by John Varley
Travis knew from bitter experience what the other kids did if they learned you were intelligent. It could all be summed up, he felt, in Moe Howard, the mean Stooge, sneering at Curly and saying, “Oh, a wise guy, eh?” Then the fingers poked in the eyes. In the city schools a wise guy was the worst thing you could be, except for being a faggot, and Travis figured things wouldn’t be any better out in the country.
They wouldn’t have been, but none of the Avery branch of the Broussard family had to worry about that, because none of them were ever put in school. Though there may never have been worse candidates for home schooling than the Avery Broussard family, the school boards of Bayou Teche Parish were hard-pressed to educate even the children who came in willingly. They didn’t have the heart to fight very hard about those whose parents would prefer their children to stay at home. Their high school graduates often had trouble passing seventh-grade-level tests. Could home schooling do much worse? They washed their hands of Avery Broussard and his brood, preferring not to notice that Avery’s mildly retarded common-law wife, Evangeline, could neither read nor write.
It turned out in the Broussard case that home schooling could do substantially worse than the public schools.
Avery had been an extremely religious man most of his life. He had [92] been raised Christian, of course, like everyone else in the parish, and Catholic, like many of his neighbors. But it was a wild, charismatic brand of Catholicism that just sort of naturally blended in with the hard-shell Baptists all around them until you could hardly tell the difference. Actually, the Broussard family church didn’t have much contact with either the Catholic or the Baptist mainstream. The First Baptist Church in Lafayette, for instance, never released venomous snakes in their immaculate sanctuary, nor did the congregation of Our Lady of the Bayous drink poison. Avery’s church did both of these things, and more. The church started small, and stayed small, new converts just about balancing out casualties.
In that part of Louisiana, it was common to be deeply religious yet far from saintly. A lot went out and raised some hell on Saturday night. Maybe that was the reason such extreme measures were thought necessary the following day, as if simple prayers and pleas would not be enough.
One night when he was twenty-two, dead drunk and coked to the eyeballs, Avery had gone out to the parking lot of the Gables, a local after-hours bucket of blood, to square off with Alphonse Hebert. Avery thought the matter should be settled with fists, and Avery was the best man with his fists for a good ten miles around. Hebert must have heard that, because he drew a revolver and fired all six shots at Avery from a distance of no more than six feet. Avery, suddenly cold sober but no more able to move than a jacklighted deer, stood there and pissed himself, then felt all over his body for bullet holes, then fell to his knees and began to pray as three of his brothers worked Hebert over with pool cues and boots, and the rest of the patrons of the Gables stood around and watched, the general feeling being that Hebert was getting no more than he deserved.
Now, while it was agreed that Hebert was easily plotzed enough to miss at that range, he was unlikely to miss with all six. And examining the bullet holes later, it surely did appear that most of that lead ought to have been slowed down appreciably by various parts of Avery before hitting the clapboard wall behind him, which would have been good [93] news for old Charlie Wilson, who soaked up two of the bullets after they came through the wall, one with his chest and the other with his head, and as a result gave up drinking and never quite walked right for the rest of his life.
“It weren’t no burnin’ bush, no,” Avery later told anyone who would listen. “But I knows de hand a God when I sees it, oh yes.” He swore off liquor, fornication, and fighting, which left quite a gap in his social life, as aside from sleeping, eating, and working as a roughneck on an offshore drilling rig when he needed money, drinking, fighting, and screwing other men’s wives was about all he did.
He filled the gaps with marriage and praying and preaching. He became even less employable than he had been before the miracle, as he could seldom go through an entire day without getting into a heated argument with his boss or a customer or fellow worker about religion. He never hesitated to point out sin, which did not make him popular. He moved deeper into the swamp and started in on a family.
Evangeline had been picked for the fertility of her lineage more than beauty or brains, as she had little of either, but she was fertile and prolific, and able to work like a horse even when eight and a half months gone. And that was good, because she spent the next fifteen years pregnant, giving birth usually in March or April, usually on a Sunday, and three times on Easter Sunday itself. Avery and Evangeline had seven sons: Veneration, Jubilation, Celebration, Sanctification, Exaltation, Consecration, and Hallelujah. They had five daughters, all named Gloria: Gloria Patri, Gloria Filly, Gloria Spiritusanctu, Gloria Inexcelsis, and Gloria Monday. They lost three, a boy and two girls, stillborn.
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 [94] 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.
[95] 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 per
son 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 [96] 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.
[97] 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.
11
* * *
“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.
[99] “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 [100] 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 c
ry 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 [101] 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.”