Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

by Pancake, Breece D'J

  He worked as hard at his writing as anyone I’ve known, or known about. I’ve seen the pages of notes, the sketches, the numbers of drafts, the fierce marginal notes to himself to expand this, to contract that. And of course the final versions, as hard and brilliantly worn as train rails.

  When he sold his first story to The Atlantic he scarcely took a breath. (He did do one thing by way of celebration. The galley proofs came back with the middle initials of his name set up oddly: Breece D’J Pancake. He said fine, let it stay that way. It made him laugh, and, I think, it eased his sense of strain—the strain of trying to get things perfect—to adopt an oddity committed by a fancy magazine.) He was glad, but the rhythm of his work didn’t let him glory or even bask. He had expected a great deal from his work, and I think he began to feel its power, but he also felt he was still far from what he wanted.

  Not long before Breece and I got to be friends, his father and his best friend both died. Sometime after that Breece decided to become a Roman Catholic and began taking instruction. I’m as uncertain finally about his conversion as I am about his suicide. I’ve thought about both a lot, and I can imagine a lot, but there is nothing certain I would dare say. Except that it was (and still is) startling to have had that much fierce passion so near, sometimes so close.

  Breece asked me to be his godfather. I told him I was a weak reed, but that I would be honored. This godfather arrangement soon turned upside down. Breece started getting after me about going to mass, going to confession, instructing my daughters. It wasn’t so much out of righteousness as out of gratitude and affection, but he could be blistering. And then penitent.

  As with his other knowledge and art, he took in his faith with intensity, almost as if he had a different, deeper measure of time. He was soon an older Catholic than I was. I began to feel that not only did he learn things fast, absorb them fast, but he aged them fast. His sense of things fed not only on his own life but on others’ lives too. He had an authentic sense, even memory, of ways of being he couldn’t have known firsthand. It seemed he’d taken in an older generation’s experience along with (not in place of) his own.

  He was about to turn twenty-seven when he died; I was forty. But half the time he treated me (and I treated him) as if I were his kid brother. The other half of the time he treated me like a senior officer in some ancient army of his imagination. I knew a few things, had some rank, but he felt surely that I needed some looking after. There was more to it than that of course. More than these cartoon panels can show, he was a powerful, restless friend.

  After his year commuting from Staunton, we got some money for him. The creative-writing program at the university was coincidentally, and luckily, endowed, and Breece was among the first to get one of the new fellowships. He had time now to get to know some of the other writers on the faculty (Peter Taylor, James Alan McPherson, Richard Jones) and some of the new band of graduate students in writing. This was, on the whole, good. The University of Virginia English department is a sophisticated place, both in a good, wide sense and a bad, narrow sense. The program in writing is just one of the many subdivisions—which is also, on the whole, good. On the good side, there were (and are) people on the regular faculty and among the regular Ph.D. candidates who understood and cared for Breece and his work. On the bad side of life in the department, there is a neurotic cancellation of direct, open expression, perhaps out of self-consciousness about how one’s opinion will be regarded, since opinion is the chief commodity. Sometimes it’s hard to get a straight answer. And sometimes it’s clear that some people hold that criticism is the highest bloom of the literary garden, and that actual stories or novels or poems are the compost.

  There was just enough of this attitude to give a young writer, however good, a sense of what social theorists call “status-degradation.” Breece didn’t know how good he was; he didn’t know how much he knew; he didn’t know that he was a swan instead of an ugly duckling. This difficulty subsided for Breece, but there was always some outsider bleakness to his daily life, a feeling that he was at the university on sufferance.

  Of course, Breece could be pretty thorny himself, and he spent some time getting mad uselessly—that is, over things that I thought were better ignored, or at the wrong people. One effect of Breece’s irritated energy was that he began campaigning for an M.F.A. degree for the apprentice writers, a so-called “terminal degree” to replace the uneasy M.A. The university now offers an M.F.A. in English, and it’s on the whole an improvement in that it’s a license for some of the subsistence-level jobs a writer might need along the way. Breece was a good union man.

