Liar's Bench

by Kim Michele Richardson

  I never did get around to building up the courage to tell her there hadn’t ever been a “just in case” moment, or that there probably wouldn’t be one anytime soon. Maybe never, at the rate I was going.

  Still, it kept my cycle regular and helped with the cramps some. I popped the tiny yellow pill into my parched mouth and dry-swallowed, all part of my morning ritual.

  I cracked open my bedroom door and listened for Daddy.

  Silence.

  Padding downstairs to the kitchen, I lit the pilot inside the oven so I could get a start on breakfast for us. While I was waiting for it to heat, I picked up the kitchen phone. The party line was busy. I tried three more times and finally asked Widow Sims if I could use it. I knew it was taboo to call a boy for a date, but this was different. I really needed to call Bobby. Not for a date, but for a talk. I paced back and forth a few times before I finally got the courage to pick up the receiver. My windpipe clogged as I fought to find the perfect words. I let his number ring for a long while before hanging up, sorely disappointed. Where could he be?

  When the grandfather clock struck nine, I plugged in the percolator.

  My stomach grumbled as I lightly kneaded the biscuit dough. After I popped the bread into the oven, I grabbed a peach off the windowsill, soft and warm from days of sitting. When I was through, I spotted the water glass sitting next to the sink. I lifted it quickly to my nose and sniffed for any signs of whiskey—a boot soakin’. Water. A great relief, but I couldn’t help feeling a snip of anger, because I couldn’t trust my daddy.

  Standing at the kitchen window, I stared out at the fields, mechanically gnawing on the peach and mentally chewing on yesterday, and what had been brewing inside me for days. Though my run had helped some, my heart helplessly panned for healing. Answers. Now two hours later, my good energy had slowly been replaced, bit by bit, by anger, a churning ball of rage. I was looking to point the finger.

  If Daddy hadn’t boozed, lied, and cheated, I kept thinking. If Mama hadn’t left us and hooked up with that good-for-nothing pillhead, none of this would have happened. She would still be here today, living and breathing. If Daddy had never lied to her . . .

  At the dinner after the funeral, I’d overheard Ocilla Brown click her false teeth to her nosey group that “if only Adam had never slept around, poor Ella would be here today. Bless her heart,” she added, collecting her Jesus points like S&H stamps to trade with the devil.

  I tried to shake off these thoughts, especially since Daddy’d been taking such good care of me this past week, letting me sleep in and fixing meals for us. But maybe Ocilla Brown was right and he was responsible from the start, and worse, he was still hiding something from me. And how could I forget what Pastor Dugin’s wife had said long ago . . . ?

  Yawning, Daddy shuffled through the kitchen door. “Nearly ten o’clock. I can’t believe I slept in so late. Good thing I cleared my court calendar for a few days.”

  I slouched over the sink and watched a flock of crows fuss in the yard. Why, even the birds are mad at him.

  Daddy peeked out the window beside me. “If those rain clouds would pass, we might have a nice day.”

  The crows took flight.

  If. If. If . . . “Yeah, if,” I said, looking at him, my anger coiled tight, ready to pounce at the slightest thing or anything that would allow me to unleash. “Been a whole lotta ‘ifs’ in this house lately.” I squeezed past him to hurry upstairs.

  I tried to ignore the soft taps on my bedroom door by cramming the pillow tightly over my head, but Daddy was insistent.

  “Not feeling well. Go away. Please. Just go away.” I pressed my fingers against my temples—squeezing, pushing—and wishing I could just rub him away.

  “C’mon, Muddy, let’s talk.”

  My temper sparked, quick and reflexive, like flint on steel. “Mudas, not Muddy.”

  “Muddy, I—”

  “MUD. US. Please stop calling me Muddy, ADAM. My name’s Mudas!”

  “Watch that sassy mouth, gal.”

  “Why should I? You can’t get anything right! It’s your fault! All of it!” I cannoned off my accusations to the door. “If you hadn’t cheated on Mama, there’d never have been a divorce or a funeral, and she’d still be here today. Everyone knows it. . . .”

  “Muddy, you open this door right now!”

  I paced across hardwoods, single-minded with my anger. “You cheated with that secretary, skirt-chased all those women.”

