The Green Mile (21 page)

“The mouse told you,” I said. “Am I right?”

“Oui.”

“Like he whispered his name to you.”

“
Oui,
in my ear he whisper it.”

“Lie down, Del,” I said. “Have you a little rest. All that whispering back and forth must wear you out.”

He said something else—accused me of not believing him, I suppose. His voice seemed to be coming from a long way off again. And when I went back up to the duty desk, I hardly seemed to be walking at all—it was more like I was floating, or maybe not even moving, the cells just rolling past me on either side, movie props on hidden wheels.

I started to sit like normal, but halfway into it my knees unlocked and I dropped onto the blue cushion Harry had brought from home the year before and plopped onto the seat of the chair. If the chair hadn't been there, I reckon I would have plopped straight to the floor without passing Go or collecting two hundred dollars.

I sat there, feeling the nothing in my groin where a forest fire had been blazing not ten minutes before.
I helped it, didn't I?
John Coffey had said, and that was true, as far as my body went. My peace of mind was a different story, though.
That
he hadn't helped at all.

My eyes fell on the stack of forms under the tin ashtray we kept on the corner of the desk.
BLOCK REPORT
was printed at the top, and about halfway down was a blank space headed
Report All Unusual Occurrences.
I would use that space in tonight's report, telling the story of William Wharton's colorful and action-packed arrival. But suppose I also told what had happened to me in John Coffey's cell? I saw myself picking up the pencil—the one whose tip Brutal was always licking—and writing a single word in big capital letters: MIRACLE.

That should have been funny, but instead of smiling, all at once I felt sure that I was going to cry. I put my hands to my face, palms against my mouth to stifle the sobs—I didn't want to scare Del again just when he was starting to get settled down—but no sobs came. No tears,
either. After a few moments I lowered my hands back to the desk and folded them. I didn't know what I was feeling, and the only clear thought in my head was a wish that no one should come back onto the block until I was a little more in control of myself. I was afraid of what they might see in my face.

I drew a Block Report form toward me. I would wait until I had settled down a bit more to write about how my latest problem child had almost strangled Dean Stanton, but I could fill out the rest of the boilerplate foolishness in the meantime. I thought my handwriting might look funny—trembly—but it came out about the same as always.

About five minutes after I started, I put the pencil down and went into the W.C. adjacent to my office to take a leak. I didn't need to go very bad, but I could manage enough to test what had happened to me, I thought. As I stood there, waiting for my water to flow, I became sure that it would hurt just the way it had that morning, as if I were passing tiny shards of broken glass; what he'd done to me would turn out to be only hypnosis, after all, and that might be a relief in spite of the pain.

Except there was no pain, and what went into the bowl was clear, with no sign of pus. I buttoned my fly, pulled the chain that flushed the commode, went back to the duty desk, and sat down again.

I knew what had happened; I suppose I knew even when I was trying to tell myself I'd been hypnotized. I'd experienced a healing, an authentic Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty. As a boy who'd grown up going to whatever Baptist or Pentecostal church my mother and her sisters happened to be in favor of during any given month, I had heard plenty of Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty miracle stories. I didn't believe all of them, but there were plenty of people I did believe. One of these was a man named Roy Delfines, who lived with his family about two miles down the road from us when I was six or so. Delfines had chopped his son's little finger off with a hatchet, an accident which had occurred when the boy unexpectedly moved his hand on a log he'd been holding on the backyard chopping block for his dad. Roy Delfines said he had practically worn out the carpet with his knees that fall and winter, and in the spring the boy's finger had grown back. Even the
nail had grown back. I believed Roy Delfines when he testified at Thursday-night rejoicing. There was a naked, uncomplicated honesty in what he said as he stood there talking with his hands jammed deep into the pockets of his biballs that was impossible
not
to believe. “It itch him some when thet finger started coming, kep him awake nights,” Roy Delfines said, “but he knowed it was the Lord's itch and let it be.” Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty.

