Red Thunder (13 page)

Most people in town knew the legend of how their youngest,
Hallelujah, got his name. There had been complications in his birth
and, against his better judgment, Avery had taken Evangeline into town,
where Hallelujah had been delivered by C-section. When the doctor told
her she would not be able to have any more children, Evangeline had
shouted out the infant's name on the spot.

Jubilation, known to everyone but his father as Jubal, was six the
first time Avery saw Jesus. From that moment the lives of the Avery
Broussard clan became a race to see if any would grow large enough to
fend off their father before his increasing insanity killed them all.

Avery was called to the pastorship of the Holy Bible Church of the
Redeemed when the previous preacher succumbed to multiple spider bites
from a brown recluse he was attempting to swallow. He had become
allergic to the spider's venom, and expired on the altar from
anaphylactic shock.

Being called to lead the flock of the Redeemed didn't require a
certificate from any seminary. It was mostly a matter of stepping
forward and taking the microphone from the cooling hand of the previous
shepherd and starting to preach. Avery bellowed for two hours that
night, without notes, quoting long passages from the Bible, and when
the last hymn of the night had been sung it was clear there would be no
challenge to his leadership.

From the first Avery was never shy about his meetings with Jesus. A
small number of his parishioners left the church, feeling his
descriptions of the Son of God to be blasphemous, but about twice their
number heard of Avery's wonderful stories about what it was like to
literally walk with Jesus, and joined up. So in the early years,
Avery's church thrived.

And the stories were wonderful. Avery didn't just walk with Jesus,
he fished with him and hunted with him, too. He declared Jesus to be
the best shot he'd ever seen with a .22, and he'd hunted with hundreds
of men, in pretty near every parish in southern Louisiana. If Jesus saw
a squirrel a hundred yards away, that squirrel was
doomed.
And Jesus didn't look much like that sad sack fairy-boy all y'all seen
nailed to a cross or praying in Gethsemane looking like he needed a
good dose of Ex-lax, either, Avery told his congregation, nor did he
wear hippie robes and beatnik sandals. Jesus walked the bayous in good,
sturdy work boots. He wore J. C. Penney overhauls and made-in-America
red-and-black-checked flannel shirts or T-shirts with a pack of
cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve. Jesus chewed Red Man, Avery said,
and smoked Luckies.

Avery's idea of education was fairly simple. He believed in the three R's, but not too much of any of them.

He figured a person had to know how to read the Bible or he would be
at a severe disadvantage in life. To that end he laboriously taught his
three eldest children their ABC's and had them play an old "Hooked on
Phonics" tape over and over again on a thrift-store Walkman. It was all
he could do. His own reading skills were not the best, though his
memory was phenomenal.

He knew how to sign his name, so his children learned, too. Any
efforts beyond that, he felt, were strictly advanced classes for
special credit.

He felt a person had to be able to count money, to not get
shortchanged and to render unto Caesar all that you can't hide from
Caesar. So his children played counting games with real coins and
Monopoly money.

Teaching them to read brought up a special problem, though, to
Avery's way of thinking. Like many of his neighbors, he did not allow
his children to go to the picture shows or watch the television set.
Avery, as he so often did, took things a little further. The only thing
in the world worth reading, and therefore the only book his children
would read, was the Holy Bible.

Jubal taught himself to read at the age of three by watching over
his father's shoulder as he took them through their daily Bible lesson.
His father was delighted at first. He began letting Jubal do most of
the reading.

But when he heard his son had started to hang around with his cousin
Travis, Avery became suspicious. Everybody knew Travis was too smart
for his own britches, and in Avery's experience, that smartass attitude
could be catching.

Once Jubal realized that his ability to read the Bible carried over
to hundreds of other books and magazines and newspapers, he was lost.
He set out to read every book in Louisiana.

Travis got him off to a good start by loaning Jubal his textbooks,
which the boy read in a night, and by checking books out of the junior
high school library. Jubal had to stash them in a secret hideout he
built, and read them by the light of a kerosene lamp in the middle of
the night. Sometimes Travis joined him. It was the best time of Jubal's
life.

