Tense and Time in Breece DJ Pancake's "Trilobites"

Breece DJ Pancake's story "Trilobites" (from Trilobites and Other Stories) is a story about time and its passing. Though it is told in the first person present tense, much of this story is spent remembering. The story begins,"I open the trucks door, step onto the brick side street. I look at Company Hill again, all sort of worn down and round." This is a very immediate and elongated present tense, as we are meeting the character/narrator through his slow, mundane actions. And yet, despite the now quality of the prose's action, Pancake introduces the passing of time through the details of the Company Hill being "worn down and round," evoking images of wind and slow erosion through the ages. And the narrator looks at the Hill "again," thus lashing these small details of his movements to his history with this mountain, this place. The story continues, "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." Here, we're moving from this very immediate personal experience into the past tense and expansive geological time--and the narrator's relationship to time. "I've looked all over it for trilobites," written in the past tense, reveals that the narrator is searching for something, and that he has not found it. We move back into the present tense reflecting upon geological time-- "I think how long it has always been there and always will be, at least for as long as it matters"--and then into the narrator's slow and quiet reflection of what's happening right now-- "The air is smoky with summertime. A bunch of starlings swim over me." The starlings, a kind of bird, "swim" over him; the choice of "swim" accents this paragraph's quality (and the narrator's experience) of being almost suspended underwater, both inside and outside of time and its passing. The first paragraph continues: "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 cafe." This section reverts to the past tense, and to the narrator's personal beginnings as related to this land, to Company Hill, to the trilobites he can't find. And then it moves to his dead father, the source of his (the narrator's) own life and how his passing through and out of time "took something out of [the narrator]." The paragraph ends in present tense, like it started, shutting the door that was opened, heading away from Company Hill, away from this questions about time, and to the cafe. 

The second paragraph reads, 

"I see a concrete patch on the street. It's shaped like Florida and I recollect what I wrote in Ginny's yearbook: "We will live on in mangoes and love." And she up and left without me--two years she's been down there without me. She sends me postcards with alligator wrestlers and flamingos on the front. She never asks me any questions. I feel a real fool for what I wrote, and go into the cafe." 

The loss in this paragraph is direct and unhidden, but there are wonderful subtleties such as the word "without" repeated twice in close proximity, and the word "never," as juxtaposed with what he wrote in her year book, the affirmative and hopeful "We will live on..." Like the first paragraph, the story continues with this fluid flux between the plodding present and the memories of the past. Like we imagine Company Hill once was, the story is strewn with kind of artifacts of Colly's life and loss--the trilobites, of course, Ginny's yearbook, the turkle, the depot, the nails that pop used to build the shed, the sliver of metal from Pop's war wound that migrates to his brain and kills him. All of these artifacts are packed with memory and are symbols of what Colly doesn't have in his life anymore.

Ginny is a big loss. She has left him behind, moved on, and their connection is severed. He waits for her to come back, hopeful about their reunion. "I wonder what it will be like when Ginny comes by. I hope she's not talking through her beak. Maybe she'll take me to her house this time," Colly wonders into the future. "If her momma had been anybody but Pop's cousin, her old man would let me go to her house. Screw him." Here, we learn that Ginny and Colly are related, and we find out an inherent barrier to their being together. But I can talk to Ginny. I wonder if she remembers the plans we made for the farm. And we wanted kids. She always nagged about a peacock. I will get her one." The tenses are so beautifully complicated in this section: Colly is actively wondering into the past about what Ginny does and doesn't remember about their imaged future together, now that she is back and things have changed. This paragraph is hopeful, reminicsent, but also doomed. There is a dark tension between the past and the future, tangled up in the stasis of Colly's present. 

Ginny says, "'He taught you everything. What killed him?" Colly replies, "Little shell fragment, been in him since the war. Got in his blood." What killed his father, then, is something from another time. The war killed him, but retroactively. Again, here, tenses are ruptured in the physical/action dimension of the story. 

The loss of the farm contains the loss of Colly's father (or vice versa). "Me and pop built this barn and I look at every nail with the same dull pain." The farm is the physical memory of his father. "His neighbor, who wants to buy the farm from Colly and his mother, says, "This is about the last real farm around here." This is something in which Colly's father would have taken pride, but it makes Colly feel guilty.  

"It can go now; the stale seed, the drought, the blight--it can go when she signes the papers. I know I will always be to blame, but it can't just be my fault. 'What about you?' I say. 'Your side hurt all that morning, but you wouldn't see no doctor. Nosir, you had to see that your dumb boy got the crop put proper in the ground.' "

Colly's mother will sell the farm and move to Ohio, he's sure, because he cannot take care of the farm anymore. Colly's father took care of the farm so much that he ignored his health (at the expense of his death) to tend to the farm. That Colly cannot manage the farm is like losing his father all over again. 

The trilobite is the primary metaphor for all of Colly's loss through time. The trilobite is something Colly looks for over and over and cannot find. His father told him about the trilobite, and his father's friend can name any fossil Colly finds Colly keeps a collection. "Ginny helped me find most of those," Pancake writes. The nature of a trilobite is that of a time capsule, a relic of the past and how things used to be in a particular place, a sliver of survival and history. And a trilobite is the rarest one. Colly never finds a trilobite, the rare and beautiful thing he always wanted, and no one can help him do so.  Pancake ends the story with Colly thinking of the places he might move once the farm is sold. "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." Like a fossil, Colly sees himself and his experience as not singular or immediate, but part of time on a massive scale. He feels connected to a larger Universe and ready to move on (though we also have to believe that not all of his fear moves away from him--that he holds on to some of it as part of his experience in this lifetime).