  He was also a wonderful reader. He screened prose fiction submissions for Virginia Quarterly Review and, in the spring of 1979, for the Hoyns Fellowships. He and I and another friend of ours went through a bale (that’s a file-cabinet drawer, stuffed). In some ways we were engaged in the most functional form of criticism—picking twelve potential writers out of the bale.

  From his clearheadedness and good humor then, and from the way his work was going, I guessed Breece was in good shape. He’d sold another two stories. He gave a reading of yet another to a full house. He had some job prospects, and he was getting ready to leave Charlottesville. He began giving away his possessions to his friends. He’d always been a generous gift-giver—when he came for a meal he’d bring trout he caught, or something for my daughters (for example, bathtub boats he’d whittled, with rubber-band-powered paddle wheels). When he began to give away his things, it looked as if he was just preparing to travel light.

  A month later a friend of his showed me a letter from Breece in which he’d written, “If I weren’t a good Catholic, I’d consider getting a divorce from life.”

  No one close to him guessed. Even that sentence about getting a divorce from life is only clear in retrospect. And from other signs and letters it’s hard to say how intentional, how accidental his state of mind was when he killed himself.

  Breece had a dream about hunting that he logged in his notebooks, I think not long before he died. In the dream there were wooded mountains and grassy bottomland. Clear streams. Game was abundant. But best of all, when you shot a quail, a rabbit, or a deer, it fell dead and then popped back to life and darted off again.

  There are a number of things that strike me about this dream. One is that it’s about immortality and paradise. It is the happy hunting ground. And so it’s still another case of a lore that Breece acquired sympathetically and folded into his own psyche. But the most powerful element is this: a theme of Breece’s life and stories is the bending of violence into gentleness. He struggled hotly to be a gentle person.

  One of Breece’s favorite quotations was from the Bible—Revelation 3:15–16.

  I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.

  So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.

  This is a dangerous pair of verses. Untempered by other messages, by the gentler tones of voice of the Spirit, they can be a scourge. It may have been simply a bad accident that Breece didn’t allow himself the balms that were available to him after his self-scourgings.

  I have three kinds of reminders of Breece. The first is the surprising number of people who have come by to talk about their friendships with him, or who have sent me copies of their correspondence with him. They all know how bristly Breece could be, how hard on himself. (On one postcard to a friend, in the spot for the return address, which was 1 Blue Ridge Lane, Breece wrote: “One Blow Out Your Brain.” The friend hadn’t noticed it. But the message on the card was to encourage the friend—keep on, keep on writing, have a good time, damn it.) But these people speak more of what Breece gave them by his heat.

  I also have what Breece wrote.

  And then there is a third way—perhaps memory, perhaps a ghost. I’m not sure what ghosts are. The reflective, skeptical answer I give myself is that the vivid sense of dead people that you sometimes have ma
y be like the phantom-limb syndrome—you still feel the arm that’s been cut off, still touch with the missing fingers. In like manner, you feel the missing person.

  Two weeks after Breece’s death, and after a lot of people who knew Breece peripherally had asked the inevitable unanswerable question, I was walking home, dog-tired. It was about two A.M. I was on the Lawn, going toward the Rotunda, the dome bright under the moon. I was walking automatically and only slowly realized I’d stopped. I smelled something. I tasted metal in my mouth. I didn’t recognize the smell for an instant. It was a smell I’d known well years before. Gun bluing. But inside this sense of taste and smell was a compelling sympathy, beyond the sympathy of that’s what it smelled like to have the muzzle in his mouth. There was a deep, terrifying thrill that I would never have dreamed of, a thrill and a temptation that sucked at the whole body. I wouldn’t have thought of that. I wouldn’t have dared to think of that.

  In that dizzy urgency of sense, even while I was opening to it, there was something reassuring about it. As much as the letter he left, it was alarming, but loving: Don’t go on thinking about why. Feel what I felt for an instant.

