2/15/2023 0 Comments Home depot hogwasherA myth, not unlike James Dean's or Sylvia Plath's, seeks to find in death what could not be had fully in life. Someone hopes to stage a play, interweaving the work with the life. Now the legend of Breece D'J Pancake glimmers and spreads like fox fire. From all the naked eye could detect, he had every reason not to die. He had written some beautiful short stories in a creative writing program and had sold several to The Atlantic. On his typewriter lay two stamped letters. Taped to the dash of his beat-up car was a grocery list. "I love you, mother," he had said three times the night before on the telephone. Part of his brains were on a wall behind him. When they found him that April evening, he was sitting upright in a folding chair under a fruit tree, the weapon cradled against his right arm. "If I weren't a good Catholic, I'd consider getting a divorce from life," he had put in a letter to a friend. He died on the outskirts of Charlottesville, a few hours after he had attended mass. Helen Pancake is the mother of Breece D'J Pancake, a gifted writer who killed himself five years ago, on Palm Sunday, just at the moment of his probable fame. That's the way we do." She has the same linear features and big bones you remember from photographs of her son. On the phone Helen Pancake had said, "You'll come for lunch, of course. From the kitchen comes an aroma of something Sunday simmering in a pot. She is tall, in flat shoes, and there is a pressed handkerchief in her dress pocket. "Well, Lordy, look what you brought," says the woman in the doorway, taking up you and your flowers in nearly the same embrace. Pumps suck at ancient gas fields in the earth: Union Carbide, not coal, is king in this corner of West Virginia, which is down below Charleston, where the Mud River winds and the fields are green with corn and cane. Off to the side are giant generator cones spewing fumes into a yellow sky. To get there, you take I-64 and blur by towns named Nitro and Hurricane.
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