  “We’ve been through this before. Just one,” he honey-coated. He’d always insisted there’d only been one: just one moment of infidelity with his new secretary, Caroline—the one I’d spilled the beans about when I was five years old. But I knew better, I’d heard about Jackie and Laura, and seems Mama was right, once a snake, always . . .

  “Whatever,” I mumbled, his past wedged between us, soldiering walls, always blocking. I’d understood little as a child. But Daddy and Mama’s heated whispers grew, and my knowledge grew as I did. And I began to understand more of the words I heard and the glimpses of Daddy’s cheatin’ ways that I saw. The long office hours. The way the town women hovered around him, leaning in close. And him always sidling closer, flirting, being extra nice and talking especially slow when they were around.

  He’d always tell Mama, “It’s my job to be nice to them, so they’ll do me a favor when I need their help with a case or a witness, or even as a juror.” I didn’t understand back then that a small-town lawyer had to be “everyone’s” good friend. I wasn’t sure I understood it now.

  He jiggled the knob, hard enough to rattle the whole door in its frame.

  “You know what people say about you, Daddy? Do you?” I pounded into wood. “I overheard Myrtle Dugin calling you a horndog. . . . Yeah, that’s right, the pastor’s wife. She said you’re nothin’ but a horndog who chased any skirt you could tomcat it up with.”

  “Muddy Elizabeth Summers!” He battered the door. “You ain’t too old for me to take a hickory switch and cut your tail, gal!”

  “Myrtle Dugin was only saying what everybody already knows! That you’re a cheater. Lord! It’s your lies that killed Mama!” I picked up my funeral dress off the floor, wadded it into a ball, and threw it at my bedroom door. “Just leave me alone! It’s all your fault Mama’s dead!” I flung the blame into the charged air, ignoring the voice inside that said the fault was mine for being too weak to stay in the city with her. Leaving her in the yard last week. Or for tattling on Daddy long ago.

  I pushed back the guilt, letting anger take the lead. “You had a knot in her noose last Friday! You sat on Liar’s Bench and swore you didn’t cheat on her! You brought women into our house and even had Mama cook for them, letting her think y’all were just business friends, her never suspecting you was doing your business in their beds. And all your drinking . . . Lord . . . You drove her away!”

  “Your mama had her own problems—”

  “No, she didn’t. . . . Don’t say that. You were the problem.” I chewed on my fist. I’d hardly known much about the danger of refreshments at age nine. But when I turned twelve, I’d overheard Grammy Essie’s whispers to Papaw. “Ella’s taken to hard liquor like most folks to sweet tea, and she’s got one foot in the trash with Tommy. Respectable lady sips a few tablespoons every now and then . . . doesn’t nurse a bottle every day. . . . Gonna end up like white-trash Oleanna Hogard if she’s not careful,” she’d worried to Papaw. I’d fretted for a good week, cried for another, and sulked around for one more after that. I was so ashamed. Ashamed for Mama, and for me. Then Grammy explained to me about the hurts of alcohol, and we’d both prayed for Mama to stop. I’d been praying ever since.

  “Open this door right now, young lady.” A hint of desperation had snuck into Daddy’s voice, beneath the anger, the denials. For a brief moment I felt ill about the words I’d flung. His voice grew soft, like maybe he’d used up all the fight he had left. Maybe I had, too.

  “Muddy, please. Jesus. Jesus Christ, please .
. .” He slumped against the door, and I heard a gutted breath slip from his mouth.

  Soupy, thick air made it difficult to breathe, and I could feel hot tears starting to gather behind my eyes. “Just go, Daddy. Please.”

  He hesitated outside the door, like he didn’t know what I might do if he waited me out. Finally, after a few silent moments, the heavy fall of his steps retreated down the hallway.

  Spent, I sat down on the window seat and curled myself up tight against the frame. Reaching for my stuffed tiger, the one I’d received from Grammy Essie on my third Christmas, I stroked Tuffy’s ringed tail and cuddled his thinning, fur body. “I’m Mudas. Mudas,” I whispered into my tiger’s tufted ears. I remembered the lilt Mama always lent to my name when she’d call for me. It was a special name, she’d told me, given as legacy in her family. The meaning: a seed rising from the mud to blossom as a beautiful flower. Leaning my head out the window, I drank the fresh air and silently cursed my ancestral name, which I’d once loved as a child, because it was carried by my mama and her mama before that.

