Bus owns this farm, and has sealed it off in time where he can live it every day. And Ottie sees them together a last time: a dying dog and two useless children, forever ghosts, they can neither scream nor play; even dead, they fight over bones.

  The cars leave the dusky yard, bound for cities and years far into the night. He stands until the farmhouse lights go out, then walks back through the yard, up to the porch.

  “You’ll be heading out tomorrow?” Old Gerlock sits hidden away in the shadows.

  “Yessir.”

  “Stick around and help to strip tobacco.”

  Ottie grins. “Cutting knife don’t fit my hand.”

  “Can’t you tell the truth about Buster?”

  He shrugs, rubs his hand across his face, but smells no salve or powder; only the dust of leaves. “I reckon Bus was trying to… I guess it was accidental.”

  The old man goes to the door, holds it open, then spits over the banister. “God forgive my wore-out soul, but I hope you burn in hell.” Old Gerlock goes inside.

  Ottie sits in the swing, thinks of the bars on his window at Pruntytown, and laughs. They never needed bars. They had always been safe from him. Do what in the dry

  His voice is smoky: “Blow away.”

  Rustling metal leaves of tintypes, he takes a cardboard picture from the shoe box, lights it, sees the photograph crinkle into orange, blue, and purple against the night. He lights another, makes flames eat the long-forgotten faces. Blow away The third he wants to hold to the wasp nest, wants to make singed insects fall through colored flames, wants to see worms bubble and the rough edges of their paper nest smolder. It is not his way of doing. He shakes his head, waves out the fire. He stands until the last spark glows, rises, burns out.

  “Blow away.”

  Inside is close, and it sucks the air from him. The scent of chicken seeps into the walls and already it is becoming the smell of old times. He takes the stairs quietly, sees no light under Old Gerlock’s door, but a film clings to his skin the closer he comes to the landing.

  Going down the hall to his old room, he passes Sheila’s door, looks up. He sees her standing naked in the doorway; gray, waiting. He stops, waiting; he listens to her breathing. Slowly, he moves up his hand, touches her face, and he feels the sweat of her cheek mingle with the dust of his palm. He knows her better, and he knows her way of doing.

  He steps into his room, strips off the white rag, and leaves it lying on the bed. He packs his grip with a razor, soap, and comb, all things he brought. Pulling on a clean T-shirt, he zips shut the grip and carries it into the hall. Sheila’s door is closed, and Ottie knows what turned them all will spin them forever.

  Outside, the yard is empty, dark. He climbs the ladder into his semi’s cab and tries to remember a wide spot by the mill, a place to pull over. The ignition bell rings out, and gears—ten through forward—strain to whine into another night, an awful noise.

  FIRST DAY OF WINTER

  HOLLIS sat by his window all night, staring at his ghost in glass, looking for some way out of the tomb Jake had built for him. Now he could see the first blue blur of morning growing behind bare tree branches, and beyond them the shadows of the farm. The work was done: silos stood full of corn, hay bales rose to the barn’s roof, and the slaughter stock had gone to market; it was work done for figures in a bank, for debts, and now corn stubble leaned in the fields among stacks of fodder laced with frost. He could hear his parents shuffling about downstairs for their breakfast; his old mother giggling, her mind half gone from blood too thick in her veins; his father, now blind and coughing. He had told Jake on the phone, they’ll live a long time. Jake would not have his parents put away like furniture. Hollis asked Jake to take them into his parsonage at Harpers Ferry; the farm was failing. Jake would not have room: the parsonage was too modest, his family too large.

  He went downstairs for coffee. His mother would not bathe, and the warm kitchen smelled of her as she sat eating oatmeal with his father. The lids of the blind man’s eyes hung half closed and he had not combed his hair; it stuck out in tufts where he had slept on it.

  “Cer’al’s hot.” His mother giggled, and the crescent of her mouth made a weak grin. “Your daddy’s burnt his mouth.”

  “I ain’t hungry.” Hollis poured his coffee, leaned against the sink.

  The old man turned his head a little toward Hollis, bits of meal stuck to his lips. “You going hunting like I asked?”

  Hollis sat his cup in the sink. “Thought I’d work on the car. We can’t be with no way to town all winter because you like squirrel meat.”

  The old man ate his cereal, staring ahead. “Won’t be Thanksgiving without wild game.”

  “Won’t be Thanksgiving till Jake and Milly gets here,” she said.

  “They said last night they ain’t coming down,” his father said, and the old woman looked at Hollis dumbly.

  “I got to work on the car,” Hollis said, and went toward the door.

