In God's House (47 page)

When winter came to Frankfurt in December of 1995, I had been in Europe for six years. It was ten years since Francis Dubois had been sentenced to a twenty-year term and I was trying to put the past in the past. Kate had remarried, but she stayed in close touch, as did our children. When my dad got sick, Kate and the children had visited him often, though it was only me there at the very end when he asked a home healthcare lady to put a sponge to his dry lips. The last words my old gent ever spoke were, ‘Thank you.’” Now, whenever Kate called, she always ended every phone call with: “You have our love. Take care of yourself.”

An essay I once read stated that the place we consider home, the locale where we are most comfortable, the place we long for when we are absent, is not necessarily the place where we are born and reared, but rather the place where we encountered the most significant emotional experiences of our life. For sailors, it might be the open sea, for pilots, the night sky.

For me, it had always been Frankfurt, Germany. Especially the old quarter of Sachsenhausen, along the River Main, where I had lived for nearly two years with Kate and young Shelby, long ago. I was in the army then. It was that time in life we all have, that time before anything bad has happened.

Three months earlier, in September 1995, a headline in the International Herald Tribune had caught my eye: “Cardinal John
Wolleski, 88, Dies in Rome”. The short notice said the cardinal had passed away in a Vatican apartment and would be buried in Rome later that week. Arriving in Rome a few days later, I went straight to Ristorante Rinaldi on Piazza Navona. Old Giovanni Rinaldi was there, but he did not remember me. He told me where the Mass would be the next morning and gave me the address of the cemetery. Giovanni motioned for me to take a seat anywhere I wished. I chose a small table that gave me a view of Isabella in her Charlie Chaplin costume.

The cemetery was on a hill with tall trees, cedars. There were only three men at the freshly dug grave when I arrived: two laborers in khakis and a nervous older man in a baggy blue suit. The old man was smoking a short, unfiltered cigarette and constantly pulling on his long, fat nose. Unconsciously, he tossed the lit cigarette butt into the trench. Realizing what he had done, he cursed, and one of the laborers jumped into the hole, retrieved the cigarette, took a hit off it, stubbed it out and stuck it in his pocket. The name on the headstone next to Cardinal Wolleski’s plot read “Isabella Rinaldi”. I made a mental note to one day tell someone the story of the cardinal and the ice-cream girl.

The funeral cortège slowly made its way up the hill. At the graveside, the priest offered prayers and remarks in both Italian and English. When the service was over, the priest greeted the mourners. I took the last place in line and extended my hand as I reached him. “Father, you described the cardinal well.”

“He was a good man,” he said. “I am Jozef Majeski.”

“Renon Chattelrault. A long time ago I worked on a document for the cardinal with two priests in the United States, Fathers McDougall and Patterson.”

“Yes, of course. I remember. I know who you are. John thought highly of you. Once he gave me the names of your children on a piece of paper. The paper remains on the altar in the Holy Father’s private chapel.”

I reached in my pocket, pulled out a card and carefully printed
two words on the back of the card, handing it to him. “Will you put this on the altar of the Pope’s private chapel?”

He nodded as he looked down at the words I had written: “Will Courville.”

It was a freezing Monday night in December and I was staring out at the snowy Frankfurt streets when the phone rang. It was Kate, calling to tell me that Francis Dubois had been released from prison ten years early.

“You’re serious?”

“Yeah, Ren. He was released without any supervision. The media in Louisiana is saturated with the story of his early release. The biggest and worst story was a wire story originating with the
Houston Chronicle
that ran in the New Orleans newspaper. It quoted prisoners at the Riverbend facility saying Francis Dubois ran the prison when he was there because of the influence an important judge had over the warden. According to the
Chronicle
, Dubois had his own office where he scheduled prison activities, and he was allowed to pick his own assistants, always choosing the youngest-looking kids on the juvenile wing. Apparently, he spent a couple of years of his sentence, when he was supposed to be in a state penitentiary, living as a trustee in the jail of Morgan’s Hope, his hometown. He was free to come and go as he pleased at Morgan’s Hope, only required to make a ten p.m. bed-check.”

I waited to hear more.

Kate told me the new district attorney in Thiberville was outraged, offering interviews to any media outlet that would talk to him. The Louisiana state Senate convened a special panel to investigate the circumstances surrounding the early release of the most notorious criminal in Louisiana history. She said one of the United States senators issued a statement about the obvious miscarriage of justice.

I could only imagine what impact the news had had on the people of Amalie – Dubois’s victims, their families and friends, the entire community.

Kate closed by saying, “I don’t know how this could possibly involve you, Ren, but I have a bad feeling. I knew you’d want to know. All hell’s broken loose over his early release and the stories about the special treatment this judge got for him while he was incarcerated.”

I thanked her for calling and asked her to give my love to the kids. When we hung up, I made a mental note to research Judge Livingston and find out what a Knight of Malta was.

Poppa Vidros, Wiley Arceneaux and Tommy Wesley Rachou were having coffee on the front porch of Wiley Arceneaux’s Feed & Seed store.

