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 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 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.