Stories of Breece D'J Pancake Read Free Page A

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