The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake by Breece D'J Pancake

Hunched on his knees in the three-foot seam, Buddy was lost in the rhythm of the truck mine's relay; the glitter and coal and sandstone in his cap light, the setting and lifting and pouting. This was nothing like the real mine, no deep tunnels or man-trips, only the setting, lifting, pouring, only the light-flash from the caps in the relay. In the pace he daydreamed his father lowering him into the cistern: many summers ago he touched the cool tile walls, felt the moist air from the water below, heard the pulley squeak in the circle of blue above. The bucket tin buckled under his tiny feet, and he began to cry. His father hauled him up. "That's the way we do it," he laughed, carrying Buddy to the house.

At the Billy Motel in Davis, West Virginia--the highest town in the Mountain State, and a little enclave of hillbilly hipsters--every room boasts a copy of The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake in the place of the Gideon Bible. I had brought my own, a funny happenstance, but not quite a coincidence, given the nature of these stories: their scrupulous invocation of the West Virginia hollows, where homes abide in such brief daylight, the love and shame they bear toward the lives of labor West Virginians lead, of farming and coal mining and cockfighting.  The characters of these stories dream of getting away; they don't yet know what Pancake knew, that you can never get away from your home, that you carry with you, with all its contradictions. I wonder what Pancake would have thought about a twee place like the Billy Motel.

To a traveler who hasn't yet opened the book, Pancake's name must seem in keeping with the wryness and whimsy of the Motel. But the stories are not whimsical, not at all: they are quite dreary. The first story "Trilobites" sets the tone: the protagonist Colly faces down a failing farm, a mother he cannot take care of, a girlfriend who despises him. His mother encourages him to sell the farm and follow her to Akron, go to college, but such a thing is barely conceivable to Colly, who feels tied to the ancient mountains, where the title fossils are found: "I like to hold little stones that lived so long ago," he tells us. The beautiful spareness of that sentence is emblematic of these stories, which hum in the human register of the West Virginia working class. It's hard not to see in Colly the anxieties of Pancake himself, who wrote these stories while working not in the coal mines but in the University of Virginia's English program. Did Pancake--who committed suicide after the publication of this handful of stories--know what Colly only suspected, that our lives are in their way inescapable, no matter where we go?

I don't know if these stories are sequenced according to when they were written, but I felt they grew only stronger as the collection progressed. They all share the basic elements as "Trilobites," but within them Pancake explores a great range of the disaffected: the embittered miner of "Hollow," the woman in "The Way it Has to Be" who knows she lacks the strength to leave her violent lover, the young mechanic of "Fox Hunters" who resents the sour bigotries of the men who pretend to be older and wiser. Pancake's characters often do more wandering and remembering than acting, a trait that can lead to stiffness, but I was enchanted by "The Honored Dead," a story about a man troubled by the guilt over his friend's death in Vietnam. And the best story might be "In the Dry," about a man who returns to visit a foster family to which he never quite belonged, years after the car crash which crippled a natural son:

He walks the darkening fields alone. Heat lightening 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 Otie 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.

So much goes unstated in this wonderful story: How does the patriarch, Old Gerlock, feel about Ottie's return? What are the feelings of his foster sister, with whom he shared a passionate kiss long ago? And what is Ottie trying to accomplish by coming back to this place he had forsaken? The influence of Hemingway haunts these stories, in not just the spareness of the language but the conception of a story as an iceberg, in which everything that lies beneath the surface buoys what is above. For Pancake, a better metaphor might be a West Virginia hill, where seams of valuable coal are buried too deep to pry into the open.