Pinckney The Brave

Abstract

Pinckney The Brave Laura Benedict (bio) For many years, Pinckney and I lived together in the house of his dreams. We met in the dog days of the summer of 1989 at the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop at the Hindman Settlement School in Hindman, Kentucky. He was doing what young mfa grads often do: spending his summer writing and teaching workshops to keep body and soul together. That fall he would begin teaching at Oberlin College in northern Ohio. I was looking for respite from my corporate job in St. Louis, and for some encouragement for my own, very naïve, short stories. Within the year, we were married and living on Ben Buck, his family’s West Virginia six hundred-plus acre dairy farm. Being a child of Ohio and Kentucky suburbs, I had very little experience of farms; Pinckney had lived on his family’s farm all his life. I love to hear him talk about being a boy on the farm. He was allowed to roam it, alone, from a very young age. When he was as young as five, his mother would pack his lunch for him and send him off with one of his toy rifles for a day of adventure. His most frequent destination was the Powell house, where his friend Scott Powell lived. Scott’s father managed the farm for many years, and the Powell house became a second home to Pinckney. A doctor named Beard collected much of the land that eventually became Ben Buck, and built the house at the edge of it in 1904. It’s a gracious house of vaguely Edwardian design, about four thousand square feet, with sturdy hardwood floors and varnished West Virginia cherry doors and trim throughout. The rooms are large, and the ceilings are astonishingly high for a house that was heated by coal. The family bedrooms have walk-in closets—innovations that were virtually unheard of in early twentieth-century country houses—and the dining room houses a butler’s pantry behind its sliding pocket doors. The walls are surfaced with inch-thick horsehair plaster that crumbles when you drive a nail into it. From the outside, the house looks tall, but unprepossessing, its broad planes gentled only by a bay window that looks out over the farm and ridge, and a house-wide porch that’s deep enough for a swing. The absence of locks on the doors (until a few weeks after we moved in) made it an extension of the land around it, so that it seemed to invite the unpopulated [End Page 10] wilderness around it inside. Despite its peculiar elegance, the Beard house must have been a very lonesome place a hundred years ago. The Powells were a farm family, and the house was their family’s home for many years. I didn’t know the house at all until they were long gone from it, but Pinckney has told me that his intimate familiarity with it made it a permanent, Gothic fixture in his mind and work. Scotty Powell’s grandmother, old Mrs. Powell, lived sequestered for months at a time in the front parlor that later became Pinckney’s office. The butler’s pantry, which we employed as a furnace closet, was where the Powells hung meat to age. It occurs to me that during our six-year tenure in the house, Pinckney always avoided using the dark, narrow back stairway. The stairway sits at a steep incline, and reaches up to the second floor without the relief of a single landing. It hadn’t changed in all those intervening years. It must have been intimidating to a boy of five or six. When I read Pinckney’s work, I see that house. I see his characters move through it like ghosts who never give up their fierce desire for life. I see the wall that, in his novel Dogs of God, absorbed the bloody handprints of a murder victim and refused to let them be erased. I see the ridge that hid brave, deluded Odom and his son from the rest of the world. I see the bedroom where the wife of the Mudman’s creator leapt...