  Breece and I used to argue a lot. The rhythm of it would often be that he would get up and go just before he lost his temper. He’d come back into my office after a bit and either tell me calmly I was still wrong, or say something funny, allowing he might be not entirely right. Now that my own temper’s worse, I appreciate his efforts. A month after the experience on the lawn, I was lying in the bathtub trying to think of nothing. I heard a short laugh. Then Breece’s voice, an unmistakable clear twang: “That’s one way to get the last word.”

  You don’t have to believe anything but this—that’s just the way he said things.

  There were several more of these sentences over the next year. One a rebuke, the next two gently agreeable. Then recently, again late at night in a lukewarm bath, only a distant murmuring. What? I thought. What?

  “—It’s all right. You’ve got your own conscience.”

  Now there’s the less excited working of my mind alone: Breece would have liked this or that, this stream, this book, this person. This would have made him angry, this made him laugh. A lot of people miss him, and miss what he would have gone on to write.

  I think about the many things I learned from Breece. I think, with somewhat more certainty than a wish, that Breece’s troubles don’t trouble him or the people who struggled with him and loved him, that a good part of what he earned from struggling with his troubles remains.

  1983

  AFTERWORD BY ANDRE DUBUS III

  MY life as a writer did not really begin until I read the work of Breece D’J Pancake. It was 1983, more than four years after his death, and I was living in Boulder, Colorado, and working in a halfway house for convicted adult felons from Canon City Penitentiary. My job title was Correctional Technician I, which meant I walked the facility from 5 P.M. to 1 A.M. with a clipboard and pen and kept a watchful eye on fifty-seven inmates, nine of them women, one of whom had shot her abusive husband in the face.

  The house itself was only three blocks from the University of Colorado and, until it was acquired by the Department of Corrections a few years earlier, had been home to generations of sorority girls. In the front yard were two grand oak trees, and in winter, while doing midnight rounds on the third floor, I could see through their bare branches to the border of the city and the Flatirons, great slabs of ancient rock rising out of the pines and snow, a constellation of stars sitting along the ridge. I usually allowed myself to take in this view only after the inmates were asleep, and I tried not to think about the fiction I worked on each morning and early afternoon.

  I was twenty-three years old and, much to my surprise, had started writing short stories. I did not consider myself a writer, however, nor did I think I would ever be one. I’d been reading Richard Yates, John Cheever, and John Updike, writers who wrote beautifully about all sorts of things, particularly middle- and upper-middle-class married people who are terribly unhappy. In my own work, I think I was trying to copy not only the rhythms of their prose but their very visions, too; but theirs had nothing to do with my own. Both sides of my family are from the South; my father’s father was a civil engineer and his father had been the first auto mechanic in Louisiana. On my mother’s side were pipe fitters, rice farmers, and muleskinners; I grew up in a string of fallen mill towns in New England, and my best friends were not unlike the men I supervised from Canon City Penitentiary.

  Willa Cather once wrote: “A writer is at his best only when writing within the character and range of his deepest sympathies.” What I’d been working on in those first few months had been inspired by writers whose artistic vision did not necessarily include those at the bottom of the pile. And I suppose—because I was young and ignorant and had not read nearly enough literature—I made the unconscious assumption that real fiction just didn’t have those people in it. Consequently, I felt little connection to my own writing.

  I kept at it, but I hated it and myself. I began tagging along with a private investigator and sometime bounty hunter. I trailed a diamond thief in Denver, did surveillance on the house of a hit man’s girlfriend, found myself under an assumed name in meetings with U.S. marshals and DEA agents. I flew to Mexico looking for a sadist we never found. It was boring and sometimes dangerous work, and I didn’t care; I was lost; I had no direction or voice or vision. In my off-hours, I drank a lot.

  I don’t recall now how “Trilobites” got into my hands, but I remember it being a Xeroxed copy from a book or magazine. It was a winter afternoon, and in the slanted shadows of the Flatirons, I sat at my desk and read it. The first line was first-person, present tense, a device I hadn’t seen much of before, though I stopped noticing that soon enough:

  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.