Roy Delfines's story was only one of many; I grew up in a tradition of miracles and healings. I grew up believing in gris-gris, as well (only, up in the hills we said it to rhyme with
kiss-kiss
): stump-water for warts, moss under your pillow to ease the heartache of lost love, and, of course, what we used to call
haints
—but I did not believe John Coffey was a gris-gris man. I had looked into his eyes. More important, I had felt his touch. Being touched by him was like being touched by some strange and wonderful doctor.

I helped it, didn't I?

That kept chiming in my head, like a snatch of song you can't get rid of, or words you'd speak to set a spell.

I helped it, didn't I?

Except
he
hadn't.
God
had. John Coffey's use of “I” could be chalked up to ignorance rather than pride, but I knew—believed, at least—what I had learned about healing in those churches of Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty, piney-woods amen corners much beloved by my twenty-two-year-old mother and my aunts: that healing is never about the healed or the healer, but about God's will. For one to rejoice at the sick made well is normal, quite the expected thing, but the person healed has an obligation to then ask why—to meditate on God's will, and the extraordinary lengths to which God has gone to realize His will.

What did God want of me, in this case? What did He want badly enough to put healing power in the hands of a child-murderer? To be on the block, instead of at home, sick as a dog, shivering in bed with the stink of sulfa running out of my pores? Perhaps; I was maybe supposed to be here instead of home in case Wild Bill Wharton decided to kick up more dickens, or to make sure Percy Wetmore didn't get up to some foolish and potentially destructive piece of fuckery. All right,
then. So be it. I would keep my eyes open . . . and my mouth shut, especially about miracle cures.

No one was apt to question my looking and sounding better; I'd been telling the world I was getting better, and until that very day I'd honestly believed it. I had even told Warden Moores that I was on the mend. Delacroix had seen something, but I thought he would keep his mouth shut, too (probably afraid John Coffey would throw a spell on him if he didn't). As for Coffey himself, he'd probably already forgotten it. He was nothing but a conduit, after all, and there isn't a culvert in the world that remembers the water that flowed through it once the rain has stopped. So I resolved to keep my mouth completely shut on the subject, with never an idea of how soon I'd be telling the story, or who I'd be telling it to.

But I was curious about my big boy, and there's no sense not admitting it. After what had happened to me there in his cell, I was more curious than ever.

B
EFORE LEAVING
that night, I arranged with Brutal to cover for me the next day, should I come in a little late, and when I got up the following morning, I set out for Tefton, down in Trapingus County.

“I'm not sure I like you worrying so much about this fellow Coffey,” my wife said, handing me the lunch she'd put up for me—Janice never believed in roadside hamburger stands; she used to say there was a bellyache waiting in every one. “It's not like you, Paul.”

“I'm not worried about him,” I said. “I'm curious, that's all.”

“In my experience, one leads to the other,” Janice said tartly, then gave me a good, hearty kiss on the mouth. “You look better, at least, I'll say that. For awhile there, you had me nervous. Waterworks all cured up?”

“All cured up,” I said, and off I went, singing songs like “Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine” and “We're in the Money” to keep myself company.

I went to the offices of the Tefton
Intelligencer
first, and they told me that Burt Hammersmith, the fellow I was looking for, was most likely over at the county courthouse. At the courthouse they told me that Hammersmith had been there but had left when a burst waterpipe had closed down the main proceedings, which happened to be a rape trial (in the pages of the
Intelligencer
the crime would be referred to as “assault on a woman,” which was how such things were done in the days before Ricki Lake and Carnie Wilson came on the scene). They guessed he'd probably gone on home. I got some directions out a dirt road so rutted and narrow I just about didn't dare take my Ford up it, and there I
found my man. Hammersmith had written most of the stories on the Coffey trial, and it was from him I found out most of the details about the brief manhunt that had netted Coffey in the first place. The details the
Intelligencer
considered too gruesome to print is what I mean, of course.

Mrs. Hammersmith was a young woman with a tired, pretty face and hands red from lye soap. She didn't ask my business, just led me through a small house fragrant with the smell of baking and onto the back porch, where her husband sat with a bottle of pop in his hand and an unopened copy of
Liberty
magazine on his lap. There was a small, sloping backyard; at the foot of it, two little ones were squabbling and laughing over a swing. From the porch, it was impossible to tell their sexes, but I thought they were boy and girl. Maybe even twins, which cast an interesting sort of light on their father's part, peripheral as it had been, in the Coffey trial. Nearer at hand, set like an island in the middle of a turd-studded patch of bare, beatup-looking ground, was a doghouse. No sign of Fido; it was another unseasonably hot day, and I guessed he was probably inside, snoozing.