  But now, Mama was gone. I pressed Tuffy’s tail to my eyes, hating that I couldn’t stop the hurt, hating my weaknesses then and now. Worst of all, it was not, nor would it ever be, a remembered fact that I was named after my great-great-great grandmother. No. What people did remember was the fact that my daddy, Adam Persis Summers, had gone and ruined the name by marking it with the town’s annual summer social: the Cow Plop Bingo.

  I looked out the window at the persimmon tree and dredged up the yarn that had damned my name. Oh, how Daddy loved to regale anyone who hadn’t already heard or, as a matter of fact, anyone who was too polite to deny Adam Summers one more telling of his braggart’s tale: the story of how he’d met and courted Ella Mudas Tilley, my mama. The same ol’ story that went like this:

  In 1953, Daddy and his friend George were walking across the grounds of the courthouse when he spied a petite woman with gorgeous chestnut hair and green eyes sitting across the road on Liar’s Bench. She was “sitting there all propered-up, daisy-like, with legs gracefully long and leading to Heaven,” Daddy said.

  He immediately stopped and was about to cross over to introduce himself when George held up his hand, and warned, “She’s that Casanova Tommy Whitlock’s gal. Name’s Ella. She was raised in Nashville and Kentucky, same as him, and just moved back here after her parents passed. Easy pickings for Whitlock. So you best mosey on, Adam, before it costs you a whole lotta money and misery. And misery being ’bout the only thing you’d get on ol’ Frannie Crow’s bench.”

  Daddy just grinned wide, gave George a friendly whack on the back, and said, “You can’t catch a rabbit if you don’t muddy up your boots, boy.”

  And that he did, the following week at the Peckinpaw County Fair, by buying up all the chances for the Cow Plop Bingo, our town’s favorite game of chance and an annual tradition. Every year, a particularly unfortunate field was made to look like a bingo card, divided into three-foot squares, each numbered with lime, and the good people of Peckinpaw would place their bets on whether or not a cow would plop on their number. The prize: a dance with the Fair Queen at the Midsummer Dance, the highlight of the Peckinpaw Fair. That year’s queen: Ella Mudas Tilley.

  Wasn’t a year later that Daddy proposed to Mama on Liar’s Bench. I came along in ’55, the very next year. In keeping with the Tilley family tradition, they named me Mudas. But Daddy gave me his own special nickname, “Muddy,” in homage to his ingenious way of courting Mama and the philosophy that made it special. “Can’t catch a rabbit if you don’t muddy up your boots, gal,” was the refrain of my childhood. My nickname was Daddy’s way of reminding me that I needed to strive to be the best and always work extra hard to catch this rabbit of life. To his way of thinking, this was the only path to success.

  An all right story. Except for the fact that my daddy didn’t know when to end it. He’d puffed up his chest and told the famous Cow Plop Bingo story so many times that, in Peckinpaw, my name would be forever linked to those stupid cows. What a joke and an even bigger joke with the kids at school. Even my best friend, ThommaLyn, couldn’t shake off using the name, though I didn’t mind much, since she was made fun of for her own tomboy name, same as me. Sharing the misery sort of made it bearable. Still, being named after a boy is one thing, but living down a cow-patty legacy is entirely another. I’d come home from school crying no telling how many times, begging Daddy to let me change my name and to please stop telling that stupid story.

  Then, one day, he did. It was years ago; three months shy of my ninth birthday. The year he let his rabbit get away. The year Mama decided that Daddy had used up all his chances. She’d had enough of his cheating ways. That’s when she resolved to lace up her own shoes to do some stomping. It was in 1964, but it seemed like just yesterday, when Mama had dressed me in my finest cotton dress and driven us down to Liar’s Bench to meet Daddy.

  Daddy had hurried across the street from his office with a big smile stretched across his face that slowly slid downward with each step closer, until he finally sank down onto the bench next to us, with me in the middle. They wouldn’t look at each other. I tapped my thumbs against my fingertips.

  Mama crossed her arms and raised her chin. “Adam Summers,” she said, “I’m leaving you. Say good-bye to Mudas.”