The noise and smoke from the tires on Randy Falgout’s truck startled the group. Falgout spun the truck off the blacktop onto the oyster-shell parking lot and nearly rammed into the side of the building. Throwing the door open and jumping from the cab of the truck, he screamed, “They seen him. The fucker. Dubois’s Suburban was seen by an old trapper early this morning. Going in the direction of his camp at South Pass. The fuck has come back here. This time he ain’t leaving.”

“I got three guns,” Poppa shouted.

“I got two shotguns inside the store,” Wiley said.

“Get ’em,” Randy shouted. “Give me one.”

In less than a minute, the men were locked and loaded, in a two-truck caravan, headed for the wild marsh.

The old trapper had been right about seeing Father Dubois’s old black Chevrolet Suburban on the South Pass Road. When he was released from prison, Dubois had gone back to Morgan’s Hope, where one of his brothers had kept his car on blocks with the fluids drained for ten years. For reasons known only to him, Francis Dubois was returning to the scene of some of his most heinous crimes.

Poppa Vidros was waving his arm out of the driver’s side, motioning Randy Falgout to slow down and pull over onto the shell surface of an oilfield installation, a web of pipes painted silver contained within a high fence. Once the men had got down from their vehicles, Poppa said, “That’s his truck. Up there by the boathouse. His camp is just the other side of the boathouse. We walk it from here.”

“The fucker has guns too,” Randy said.

The men checked the ammo in their shotguns and started walking on the soggy grass, being as quiet as they could.

Francis Dubois was on his knees in the small utility room at his fishing camp. It had a hot-water heater, a sink and shelving. With a crowbar in his hands, he pulled at the hard cypress planking. In his haste to leave the area years earlier, when he cleaned out the church rectory, he had forgotten about the camp. The weatherproof safe he had installed under the floorboards contained something he needed and some things he never wanted anyone to find.

The four men huddled behind the boathouse. They spoke in whispers. It was decided that Wiley Arceneaux would cover the back of the camp while the others approached from the front.

The first thing Dubois heard was the sound of Poppa’s heavy boots on the front porch of the camp. The old structure shook for a moment. Poppa kicked the door open. A gust of wind blew in, shaking a camouflage jumpsuit hanging in the corner of the front room. Mistaking the suit for a man, Poppa unloaded a round of buckshot into the clothing.

Dubois flew out the back door of the utility room, surprising Wiley Arceneaux as he hit him with the crowbar, knocking him out. Dubois dove into the freezing water of the canal so fast he failed to close his mouth. He tasted the icy, muddy water as he plunged to the bottom and swam through the grassy reeds. He was only ten yards from the camp, but in the cover of the marsh he could have been ten miles away.

Rushing through the camp, Poppa, Randy and Tommy Wesley found Wiley unconscious and bleeding in the mud near the boathouse.

“Tommy, you get Wiley to the hospital. Randy and I can take care of the fuck our ownselves,” Poppa said.

As Tommy Wesley Rachou was picking up Wiley out of the mud, he said, “We got to call the cops.”

“Fuck the cops,” Poppa said. “They had their chance. No fucking cops. Tell the ER nurse Wiley slipped in a boathouse.”

Dubois had made a lot of ground by the time Randy and Poppa returned from helping load Wiley into Tommy’s truck. Dubois had stripped off everything but his jockey shorts. He buried his clothing in the soft silt. The waterlogged, mud-caked clothing would have slowed him down.

He shivered in the freezing, brackish marsh water, colder than he’d ever felt in his life. Dubois mimicked the motion of a water snake, slithering on his belly on the surface of the slimy mud, beneath the cover of the tall grass. Aware he was making a trail, he doubled back and created a false trail to the east, another to the west. Then he entered a cut, a narrow slit through the marsh dug out for the mudboats used by gaugers taking pipeline readings. Dubois was all too aware that these ditches were known as alligator runs.

Randy Falgout, a master mechanic with boat engines, found Dubois’s mudboat in the boathouse and managed to get its motor to turn over. The vertical exhaust pipe spewed enough smoke to fill the tin shed. Poppa and Randy were being overcome by fumes as Poppa struggled with the chain on the double doors. Exasperated, Poppa blew the doors open with a shotgun blast.

Hearing the motor and the gun, Dubois knew what was coming. As he heard the boat running up the cut, he twisted, lying on one side. Then he slid out of the small canal and back into the dense marsh grass, leaving as small a print as possible in the muddy bank, hurriedly righting the reeds he had disturbed. The mud was as cold as the water.

Dubois decided he would lie there until dark. As the hours passed, Dubois did not notice the mosquitoes that covered him, sucking blood from his flesh. He began to feel colder and weaker. Aware that his breathing was slowing and his mind was getting cloudy, he took his pulse. The slow heart rate he counted told him his body temperature was falling fast.

