Ed “Moose” Duke is my kind of liar. By that, I mean he’s professional liar, or more accurately a storyteller and tall-tale spinner extraordinaire. Probably because I hail from a race that includes jackleg preachers and veteran porch-sitters who could talk the ears off a potato, when characters like Ed Duke speak, I draw up a chair and listen. I first heard about Ed from a neighbor who was impressed by the yarns he spun a year or so ago down at the Bald Face Liars Competition in Laurinburg, where he won second runner-up to one of the South’s most gifted liars.

Then one day not long ago, I got a phone message from Ed himself, or maybe it was a message on my little-used Facebook account — I forget which, and that’s no lie — inviting me to come meet his pet possum, Bug. When I phoned Ed back earlier this week, however, I was sorry to learn that Bug had just passed on.

“He was a good possum,” Ed told me with feeling and a rural twang that gladdened my redneck heart. “And he had a nice good life. Two is about the average life for a possum in the wild.”

Before I could ask about a possum’s quality of life, Ed added: “Of course, it was even harder to lose Dude. Dude was 5. That’s old for a possum. We had some truly great adventures together. He could do just about anything, even talk.”

Needless to say, Dude lives on in Ed’s storytelling. I asked him how he happened to find Dude, or vice versa. Somehow a possum seems like the perfect house pet for a professional liar who spends his days embroidering real life, playing possum with words “Well, Mr. Jim, it was like this,” he declared. “I was sittin’ on my porch in Pinehurst some years ago and my dog was sniffin’ around in some leaves. I walked over to see what it was and found this little rascal that looked like a worm. It weren’t no worm, though — it was a newborn possum.”

Ed phoned his friend Karen Hammer of the Pinehurst Police Department, a licensed wildlife rehabilitator, and “she come out and picked him up and took him home and cared for him. When he got growed, she brought him back so I could let him go. I turned that rascal loose on my porch and he went into my house and climbed into my bed. “We become good friends after that. I made him a 100-by-100 enclosure so Dude could come and go as he pleased. Him and me did everything together. I eventually rescued a greyhound, and old Dude began riding him around.”

Other Kinds of Lies

When Ed retired from teaching school in Hoke County two years ago, he started telling stories about Dude and Bug, other wild critters he’d managed to save over the years — creating a menagerie of animal-happy tall-tales that have delighted schoolchildren and tall-tale fanciers at more than 200 gigs across this state and neighboring South Carolina and Tennessee.

“I have found there’s nothin’ on this Earth quite as satisfyin’ for me to do than tell a little story that makes a young person or an older soul smile. That’s like magic. For a little while they can leave their problems behind — all the bad news of this old world — and just disappear into a story that just never ends and forever grows.”

He paused and laughed. “I guess that’s why they call it ‘stretchin’ the truth.’” Ed had a gig up in Greensboro the other day, so I went up to watch and listen while he spun his homely tales. On the way up, the noon news was full of another kind of liars, the sort of truth-stretchers who seem to dominate and threaten modern civilization. A poll found that only 9 percent of Americans approve of Congress, a new historic low for a body that took the country to the edge of financial default this summer and — despite what both sides of the aisle piously claim — clearly places the interests of party far above country. Ironically, the divergent tea party and Occupy Wall Street movements are simply manifestations of fed-up citizen fury over bailed-out megabanks, criminal regulators, entrenched politicians and Wall Street titans who are once again making millions instead of printing license plates or working the prison laundry room. While the White House stonewalls on a cozy loan deal that cost the American people at least half a billion dollars, the deadline for the so-called Super Committee’s plan to reform the runaway budget had reportedly hit a stone wall too, already ossified along ideological lines. One key participant referred to the process as “one big show, a lie to the American people,” falling well short of reforms that would make a difference. In a thought-provoking essay in this week’s Newsweek, historian Niall Ferguson argues that America and the West in general are on the trajectory of all collapsing empires, ignoring truths in quest of short-term profits, calling for what for social historian Charles Murray refers to as a much needed “civic great awakening” — a return to the original values of the American republic.

Europe, meanwhile, totters over the abyss of economic chaos, with Greeks violently protesting austerity measures and the end to the three-day workweek while their neighbors the Italians prepare to sell their priceless state antiquities to the highest bidders in the Old World’s biggest yard sale. Most experts cite lack of serious oversight and political cronyism on a massive scale as a prime source of the euro’s undoing.

From the presidential campaign trail came an update from happy Herman Cain, the thin-skinned pizza baron who insisted he “absolutely” had never met any of the women who’d accused him of harassment, despite photographic evidence to the contrary. Finally, during a year in which college football has been plagued by one big-money scandal after another, there was breaking news of Penn State University, where students had rioted overnight in support of legendary head football coach Joe Paterno, who along with numerous school officials allegedly covered up the sexual predations of a longtime defensive coach and popular campus figure. According to early reports, owing to their omerta of silence — a lie of omission with the gravest sort of consequences — as many as two dozen kids may have been molested.

Unable to take much more, I switched the channel to the all-classical station. A Welcome Escape Fortunately, Ed Dukes’ sweet lies provided a nice escape from such amateur liars.

As a dozen sweet elderly folks sat around the living room at Caldwell House, an adult enrichment facility on Greensboro’s east side, Ed put on his floppy hat and told a bag-full of endearing tales about everything from growing up on a farm in Apex with “13 youngins” to taking Dude to Walmart and watching Dude’s favorite TV show, “Jeopardy.”

There was a funny tale about Dude riding in Ed’s grandfather’s old Ford Model T and dipping his tail into moonshine, and a yarn about a mule that got loose from his tether on a tree and dragged the family outhouse across a field.

Ed’s audience listened as if they were youngsters, laughing and shaking their heads at such foolishness.

“That’s a true story, y’all — as true as I’m standin’ here,” Ed kept swearing.

When he talked about “church whuppins,” an elderly black woman in a wheelchair couldn’t stop giggling and finally had to wipe her eyes.

When Ed asked if she’d ever had one, she whispered, “No sir, I was good in church. But you weren’t.” She laughed some more.

He talked about how we all have our own true stories and a need to tell them out loud to someone and finished his delightful performance with an “absolutely true story” of his own about how his grandmother passed away one day when he was about 9, and how his grandfather — missing her — simply leaned forward and died on his tractor while plowing a field just a few days later. “He just wanted to be with my grandmother up in heaven more than being down here on earth,” said Ed, wiping his own eyes, “and that’s no lie.”

“I’ve heard of that happening,” an elderly woman sitting next to me felt moved to say, poking me gently in the ribs to get my attention. I’d been listening and taking notes for almost an hour.

“Write that down,” she insisted. “That’s pure truth, honey. It really does happen.”

So I did — and you read the truth here.

After Ed thanked his audience, he walked me outside. His red bow tie was hanging off his collar and he wanted a smoke.

As he lit up, I thanked him for letting me sit in on his stories and offered my condolences on the death of Bug.

“Thank you,” he said. “But Bug and Dude are still with me every day.”

Award-winning author Jim Dodson, Sunday essayist with The Pilot and editor of PineStraw magazine, can be reached at jim@thepilot.com.