  “Car’s been setting too long,” the old woman yelled. “You be careful of snakes.”

  Outside, the air was sharp, and when
the wind whipped against his face, he gasped. The sky was low, gray, and the few Angus he had kept from market huddled near the feeder beside the barn. He threw them some hay, brought his tool chest from the barn, began to work on the car. He got in to see if it would start, ground it. As he sat behind the wheel, door open, he watched his father come down from the porch with his cane. The engine’s grinding echoed through the hollows, across the hills.

  Hollis’s knuckles were bloody, scraped under the raised hood, and they stung as he turned the key harder, gripped the wheel. His father’s cane tapped through the frosty yard, the still of December, and came closer to Hollis. The blind man’s mouth was shut against the cold, the dark air so close to his face, and Hollis stopped trying the engine, got out.

  “You can tell she’s locking up.” The blind man faced him.

  “This ain’t a tractor.” Hollis walked around, looked under the hood, saw the hairline crack along one side of the engine block.

  His father’s cane struck the fender, and he stood still and straight beside his son. Hollis saw his father’s fingers creeping along the grille, holding him steady. “She sounded locked up,” he said again.

  “Yeah.” Hollis edged the man aside, shut the hood. He didn’t have the tools to pull the engine, and had no engine to replace it. “Maybe Jake’ll loan you the money for a new car.”

  “No,” the old man said. “We’ll get by without bothering Jake.”

  “Put it on the cuff? Do you think the bank would give us another nickel?”

  “Jake has too much to worry with as it is.”

  “I asked him to take you-all last night.”

  “Why?”

  “I asked him and Molly to take you in and he said no. I’m stuck here. I can’t make my own way for fighting a losing battle with this damn farm.”

  “Farming’s making your way.”

  “Hell.”

  “Everybody’s trying for something better anymore. When everybody’s going one way, it’s time to turn back.” He rationalized in five directions.

  In the faded morning the land looked scarred. The first snows had already come, melted, and sealed the hills with a heavy frost the sun could not soften. Cold winds had peeled away the last clinging oak leaves, left the hills a quiet gray-brown that sloped into the valley on either side.

  He saw the old man’s hair bending in the wind.

  “Come on inside, you’ll catch cold.”

  “You going hunting like I asked?”

  “I’ll go hunting.”

  As he crossed the last pasture heading up toward the ridges, Hollis felt a sinking in his gut, a cold hunger. In the dry grass he shuffled toward the fence line to the rising ridges and high stand of oaks. He stopped at the fence, looked down on the valley and the farm. A little at a time Jake had sloughed everything to him, and now that his brother was away, just for this small moment, Hollis was happier.

  He laid down his rifle, crossed the fence, and took it up again. He headed deeper into the oaks, until they began to mingle with the yellow pine along the ridge. He saw no squirrels, but sat on a stump with oaks on all sides, their roots and bottom trunk brushed clean by squirrel tails. He grew numb with waiting, with cold; taking a nickel from his pocket, he raked it against the notched stock, made the sound of a squirrel cutting nuts. Soon enough he saw a flick of tail, the squirrel’s body hidden by the tree trunk. He tossed a small rock beyond the tree, sent it stirring and rattling the leaves, watched as the squirrel darted to the broadside trunk. Slowly, he raised his rifle, and when the echoes cleared from the far hills across the valley, the squirrel fell. He field-dressed it, and the blood dried cold on his hands; then he moved up the ridge toward the pine thicket, stopping every five minutes to kill until the killing drained him and his game bag weighed heavily at his side.

  He rested against a tree near the thicket, stared into its dark wavings of needles and branches; there, almost blended with the red needles, lay a fox. He watched it without moving, and thought of Jake, hidden, waiting for him to break, to move. In a fit of meanness, he snapped his rifle to his shoulder and fired. When he looked again the fox was gone, and he caught a glimpse of its white-tipped tail drifting through the piny darkness.

  Hollis dropped the gun, sat against the tree, and, when the wind snatched at his throat, fumbled to button his collar. He felt old and tired, worn and beaten, and he thought of what Jake had said about the state home he wanted the folks in. They starve them, he said, and they mistreat them, and in the end they smother them. For a moment, Hollis wondered what it would be like to smother them, and in the same moment caught himself, laughing; but a darkness had covered him, and he pulled his gloves on to hide the blood on his hands. He stumbled up, and, grabbing his gun, ran between trees to the clearing nearest the fence, and when he crossed into the pasture felt again a light mist of sweat on his face, a calming.