  Looking back and forth in confusion, I cried, “I don’t wanna go, Mama. I don’t want to leave Daddy.” Mama wasted no time in marking my cheek with a smart whap. Sighing, Daddy dropped his unlit cigar in the geranium pot and got to work on a stack of lies meant to convince Mama to stay. But I guess that wasn’t his day to be the better liar. Mama looked straight ahead as Daddy waded into the thick of his own murky waters and sank lower, and lower still. When he’d just about worn himself out, Mama calmly announced that she’d sold our spacious Bedford ranch and all of its belongings, and was moving us up to the big city of Nashville.

  “Ella,” he said, “if you’d just stop drinking, too, we could work—”

  “Adam!” She looked hard at him.

  I tugged on her arm. “Mama?”

  “Ella,” Daddy whispered, “please, we can both get counseling with the pastor and we can—”

  Mama lifted a shaky hand.

  Daddy unleashed a fresh pack of lies, promises, protests, and heated declarations that Mama was going to city-me-up and I’d lose all my respectable rural, but Mama wouldn’t budge.

  “School’s out soon. It wouldn’t hurt this apron-leashed child to get some citification and learn new cultures. Living her entire life in Peckinpaw will only make her weak and dependent. I need to polish off the edges of this rural.” She pinched my arm and I felt shame rising in my cheeks. Confusion riddled my young brain; Mama had pinched me after I told her about Daddy’s secretary, too. I wasn’t sure what was happening, but I knew I’d done something terribly wrong.

  Mama rented us a room over Nettie’s Nest until school let out for the summer. Then she loaded us into the car. I cried all the way to Nashville.

  Our new home was a tall building full of tiny homes called apartments. We lived on the ninth floor. Mama found a job at a nearby bank and hired Mrs. Barnes, a nice neighbor lady in our building, to babysit me. Sometimes after work, Mama would go out on the avenues with her bank friends and have what she’d always liked to call “refreshments.” She’d started smoking, and bought herself a fancy filter like her new friend, Collette. During these times I missed ThommaLyn the most. I even missed school a little.

  I began counting the days left in June and those to September. To help me through the “Lonely Lucys,” Mrs. Barnes let me open the window and drop breadcrumbs on the ledge. Within two days, I had three feathered friends. I named the pigeons after ThommaLyn, Grammy Essie, and Daddy. But one day Mama came home from work early and saw me talking to all of my new friends. She acted real nervous and led Mrs. Barnes to the door, whispering about “normal.” Next thing I knew, Mama had nailed the window shut and put up an ugly green dr
ape. I bawled like a two-year-old and hollered that she was locking my family out, same as she did Daddy. But she’d mixed herself a refreshment, swatted my tail, and sent me into the bedroom we shared.

  It was June 8 when Mama crossed paths again with Tommy Whitlock at the West End juke joint where he worked.

  A few days later, we’d all gone out for a Saturday supper to “get to know each other.” Tommy flashed a pearly grin to the waitress, and the waitress smiled back, blushing. Tommy and Mama had “refreshments.” He’d ordered for us from the menu, making sure to add a big slice of pie for me.

  Tommy downed his brown drink like a thirsty man. I soon figured out it was bourbon and water. “More water over that bourbon,” the waitress had teased. Mama kept up with him with her refreshment called vodka and tonic. He finished his second one after the first bite of his steak. His voice grew high, loud. Once, he pinched the waitress’s rear and Mama’d playfully chastised him, bent over to me, and said, “He’s just funnin’, ain’t he so funny, Mudas?” Like a clown, I’d reckoned, but glued my mouth shut and turned my red face away. Mama gulped down her second refreshment.

  I thought about Daddy a lot. At least he drank in private. I looked over at Tommy. Him, with his mouth full, waving a biscuit, grease on his chin, smacking his lips. Daddy made sure my elbows were always off the table....

  Tommy talked and kept waving his bread. Then I saw it, his hands. “Like the eyes connect to the soul, the hands talk, too,” Grammy Essie had once told me. My daddy’s hands were warm, strong, and smooth, but not too soft, like the hands of men too prissy to turn the dirt of a garden, brick a well, or cradle a fussy baby. Tommy’s were different. His pinkie fingernail was long, like it was made for scooping sand. His nails looked shiny, like maybe they’d been polished, and his hands hung limp, like they’d never shook with another. I didn’t trust those hands.