One message Jesus kept repeating to Avery was "Spare the rod and
spoil the child." Avery's punishments of his children for the slightest
infractions of his rules and the Lord's grew increasingly harsh.

He began chastising them with an ordinary oar, cut down to a useful
size, an implement virtually all of his neighbors approved of, and used
on their own children's behinds. "Time-outs" and withholding of favors
as ways to discipline a child had never made much headway in Avery's
neck of the woods. There were frowns, though, when he began hitting
them on other parts of the body. But people didn't see Avery's brood
for weeks, even months at a time. Who was to know, when one of them was
sighted with black eyes, bruises, or a broken arm, that their story of
having had an accident was a lie? The kids all stuck by their daddy, as
they'd been taught.

Avery graduated to a chopped-off pool cue, which he carried with him everywhere.

Not long after that, fifteen-year-old Veneration "Vinnie" Broussard
fell fifty feet from a live oak he had climbed to get a dead possum his
father had shot, which had become lodged in a branch. Or so Avery said.
He explained the bruises on the boy's body as having been caused by
hitting branches on the way down.

The parish coroner said that was hogwash. He counted forty-eight
bruises about eight inches long, and two straight, deep depressions in
his skull. The sheriff looked at the tree Veneration had allegedly
fallen from and concluded there was no possible way to fall through it
and receive forty-eight bruises unless those limbs were batting him
back and forth, up and down, like the ball in a pinball machine.

Vinnie had lived for three days in a coma, according to Avery's
testimony. Avery had sworn off hospitals since the day that "abortion
doctor" ruined his Evangeline's womb before the two of them had truly
started to be fruitful and multiply.

The parish prosecutor brought him to trial on a charge of second-degree murder and lesser offenses.

One of Avery's congregation was a pretty good backwoods lawyer. He
concentrated on the religious freedom aspect of the case, tried to get
the jury to look away from the pool cue and stand up for the right of a
man not to seek conventional healing but to pray to the Almighty. It
worked fairly well. Avery was sentenced to one year for manslaughter.

Jesus Christ shared his cell. From then on, Jesus was his constant
companion. When Avery was brought to trial the next time, for almost
killing his son Jubilation, Avery's defense lawyer sat to his left and
Jesus sat on his right. Christ must have had some awfully funny stories
to tell, from the way Avery would incline his head as if listening,
then roar with laughter.

"IT IMPRESSED THE jury enough that they bought the
'not guilty by reason of insanity' defense," said Travis. "It was the
first one anybody can recall in that part of the bayou. But nobody
could look at Avery talking and listening to Jesus for more than about
a day before they gave up on the theory that he was acting. Nobody
figured Avery was
smart
enough to act that well."

Travis finished the dregs of his third coffee of the night, looked
longingly at the bottle of bourbon, then held out his cup to Alicia for
a refill.

"He's been in the state hospital ever since, and he won't ever get
out, because all the doctors there know they will be held personally
responsible by the rest of the Broussards if Avery is ever judged sane
and released. And also because Avery doesn't really want out. He's
perfectly happy to sit and visit with Jesus all day, every day, and
that's just what he's been doing all this time."

He sat back in his seat, looking at a spot slightly over our heads.
I shifted around, trying to get comfortable. Travis had talked for a
long time, and I don't think I so much as twitched during most of it. I
told myself that the next time I was feeling sorry for myself for being
poor and fatherless, I'd think about Jubal's youth.

"How bad was Jubal hurt?" Alicia asked.

Travis focused on us again.

"Very bad. It started with Jesus whispering in Avery's ear again. It
turns out Jesus was a snitch, and a liar. While Avery was serving his
six months with six off for good behavior, Jesus told Avery me and
Jubal were 'sodomites, buggers, and nancyboys,' and it was reading
sinful stuff made us go bad.