A small mound to his right appeared to be an alligator nest. He knew if that was the case, the big female would return soon and attack anything that appeared threatening to her hatchlings. He knew he would either be riddled with shotgun wounds, torn to shreds by an alligator, or frozen into a stiff carcass before the night was over. Not wanting to disturb the grass more than necessary, he began to inch away from the nest, finding it increasingly difficult to move. His limbs acted erratically, out of sync with his mind. The loss of coordination scared him as much as his slow pulse. He stopped and listened for the boat motor.

He knew his boat engine well and could tell it was not in gear but was idling in the cut twenty or thirty feet away. The engine noise drowned out the voices of those in the mudboat. He had not even looked at Wiley Arceneaux when he hit him with the crowbar. He had no idea who was hunting him or how many there were. He only knew they had guns. All he had was his knowledge of the terrain, his survival instincts, and his ability to blend in with the savage environment. With each attempt to move his limbs, Dubois lost more control. The freezing temperatures were conquering his naked body. Every moment the sun dropped lower in the sky, it seemed the temperature dropped another degree or two.

When dark fell, Poppa and Randy were already back in Dubois’s camp. Tommy had returned with news that Wiley had come to in the truck and was getting X-rays at the hospital. They sat in the dark front room, their flashlights turned off. There was no moon and the low cloud-cover made it impossible to see one another in the blackness. They spoke in whispers.

“He’s gotta come back here,” Tommy said.

“Don’t go betting on that,” Randy said.

“You really think the fucker could stay the night out in that marsh?” Poppa asked. “Something is gonna kill him tonight. No one can survive out there. It’s gonna freeze over solid tonight. Let the fucker freeze. Hope he hits a nest of water moccasins and dies of snake bites. Let a gator roll him and bury him in the mud in the bottom of a canal, bury him in the mud until he’s rotten enough for that gator to want to eat him. Fuck him.”

The three men stayed the night in the rickety camp. As dawn approached, Poppa said, “What the fuck ya think he was doing here?”

Randy Falgout walked through the rooms, using his flashlight to guide him. “There’s a bunch of marks on the floor back in the room where the hot-water tank is.”

The group gathered round the gouge marks in the cypress planking. Poppa addressed the situation as he addressed every situation. He blasted the boards loose with his shotgun.

When the dust and splinters settled, Randy got to his knees and reached down into an iron box beneath the floor. Its top had been torn loose when the floor was shot to pieces. Poppa held a flashlight as Randy pulled out a stack of plastic Ziploc bags filled with cash. Then he began to pull up baggies containing something altogether different – graphic photos of the men’s sons engaged in sex with the priest and each other.

At the sight of the photographs, Tommy Wesley Rachou went outside and began vomiting. Big Poppa Vidros started crying, sobbing. Randy just looked down and muttered, “Holy Mother of Christ.”

Tommy came back in, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his coat. “Should the pictures go to the police?”

“Too late,” Randy said, as he put a flame to the pile of photographs on the rear porch.

“The money?” Poppa asked.

“You take it, Poppa,” Randy said. “Give it to the coach over at the school for the new baseball field and the leaks in the gym.”

When the sun was up, the men began speaking in normal tones. Tommy said, “How long we gonna wait?”

“I’m done,” Poppa said. “Let’s go. Dubois’s dead. He froze, or something got him in the marsh last night. Nobody coulda made it out there last night. He’s gotta be dead by now.”

When darkness had fallen over the marsh and Dubois could no longer hear the boat motor, he got back in the alligator track and made his way to the big canal. By the time he reached the canal he was so cold that he was losing all feeling. He swam away from the direction of the camp, only able to stroke in slow motion as his body began to shut down. When he was clear of the camp, he began to walk upright on the muddy bank, sliding into the water over and over, crawling out on his belly, using his hands like claws, digging into the soft mud, fighting to survive.

He knew there was a small Shell Oil Company fuel depot a mile away. It would be closed at this hour and no one would return until mid-morning. If he could make it that far, Dubois knew he could break in, clean up and find overalls and boots, something to wear. Though his mind was cloudy, his ability to think foggy, he believed there might be a boat to steal at the Shell depot. He knew the maze of canals that crisscrossed this marsh like he knew the back of his hand. He would make a large circle, cross under the bridge, and return to the vicinity of his camp in the morning. If the men who were hunting him were gone, he’d retrieve his spare key from under his vehicle, make sure his wallet was still in the console, and then drive along the ridge road that ran through the marsh. That would get him into Texas, where he could buy clothes, get ointment for his skin, and go to his brother Bobby’s farm in Flatwoods.

As he clawed his way from the canal and slumped onto the bank, Dubois gave himself a reality check. His plans were no more than the last fantasy of a freezing, dying man. If he did not get up soon, he would expire right there. He rolled over onto his stomach, got to all fours and collapsed face down in the icy mud.

When Wiley, Tommy and Papa got back to the Feed & Seed store, they turned on all the gas space heaters, brewed coffee and made a pact never to tell anyone that they had caused the death of the monster. Poppa said, “I just wish I could have unloaded my shotgun in that bastard, hit him just hard enough in the right place… ya know, watched him die slow like.”