In God's House (43 page)

I had had Francis Dubois’s eldest brother and two detectives accompany my client when he flew Philadelphia to Atlanta, avoiding Louisiana airports. They drove him from Atlanta to the Thiberville parish prison under the cover of darkness, much like the first time he had been brought home for a court appearance, more than a year before.

Matt had cleared his calendar for the week. “No one with the diocese is going to go near his prison cell after he’s sentenced. I want to be there for him, for pastoral support. Can you arrange this with the jailer? I can spend the days with Francis and the evenings with you and your family, if that’s okay?” Yet again I was amazed at Matt’s capacity for kindness.

The night before the sentencing, I received a call from Des telling me Matt had a problem with his neck. He had been admitted to a hospital in Washington and surgery was planned for the next day.

This time we were in the large courtroom because there were so many media people present. It was standing room only. I looked over the courtroom. In the last row, against the wall, I saw Francis Dubois’s parents, Iris and Willifred.

There would be no public trial of the priest. It was the result I wanted, the result the Vatican wanted.

To meet the expectations of the victims’ parents, the press, and
the voters who had elected Sean, we had written a sentencing document that implied Dubois had no option but to serve his time at Hannover House in New Jersey, rather than in a prison operated by the Louisiana department of corrections. It stated that he would receive medical care at Hannover House, and would continue to take Depo-Provera.

In writing the plea agreement, however, Sean and I had unwittingly laid the foundations for a legal free-for-all that could conceivably play out to our disadvantage in the future. The truth was that, legally, Dubois had a choice. At that time no Louisiana judge had the authority to sentence a defendant to a New Jersey penal facility. Nor could a judge mandate that a prisoner receive medication of any kind, especially something as controversial as Depo-Provera, the drug the media erroneously referred to as chemical castration.

The court proceedings that ended the criminal prosecution of Father Francis Dubois took less than five minutes.

Sean Robinette, Francis Dubois and I stood in front of Judge Labat, very close to the bench. We all stuck to an agreed-upon script. Dubois entered the plea of guilty to a portion of the indictment. The judge asked Dubois whether he was taking injections of Depo-Provera and whether he intended to continue this medication. Dubois answered “Yes” to both questions. The judge asked Dubois whether he was presently under medical care and intended to remain under medical care, and again the response was affirmative.

Judge Eloi Labat then imposed a sentence of twenty years in prison without the possibility of suspension, pardon or parole. And the judge approved Hannover House as an appropriate site to serve the sentence.

After the sentencing, Dubois was returned to the Thiberville correctional facility, where he was housed in a comfortable single cell in the medical wing. There were no other prisoners in the clinic.

“Can you come to see me tomorrow, Renon?” Dubois asked.

“No, I’m sorry. Mo will come. I need some time to myself, some time to rest. I know the waiting was not easy for you, but the work I was doing down here was hard on me. I’m beat.”

Scheduled broadcasts on local television and radio stations were interrupted by the announcement of Dubois’s sentence. After they heard the news, Elray “Poppa” Vidros and Tommy Wesley Rachou drove to the Feed & Seed store south of Amalie. When they walked in, Wiley Arceneaux nodded to a clerk to watch the counter and walked out the back door with Vidros and Rachou following him.

Poppa Vidros spit his whole chaw of tobacco against the trunk of an oak tree. “Dead and buried. That’s where this Father Dubois should be. And this fucking priest gets a pass. Twenty years – twenty – and then what happens when he gets out of prison? He’ll rape more kids.”

Tommy Rachou said, “I don’t think there was nothing the DA could do. There wasn’t nobody I knew who was gonna let their son go into that courtroom to testify in Thiberville. My boy did it once in Bayou Saint John. I didn’t want him to go through that again. There wasn’t nothing anybody could do, I reckon.”

“Where’s the justice?” Vidros asked.

“The bishop wasn’t even charged with nothing,” said Wiley. “That’s the thing that gets me. The priest only gets twenty years and the bishop’s robes don’t even get dirty.”

Poppa Vidros growled, “You read all the shit that came out. The bishop knew all about that fucking priest when he sent him down here.”

“He sent that priest here because he doesn’t care what happens to our kids. We’re a poor parish of dumb people. That’s what he thinks about us,” Tommy Rachou said.

Wiley said, “I know we’re gonna talk about this again tomorrow
morning. We’re gonna talk about this for a long time, I guess, but we ain’t gonna change nothing.”

Tommy slapped the porch railing. “All I know is there’s lots of people around the world who believe the Catholic Church is the one true Church of Jesus Christ. We know better. Hell, if Christ came back down here today, he’d be with the children and he would not go near those bastard clerics. If the world ever finds out what we know, they’ll know different about the Church too.”