“Burt, yew-all got you a cump'ny,” Mrs. Hammersmith said.

“All right,” he said. He glanced at me, glanced at his wife, then looked back at his kids, which was where his heart obviously lay. He was a thin man—almost painfully thin, as if he had just begun to recover from a serious illness—and his hair had started to recede. His wife touched his shoulder tentatively with one of her red, wash-swollen hands. He didn't look at it or reach up to touch it, and after a moment she took it back. It occurred to me, fleetingly, that they looked more like brother and sister than husband and wife—he'd gotten the brains, she'd gotten the looks, but neither of them had escaped some underlying resemblance, a heredity that could never be escaped. Later, going home, I realized they didn't look alike at all; what made them seem to was the aftermath of stress and the lingering of sorrow. It's strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.

She said, “Yew-all want a cold drink, Mr.—?”

“It's Edgecombe,” I said. “Paul Edgecombe. And thank you. A cold drink would be wonderful, ma'am.”

She went back inside. I held out my hand to Hammersmith, who gave it a brief shake. His grip was limp and cold. He never took his eyes off the kids down at the bottom of the yard.

“Mr. Hammersmith, I'm E Block superintendent at Cold Mountain State Penitentiary. That's—”

“I know what it is,” he said, looking at me with a little more interest. “So—the bull-goose screw of the Green Mile is standing on my back porch, just as big as life. What brings you fifty miles to talk to the local rag's only full-time reporter?”

“John Coffey,” I said.

I think I expected some sort of strong reaction (the kids who could have been twins working at the back of my mind . . . and perhaps the doghouse, too; the Dettericks had had a dog), but Hammersmith only raised his eyebrows and sipped at his drink. “Coffey's
your
problem now, isn't he?” Hammersmith asked.

“He's not much of a problem,” I said. “He doesn't like the dark, and he cries a lot of the time, but neither thing makes much of a problem in our line of work. We see worse.”

“Cries a lot, does he?” Hammersmith asked. “Well, he's got a lot to cry about, I'd say. Considering what he did. What do you want to know?”

“Anything you can tell me. I've read your newspaper stories, so I guess what I want is anything that wasn't in them.”

He gave me a sharp, dry look. “Like how the little girls looked? Like exactly what he did to them? That the kind of stuff you're interested in, Mr. Edgecombe?”

“No,” I said, keeping my voice mild. “It's not the Detterick girls I'm interested in, sir. Poor little mites are dead. But Coffey's not—not yet—and I'm curious about him.”

“All right,” he said. “Pull up a chair and sit, Mr. Edgecombe. You'll forgive me if I sounded a little sharp just now, but I get to see plenty of vultures in my line of work. Hell, I've been accused of being one of em often enough, myself. I just wanted to make sure of you.”

“And are you?”

“Sure enough, I guess,” he said, sounding almost indifferent. The story he told me is pretty much the one I set down earlier in this
account—how Mrs. Detterick found the porch empty, with the screen door pulled off its upper hinge, the blankets cast into one corner, and blood on the steps; how her son and husband had taken after the girls' abductor; how the posse had caught up to them first and to John Coffey not much later. How Coffey had been sitting on the riverbank and wailing, with the bodies curled in his massive arms like big dolls. The reporter, rack-thin in his open-collared white shirt and gray town pants, spoke in a low, unemotional voice . . . but his eyes never left his own two children as they squabbled and laughed and took turns with the swing down there in the shade at the foot of the slope. Sometime in the middle of the story, Mrs. Hammersmith came back with a bottle of homemade root beer, cold and strong and delicious. She stood listening for awhile, then interrupted long enough to call down to the kids and tell them to come up directly, she had cookies due out of the oven. “We will, Mamma!” called a little girl's voice, and the woman went back inside again.