  In those spare sentences of such economy, my mind went quiet, my heart hit a steady rhythm, and I was literally pulled into this West Virginian landscape and all the weight on young Colly’s shoulders—the failing farm he can’t save, his dead father, Ginny who doesn’t love him anymore and never will. Nearly all the sentences were constructed simply—subject, verb, object—yet there was a music to them that was organic, that seemed to come from the very world they evoked so fully.

  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.

  This is not mere description for description’s sake. We are hot without being told we’re hot. We are thirsty without being told we want cold water. We feel an acute awareness of the passage of time, as well as a dark foreboding, though none of these words are used explicitly. This is accomplished with Pancake’s careful selection of sensual detail: the sky’s film, the skin’s salt, yellowy billows the sun can’t burn off. But these are technical details I only became conscious of much later. My first time reading this remarkable story by this remarkable writer, that ambitious and lost part of me was put to sleep, and I simply became Colly and Ginny and old Jim, even the ancient landscape and Colly’s desire to find the fossil of a trilobite in his homeland where �
��my father is a khaki cloud in the canebrakes, and Ginny is no more to me than the bitter smell on the blackberry briers up on the ridge.”

  The story ends as seamlessly and honestly as it begins; Colly doesn’t get the girl, yet he doesn’t forget his passions either. Everything comes to true fruition by the final line:

  I get up. I’ll spend tonight at home. I’ve got eyes to shut in Michigan—maybe even Germany or China, I don’t know yet. I walk, but I’m not scared. I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years.

  Colly has been afraid for the entire story, and we’ve known it all along without consciously knowing we’ve known. When I finished reading that last line for the first time, my fingers were trembling, my breath was high in my chest, and my soul felt fed yet hungry for more. This man, Pancake, by going so deeply into this one character at this particular time and place in his life, had captured a larger truth about all of us, about living and loving and dying, and he did it all in sixteen pages without one clever or ironic turn of phrase in sight.

  I called the local bookstore and asked the man who answered if he had any books in stock by a writer named Breece D’J Pancake. He did. Thirty minutes later I bought what the bookstore owner told me was Pancake’s first and last book.

  Back home, I brewed some late afternoon coffee, and I could not stop staring at the dust jacket photo of this gifted writer who’d been gone from us already four years. I felt a strange combination of grief for the loss of him, yet anticipation for what he’d left behind. I sat down to read.

  When I finished The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake, it was sundown, and I pulled on my coat and went for a long walk in the snow-crusted streets of Boulder. I watched the lights come on in the restaurants and shops and little alpine houses. I looked up at the Flatirons and watched the stars shine over the ridge. And I just stood there in the mountain cold and felt the lives of all those characters in these twelve stories from this writer we would never hear from again: hard-living Buddy, chained to a life of coal mining his lover can’t abide; the nameless narrator of “A Room Forever,” raised in a string of loveless foster homes, his life nothing now but deserted river towns and dangerous work on a tugboat; teenage Bo and his reluctant hunt with the men who drink and celebrate the violent death of the underage girl they’d all paid for sex; the haunted serial killer in “Time and Again,” whom Pancake renders fully and honestly in just six pages; heartbroken Reva with her barren body and self-hatred and incestuous desire for her brother. There’s the fight-loving Skeevy and the doomed Alena, doomed because she loves Harvey, who was “not the man she knew in the hills, he looked skinny and meaner to her, and now she knew he was a murderer, that the gun he always carried had worked.” In “The Salvation of Me,” we have Pancake’s only comic narrator and his forever unrealized dream. There’s Ottie, the long-haul trucker who returns to the home and family that was never quite his anyway. And, finally, young Hollis, who has inherited the family farm and his ailing parents, too. We feel his misery at this fate, but we also feel his strong need to honor his family and do the right thing; this is one of Pancake’s central themes, his characters’ constant striving for goodness up against the seductive pull of the darkness within them. As in so many of these stories, there is a gun and whiskey and a craving for a change of almost any kind.