After a long silence, Poppa spoke. “My sawed-off shotgun is still loaded since I first learned what that priest did. And – make book – it’s gonna stay loaded till I unload it in his ass.”

When the criminal case against Francis Dubois ended, I felt the loss of everything that ever mattered to me.

Kate had decided to move with our children to New Orleans to be closer to her aging parents. Whatever religious faith I had possessed had been killed off by the very institution I once believed in. The country place in Coteau that I loved so much would soon be empty and then sold. My children would be hours away from me. At my core, something told me I could no longer continue to work in the law or live in Thiberville, the place where my family had resided for generations.

The day after the Dubois case ended, I was completely exhausted, deeply depressed, and riddled with doubt about the role I had played. I was also ailing physically, running a fever so high that it scared Kate when she dropped in to see me at my town house. She insisted I move to the cottage in Coteau, where she could look in on me. A physician friend of ours came out to see us in the afternoon, examined me, and called for an ambulance.

Within hours, I was in the hospital and that night I underwent abdominal surgery as I was bleeding internally. When I was out of the recovery suite, the surgeon said he could not believe I had even been able to stand upright the past few months. I shrugged and honestly said, “I hurt sometimes, you know, bad. But I got through it with willpower during the day and whiskey at night.” His caution was that I better make some changes in my life, reduce the stress. He said I’d had a really close call.

Kate stayed at the hospital while the children were in school. By the third day, the boss of the family, Sasha, was getting antsy, demanding to see her papa. The hospital floor I was on was off limits to children under twelve, so her mom brought her up through the stairwell, avoiding the nurses’ station near the elevators. Sasha slowly walked into the room, looked at me, looked at her mom, then gave us her appraisal. “He looks okay to me.”

“I think he looks great, Sash,” Kate said.

Sasha touched my face. “He could stand a shave. Don’t you think?”

Growling, I said, “You two are talking about me like I’m laid out in a casket. I won’t have any more of this.”

Sasha jumped on a chair and flew toward me.

“Nooooooooooo,” I protested. A near catastrophe was averted when I caught her and set her on the side of the bed. She insisted on looking at the bandages, tubes, and IV hookups. Then she went back to the entrance area of the room, saying, “I brought you just the right thing.”

She had brought her favorite stuffed animal, Disco Duck. She put him by my pillow. “Disco will make sure you do everything the doctors tell you to do. Except one thing. There is one thing you don’t have to do. I’m telling you, Papa, it doesn’t matter what they say about eating all your food. Ya know, I’ve been in this hospital. The Jell-o here tastes like plastic. You don’t have to eat any.”

“I’ll remember that, but I think I’m going home in a few days.”

“No worries, Papa. I’ll let you have Disco at home too. All the way to… lemme see. How many days are there till Sunday?”

One night when Julie was in the hospital room, she pulled a chair close to the bed. She appeared tentative, not herself. Like Sasha, Julie enjoyed touching my scruffy face. “I don’t want anything to
happen to you,” she said. She started to cry. “I can’t lose you from my life.”

I held her hand. “I know, Julie. We’re in cahoots, whatever that is.”

When the ten o’clock news came on, the lead story had footage of an old man in a black suit, handcuffed and shackled, being guided by deputies into the local jail. The voiceover from the reporter explained, “These pictures show former Thiberville diocesan priest Father O. D. Ellison being escorted into the jail this afternoon, where he was to be held on charges involving two murders. Though the district attorney’s office has issued no statement, sources close to the investigation have told us that the priest confessed in the presence of the DA and his chief investigator in a Florida retirement home where he was living. The latest word is that Father Ellison has been moved to University Hospital after suffering a massive heart attack.”

I switched off the TV. Neither Julie nor I spoke about the news story on Ellison. She told me she was beginning to pack up and would begin the drive to her parents’ home in Virginia soon.

“This is it?” I asked. “Goodbye?”

“No, I will not say goodbye until you are well enough to come by the apartment for a meal. I’m going to cook something. No pizza. A real Italian meal.”

“No pizza? It’s a deal.”

When I was released from the hospital, Kate insisted I go back to the guest cottage in Coteau. She looked after me and I recovered well from the surgery, but my depression hung on. I didn’t know if it was some kind of post-surgery reaction or a result of having depleted all my resources during the Dubois saga. There were periods when I could not sleep at all, and times when I could do
nothing but sleep. Kate took the phone out of the cottage because she wanted me to rest, rather than try to practice law over the phone. I felt isolated, but in a way it was a comforting feeling.

Kate told me Des McDougall called her every day. It turned out our good friend Matt was also out of commission. He was still in hospital, having been admitted with a debilitating neck problem on the morning Dubois was sentenced. The next day he had undergone an anterior cervical fusion, a routine operation involving a bone graft. Apparently the donor site for the bone graft was his hip and an infection set in there. He was now in an isolation unit where no visitors were admitted. It was hard to think of that vibrant man in a hospital bed.