"Avery found Jubal's stash and spent a whole afternoon leafing
through it. There was a biology textbook that discussed evolution,
other sinful things, too. Avery lay in wait, and when we showed up that
afternoon he lit into Jubal. He didn't have his pool cue. He had found
a two-by-four and driven some nails into it.

"He hit me once with it, backhand. I don't know whether I was just
lucky or he didn't intend to strike me with the nail side. I've still
got a scar, right here..." He fingered a spot near his hairline where
I'd noticed a faint scar before.

"Then he started in on Jubal. I don't know how many times he hit
him, all I could do was sit there in a daze. The doctors found four
punctures that went through his skull and into his brain. Both his arms
and most of his ribs were broken.

"I ran away while he was still beating Jubal. I... I still have nightmares about it, and I will probably always blame myself."

"Not fair," Kelly said. "You were too small to stop him."

"I should have thought of something. I've thought of plenty things
since. Get on his blind side, hit him with a stick, stand off and chuck
rocks at him... hurt him or distract him. But I didn't think of any of
those things, so I ran for the nearest house, which was about a mile
away. Two very large men, the Charles brothers, came back with me.
Avery had built an altar. Jesus had told Avery to offer Jubal up to
God, like Abraham with Isaac. God was bluffing, but Avery wasn't. They
got Jubal off the altar, put out the fire, and got Jubal to a hospital.
On the way the Charles brothers didn't quite kill Avery, but they
bloodied him up something awful.

"Jubal had so much brain damage the doctors didn't think he'd ever
walk or talk again. He might not even be able to feed himself. That
didn't matter, because I intended to take care of him for the rest of
his life.

"His brothers and sisters wouldn't allow that, though. They told me
to go on and get my college education, and they'd take care of Jubal.
And they did. He never lacked for any material thing from the day his
daddy almost killed him to the day I moved him here to be with me,
seven years ago. His memories before the beating are almost
nonexistent."

"He told us about his only Christmas," I said. I was going to say
more, but suddenly felt I might start to cry if I did. My only memory
of my own father is a very hazy one from Christmas day. He is rolling a
Tonka truck toward me, making sputtering sounds, and I am laughing. I
think I was four.

Kelly took my hand and squeezed it.

"That Christmas story gives you just a glimpse of what Avery was
like. Jubal remembers a few things about reading with me in our
hideout. He remembers the day I sneaked him into the picture show. It
was
Deliverance.
You know what part Jubal liked? The rushing
water. The mountains and cliffs they went through. Jubal had never been
more than twenty miles from home, mountain streams were new to him.

"Anyway, he's shown he's able to relearn things, and frankly, many
of his memories of living with his family are better lost, anyway.

"Jubal is still as smart as he ever was, and you can believe it or
not, up to you, but I'm talking Einstein, Hawking, Edison, Dyson. A few
years after the assault I showed him Einstein's equation,
E
equals
mc
squared. Jubal said, 'What dat big
E
fo'?' I told him, and he asked about the
m.
'An de
c?
'
I told him it was the speed of light. He looked at it for a second or
two, and grinned, and said, "Dis gonna upset all dat Newton stuff you
showed me. Gonna make a big bang, too.' In the next hour I fed him more
data and a few equations, and he pretty much deduced the General Theory
of Relativity.

"That mind still works, but not always according to the laws of
logic you and I know. But amazing things can come out of that mind."

He looked down at the silver bubble he had been playing with.

"Like that," he said. "That... that violates just about every law of
physics I was ever taught. And something that different, something that
violates so many rules... well, friends and neighbors, that scares me."

"Jubal was making them for some sort of target-shooting game," I told him. "Or to put on Christmas trees."

"Yeah, that's pure Jubal," Travis said.

We were all silent again for a time. Jubal wanted to use the silver
bubbles as children's toys, but it was pretty obvious they meant a lot
more than that. Just
what
they meant was still an open question.

Which Travis meant to solve. He got up from his seat and stretched. Then he looked at all of us again, in turn.