John Varley - Red Thunder

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 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 [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.

“IT IMPRESSED THEjury 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.