One afternoon when I could tell Kate was holding something from me, I pressed her. “I’m sorry, Ren,” she said. “I didn’t want to tell you, but last night Des told me they found Matt has some kind of cancer. I’m so sorry.”

I lay in bed in the cottage, trying to remember the things that had happened since I first walked into the Old Bishop’s House, a lunch that now seemed like it had taken place years ago rather than fourteen months earlier.

I tried to remember things. Rather than the memories rolling like a reel of film, they presented like a thousand snapshots scattered in the recesses of my mind. I saw different chancery buildings, faces of bishops, monsignors, and lawyers I’d encountered around the country. I saw pedophile priests, and families of priests, faces of child victims and their families. I couldn’t remember which faces belonged in which places, and my memory had no audio. Things I’d said, things they’d said, were all lost. It was a memory of motion. I had been in almost constant motion. I could remember some stark, still images, but the journey was a blur.

All I knew for sure about my recent, extended journey was that I had failed. I had failed the thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of little children whose names I would never know. The Church was not going to change until the crisis engulfed
them and the fires of the scandal scarred the walls of the Vatican itself. It would take many years for Catholic victims to find the courage to stand up to the formidable, intimidating power of their Church.

In the afternoons, Kate would come out to the cottage with a list of people who had called to check on me, some of whom wanted to visit with me. My brother, Mo, Julie, Des and Sean called every day. Soon she gave me the phone back, and I was taking calls and taking walks around the pond, getting stronger and laughing again with Sasha, Jake and Shelby. Sasha was still fishing with her popcorn-bacon combo because she could not bear to touch a worm. I spent hours on the cottage porch, sitting in a rocking chair, watching her fish.

I walked over to the wood pile and, mindful of my stitches, gingerly piled one log over another until I had the makings of a good fire. The wood had been soaked by a long afternoon downpour, which had also canceled Sasha’s daily fishing rodeo. It took time for the logs to catch fire.

Sitting in a rocking chair by the fire on the banks of the pond, I cleared my head and focused on my last hope.

I thought about my last hope until the fire burned to ashes. Still I believed it was possible that in the end, all the pain, suffering and tragedy I felt I was partly responsible for would not be for nothing. I had a plan no one knew about except two physicians at Hannover House and the members of Francis Dubois’s family.

Every pedophile priest I had met had said in one way or other that his actions were a matter of compulsion, not a choice. The medical volumes I had read on the subject, and the consultations I’d had with experts in the field, shed little light on the causes of the disorder. I began to wonder whether it might be possible to identify and treat people like Dubois before they started attacking children. Was the etiology founded in psychology, where the perpetrator had himself been a victim of sexual abuse, or had suffered some other trauma in his formative years? Or could such behavior be physiologically rooted – organic, perhaps genetic, even a part of one’s chemical composition, something that could be diagnosed early on?

Francis Dubois was from a large family. One sibling, his brother Walt, was a self-confessed pedophile. I had made countless trips up to Morgan’s Hope over the summer and during my many private conversations with Dubois’s siblings it became clear that none of them were aware that Walt shared this trait with Francis. Each one of the other siblings assured me that they were heterosexual and had never been attracted to a child or acted out with a child.

I wanted to see if a series of physical and psychological tests might somehow turn up something that matched Walt to Francis, while at the same time set both of them apart from their siblings and parents. Dubois’s parents and siblings agreed that, once the criminal case was resolved, they would all go to Hannover House, or any other sexual disorders clinic I directed them to, and submit to any such tests the doctors prescribed. Francis Dubois was aware of my plans.

My hope was that something positive would come from all of this, that something important would be learned that would make children safer from sexual predators. Soon Dubois would be incarcerated at Hannover and the testing could begin. This was my last hope.

As soon as I walked back into the office, Mo handed me a document whose embossed gold letterhead identified the writer as a Judge Garret Livingston, chief judge of an appeals court in New Orleans.

Judge Livingston’s letter was brief:

“Mo, you know who this is?”

“No, but he sounded like a jackass on the telephone.”

“Well, I think he is a jackass. I’ve never met him, but I’ve heard. He’s the most powerful judge in the state. He was once considered for the US Supreme Court. Put in a call to the judge.”

“Okay, Ren. Hey, don’t be insolent.”

When the judge came on the line, I offered reasons of health for my failure to return his phone calls.

The judge said, “Okay. Let us understand. Henceforth, when I make a call to you, your secretary will locate you. Even if you are in surgery, she will locate you. There will be no more of this. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

The judge plowed on. “Father Dubois’s family members are friends of mine and I want to help. I have spoken with the bishop in Thiberville, the archbishop in New Orleans, the Louisiana secretary of the department of corrections, and I have talked to the governor about moving Father Dubois out of that sheriff’s jail now and putting him in the best possible prison in the state. The move will happen this week.”

