The Liars' Club: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

Cajun two-step. The first night he slept with her, he took a washrag and a jug of wood alcohol to get rid of her makeup, saying he wanted to see what he was getting into.
    Their early time sounded happy. With the G.I. Bill, they bought a small house in a line of identical small houses. It was more than Daddy had ever dreamed of owning. He was so proudthat she had more going on north of her neck than her hairdo that he built bookshelves for her art books, hung her paintings all over the house, and promised someday to construct a studio so she wouldn’t have to keep her easel propped in the dining room.
    My daddy had grown up with three loud brothers and a sister in a logging camp in the piney section of East Texas called The Big Thicket. His family lived mostly without hard currency, buying coffee and sugar with credit vouchers at the Kirby Lumber Company Store. Other than that and such luxuries as calico for dresses, they grew and shot and caught what they needed.
    That world was long gone before my birth, but I remember it. In fact, my father told me so many stories about his childhood that it seems in most ways more vivid to me than my own. His stories got told and retold before an audience of drinking men he played dominoes with on days off. They met at the American Legion or in the back room of Fisher’s Bait Shop at times when their wives thought they were paying bills or down at the union hall. Somebody’s pissed-off wife eventually christened them the Liars’ Club, and it stuck. Certainly not much of the truth in any technical sense got told there.
    Except for Christmas Eve morning, when they met in the Legion parking lot at dawn to exchange identical gift bottles of Jack Daniel’s from the windows of their pickups, the men had no official meeting time and place. I never saw evidence of any planning. They never called each other on the phone. No one’s wife or kids ever carried a message to meet at thus-and-such a place. They all just seemed to meander together, seemingly by instinct, to a given place and hour that had magically planted itself in their collective noggins. No women ever came along. I was the only child allowed, a fact frequently held up as proof that I was hopelessly spoiled. I would ask Daddy for money for a Coke or shuffleboard or to unlock the pool table, and it was only a matter of time before somebody piped over at us that he was spoiling me and that if he kept it up, I wasn’t going to be worth a shit. Comments like that always rang a little too true to me. SometimesI’d even fake starting to give the coin back or shying away from the pool table. But Daddy would just wag his head at whoever spoke. “Leave her alone. She can do anything she’s big enough to do, cain’t you, Pokey?” And then I would say I guessed I could.
    Of all the men in the Liars’ Club, Daddy told the best stories. When he started one, the guys invariably fell quiet, studying their laps or their cards or the inner rims of their beer mugs like men in prayer. No matter how many tangents he took or how far the tale flew from its starting point before he reeled it back, he had this gift: he knew how to be believed. He mastered it the way he mastered bluffing in poker, which probably happened long before my appearance. His tough half-breed face would move between solemn blankness and sudden caricature. He kept stock expressions for stock characters. When his jaw jutted and stiffened and his eyes squinted, I expected to hear the faint brogue of his uncle Husky. A wide-eyed expression was the black man Ugh, who taught him cards and dice. His sister pursed her lips in steady disapproval. His mother wore an enormous bonnet like a big blue halo, so he’d always introduce her by fanning his hands behind his head, saying
Here comes Momma.
    My father comes into focus for me on a Liars’ Club afternoon. He sits at a wobbly card table weighed down by a bottle. Even now the scene seems so real to me that I can’t but write it