  He crossed the fields and fences, slogged across the bottoms and up to the house. Inside, his mother sat in the tiny back room, listening, with the husband, to quiet music on the radio. She came to Hollis, and he saw in her wide-set eyes a fear and knowledge—and he knew she could see what insanity had driven him to.

  He handed her the squirrels, dressed and skinned, from his game bag, and went to wash his hands. From the corner of his eye, he saw her, saw as she dropped the squirrels into soaking brine, saw her hand go up to her mouth, saw her lick a trace of blood and smile.

  Sitting at the table, he looked down at his empty plate, waited for the grace, and when it was said, passed the plate of squirrel. He had taken for himself only the forequarters and liver, leaving the meaty hinds and saddles.

  “Letter come from Jake.” The ol man held a hindquarter, gnawed at it.

  “And pitchers of them.” His mother got up, came back with a handful of snapshots.

  “He done fine for himself. Lookee at the pretty church and the children,” she said.

  The church was yellow brick and low, stained windows. In the picture Jake stood holding a baby, his baby girl, named after their mother. His face was squinted with a smile. The old woman poked a withered finger into the picture. “That’s my Mae Ellen,” she said. “That’s my favorite.”

  “Shouldn’t have favorites.” His father laid down the bones.

  “Well, you got to face that he done fine for himself.”

  Hollis looked out the window; the taste of liver, a taste like acorns, coated his mouth with cold grease. “Coming snow,” he said.

  His father laughed. “Can’t feel it.”

  “Jake says they’re putting a little away now. Says the church is right nice people.”

  “They ain’t putting away enough to hear him tell it.”

  “Now,” she said, “he’s done fine, just let it be.”

  When the meal was finished, Hollis pushed back his chair. “I asked Jake to help by taking you-all in; he said no.”

  The old man turned away; Hollis saw tears in his blind eyes, and that his body shook from crying. He wagged his head again and again. The old woman scowled, and she took up the plates, carried them to the sink. When she came back, she bent over Hollis.

  “What’d you figure he’d say? He’s worked like an ox and done good, but he can’t put us all up.”

  The old man was still crying, and she went to him, helped him from the chair. He was bent with age, with crying, and he raised himself slowly, strung his flabby arm around the woman’s waist. He turned to Hollis. “How could you do such a goddamned thing as that?”

  “We’ll take our nap,” she said. “We need our rest.”

  Hollis went to the yard, to where his car stood, looked again at the cracked block. He ran his hand along the grille where the old man’s hands had cleared away dust. The wind took his breath, beat on him, and the first light flecks of ice bounced from the fenders. The land lay brittle, open, and dead.

  He went back to the house, and in the living room stretched out on the couch. Pulling the folded quilt to his chest, he held it there
like a pillow against himself. He heard the cattle lowing to be fed, heard the soft rasp of his father’s crying breath, heard his mother’s broken humming of a hymn. He lay that way in the graying light and slept.

  The sun was blackened with snow, and the valley closed in quietly with humming, quietly as an hour of prayer.

  AFTERWORD BY JOHN CASEY

  I FIRST met Breece Pancake in the spring of 1975, a little more than four years before he killed himself. He was big, rawboned, slightly slope-shouldered. He looked like one who’d done some hard work outdoors. At that time he had a job teaching English at the Fork Union Military Academy. He put the student-cadets to bed at ten and then wrote from taps till past midnight. He got up with the boys at the six-o’clock reveille. Breece showed up in my office at the University of Virginia one day and asked me to look at some things he’d written. The first story I read was pretty good; it turned out to be the best of his old stuff. Possibly he was testing me with something old before showing the pieces he’d just done. He asked me to look at some more, and luckily I said yes. The next batch were wonderful.

  At that time the University of Virginia didn’t have much money for writing-students, so I tried to send Breece off to Iowa for a year to get him some more time to write. Iowa wanted him, but they were running low on funds. Breece got a job at the Staunton Military Academy for the next year and started coming to my story-writing class at the university. I thought he should start sending his stories out, but he held back for a while.

  Breece had gone to college at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, but what was striking about his knowledge and his craft was how much he’d taken in on his own. He must have had an enormous concentration at an early age. He had a very powerful sense of things. Almost all his stories are set in the part of West Virginia that he came from, and he knew that from top to bottom. He knew people’s jobs, from the tools they used to how they felt about them. He knew the geology, the prehistory, and the history of his territory, not as a pastime but as such a deep part of himself that he couldn’t help dreaming of it. One of the virtues of his writing is the powerful, careful gearing of the physical to the felt.