His contacting me was an astonishing breach in judicial ethics. All I said was, “Yes, sir, I understand.”

“Good. Goodbye, young man.”

The truth was I did not understand the judge at all. From the beginning, I had an ironclad agreement with Dubois that no third party would ever be involved in his legal affairs. The idea of a man in Judge Livingston’s position involving himself in the affairs of a notorious criminal, a pedophile, was beyond the reach of my intellect or imagination.

Dubois was stretched out on his bunk in his single cell in the medical wing, reading a book on bow hunting. The guard unlocked the door and let me in. Dubois snapped the book closed.

“Hi, Renon. You look great. Looks like you recovered from surgery well. You rested yet?”

“Think so.”

“Mo has come by every day.”

I handed him Judge Livingston’s letter.

Dubois glanced at the letterhead and laid the stationery on his bunk. “Yeah. He’s a very nice man. He wants to help. He’s getting me moved to a prison by Baton Rouge that he believes is perfect for me. He’s a close friend of the warden there.”

“What are you talking about? What in the hell are you talking about? You’re going to Hannover House. I fought like hell to get Hannover set up for you. You are going to get treated while you are incarcerated. There’s no treatment in the Louisiana prison system. You know all of your family members have agreed to be examined, tested, and evaluated at Hannover. You agreed to this too. Hannover is your one chance to do something meaningful with your life. It’s your only chance at redemption. I almost killed myself to get you this chance. I pushed things so far, so hard, that Will Courville committed suicide.”

Dubois looked at me impassively, almost as if he had heard nothing. Then he said, “Renon, don’t get so mad. Let me go to this place the judge has set up first, okay? Let me see how I like it there.”

“Look, I can’t make you go to Hannover. Francis, if you stay in the state system, the Depo-Provera injections will stop the first week. You will never receive any kind of treatment. You will always be the way you are.”

“Don’t feel that way, Renon. I will never forget what you did for me. There aren’t many decisions that are mine to make. Where I serve my sentence is my choice, according to the plea agreement papers we signed.”

“That’s true, but Francis, why in the hell didn’t you tell me about this judge being involved in your affairs before you were sentenced? We had a deal. No one was to be involved in your affairs but me. This judge has talked to everyone. He’s talked to the governor.”

“He’s an important man.”

“I know he’s important. He’s chief judge on an important court.”

“I mean… the judge is important in the Church. He knows everyone in the Church, even people in the Vatican. He’s a Knight of Malta.”

I figured a Knight of Malta must be a member of an ancient Christian order, like the Knights of Columbus, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to ask Dubois.

“How long has this Knight of Malta been involved in your affairs?”

“He was on the visitors’ list at the Saint Martin Center in New Hampshire, and I put him on the list at the Stalder Institute. Every place I’ve been. We’re old friends.”

“Judges don’t get involved in the affairs of a state prisoner. And they are not usually friends with people who have your lifestyle either.”

“It is none of your business. It’s my business. The judge is my friend,” Dubois said with authority.

“Okay, Francis. I’m sure Mo will be here after Mass today.”

In a very detached way, almost as if Francis knew this was the last conversation we would ever have, he said, “You take care of yourself, Renon.”

“You belong in Hannover House, Francis.”

Francis Dubois became more assertive. “Don’t tell me where I belong. No one asked you to give up twenty years of your life. I belong in the most comfortable environment I can find. The judge is going to get me sent to the best prison for me. He’s sure I’ll like this prison.”

I stood quietly, not knowing what I wanted to say to him. Now
I knew definitively that no good could ever come of this. Dubois and his family would not be tested. I felt like I had been a pawn in a game played by a pedophile and someone in the shadows whose presence I never even knew about, a powerful Catholic judge.

I had a flashback, remembering an all-night conversation in a New Orleans hotel on the same night I met Dubois’s family. At once, I knew I should have listened to Joe Rossi long ago in that hotel room and pled Dubois to a life sentence; ended it all. Maybe Dubois might have killed himself, but Will Courville would be alive. Whatever damage and destruction I had inflicted on others, and whatever destruction I had visited on my own life had all been in vain.

I was certain this was the last time I would ever have to see Francis Dubois and I took a good look before I walked out of the jail cell. Dubois stared at me and slowly a smirk formed in the corners of his mouth, that same expression I first saw in the Saint Martin treatment center in Deerfield, the expression I had seen so many times. The expression that told me Francis Dominick Dubois knew something I didn’t know. The last image I had of him was a half-smile beneath flat, dull eyes.