6

   When I was eighteen, my Uncle Paul—the man I was named for—died of a heart attack. My mother and dad took me to Chicago with them to attend his funeral and visit relatives from my father's side of the family, many of whom I had never met. We were gone almost a month. In some ways that was a good trip, a necessary and exciting trip, but in another way it was horrible. I was deeply in love, you see, with the young woman who was to become my wife two weeks after my nineteenth birthday. One night when my longing for her was like a fire burning out of control in my heart and my head (oh yes, all right, and in my balls, as well), I wrote her a letter that just seemed to go on and on—I poured out my whole heart in it, never looking back to see what I'd said because I was afraid cowardice would make me stop. I didn't stop, and when a voice in my head clamored that it would be madness to mail such a letter, that I would be giving her my naked heart to hold in her hand, I ignored it with a child's breathless disregard of the consequences. I often wondered if Janice kept that letter, but never quite got up enough courage to ask. All I know for sure is that I did not find it when I went through her things after the funeral, and of course that by itself means nothing. I suppose I never asked because I was afraid of discovering that burning epistle meant less to her than it did to me.
   It was four pages long, I thought I would never write anything longer in my life, and now look at this. All this, and the end still not in sight. If I'd known the story was going to go on this long, I might never have started. What I didn't realize was how many doors the act of writing unlocks, as if my Dad's old fountain pen wasn't really a pen at all, but some strange variety of skeleton key. The mouse is probably the best example of what I'm talking about—Steamboat Willy, Mr. Jingles, the mouse on the Mile. Until I started to write, I never realized how important he (yes, he) was. The way he seemed to be looking for Delacroix before Delacroix arrived, for instance—I don't think that ever occurred to me, not to my conscious mind, anyway, until I began to write and remember.
   I guess what I'm saying is that I didn't realize how far back I'd have to go in order to tell you about John Coffey, or how long I'd have to leave him there in his cell, a man so huge his feet didn't just stick off the end of his bunk but hung down all the way to the floor. I don't want you to forget him, all right? I want you to see him there, looking up at the ceiling of his cell, weeping his silent tears, or putting his arms over his face. I want you to hear him, his sighs that trembled like sobs, his occasional watery groan. These weren't the sounds of agony and regret we sometimes heard on E Block, sharp cries with splinters of remorse in them; like his wet eyes, they were somehow removed from the pain we were used to dealing with. In a way—I know how crazy this will sound, of course I do, but there is no sense in writing something as long as this if you can't say what feels true to your heart—in a way it was as if it was sorrow for the whole world he felt, something too big ever to be completely eased. Sometimes I sat and talked to him, as I did with all of them—talking was our biggest, most important job, as I believe I have said—and I tried to comfort him. I don't feel that I ever did, and part of my heart was glad he was suffering, you know. Felt he deserved to suffer. I even thought sometimes of calling the governor (or getting Percy to do it—hell, he was Percy's damn uncle, not mine) and asking for a stay of execution. We shouldn't burn him yet, I'd say It's still hurting him too much, biting into him too much, twisting in his guts like a nice sharp stick. Give him another ninety days, your honor, sir. Let him go on doing to himself what we can't do to him.
   It's that John Coffey I'd have you keep to one side of your mind while I finish catching up to where I started—that John Coffey lying on his bunk, that John Coffey who was afraid of the dark perhaps with good reason, for in the dark might not two shapes with blonde curls—no longer little girls but avenging harpies—be waiting for him? That John Coffey whose eyes were always streaming tears, like blood from a wound that can never heal.

7

   So The Chief burned and The President walked—as far as C Block, anyway, which was home to most of Cold Mountain's hundred and fifty lifers. Life for The Pres turned out to be twelve years. He was drowned in the prison laundry in 1944. Not the Cold Mountain prison laundry; Cold Mountain closed in 1933. I don't suppose it mattered much to the inmates—wars is walls, as the cons say, and Old Sparky was every bit as lethal in his own little stone death chamber, I reckon, as he'd ever been in the storage room at Cold Mountain.
   As for The Pres, someone shoved him face-first into a vat of dry-cleaning fluid and held him there. When the guards pulled him out again, his face was almost entirely gone. They had to ID him by his fingerprints. On the whole, he might have been better off with Old Sparky... but then he never would have had those extra twelve years, would he? I doubt he thought much about them, though, in the last minute or so of his life, when his lungs were trying to learn how to breathe Hexlite and lye cleanser.
   They never caught whoever did for him. By then I was out of the corrections line of work, but Harry Terwilliger wrote and told me. "He got commuted mostly because he was white," Harry wrote, "but he got it in the end, just the same. I just think of it as a long stay of execution that finally ran out."
   There was a quiet time for us in E Block, once The Pres was gone. Harry and Dean were temporarily reassigned, and it was just me, Brutal, and Percy on the Green Mile for a little bit. Which actually meant just me and Brutal, because Percy kept pretty much to himself. I tell you, that young man was a genius at finding things not to do. And every so often (but only when Percy wasn't around), the other guys would show up to have what Harry liked to call "a good gab." On many of these occasions the mouse would also show up. We'd feed him and he'd sit there eating, just as solemn as Solomon, watching us with his bright little oilspot eyes.
   That was a good few weeks, calm and easy even with Percy's more than occasional carping. But all good things come to an end, and on a rainy Monday in late July—have I told you how rainy and dank that summer was?—I found myself sitting on the bunk of an open cell and waiting for Eduard Delacroix.
   He came with an unexpected bang. The door leading into the exercise yard slammed open, letting in a flood of light, there was a confused rattle of chains, a frightened voice babbling away in a mixture of English and Cajun French (a patois the cons at Cold Mountain used to call da bayou), and Brutal hollering, 'Hey! Quit it! For Chrissakes! Quit it, Percy!'
   I had been half-dozing on what was to become Delacroix's bunk, but I was up in a hurry, my heart slugging away hard in my chest. Noise of that kind on E Block almost never happened until Percy came; he brought it along with him like a bad smell.
   'Come on, you fuckin French-fried faggot!' Percy yelled, ignoring Brutal completely. And here he came, dragging a guy not much bigger than a bowling pin by one arm. In his other hand, Percy had his baton. His teeth were bared in a strained grimace, and his face was bright red. Yet he did not look entirely unhappy. Delacroix was trying to keep up with him, but he had the legirons on, and no matter how fast he shuffled his feet, Percy pulled him along faster. I sprang out of the cell just in time to catch him as he fell, and that was how Del and I were introduced.
   Percy rounded on him, baton raised, and I held him back with one arm. Brutal came puffing up to us, looking as shocked and nonplussed by all this as I felt.
   'Don't let him hit me no mo, m'sieu,' Delacroix babbled. 'S'il vous pla t, s'il vous pla t!'
   'Let me at im, let me at im!' Percy cried, lunging forward. He began to hit at Delacroix's shoulders with his baton. Delacroix held his arms up, screaming, and the stick went whap-whap-whap against the sleeves of his blue prison shirt. I saw him that night with the shirt off, and that boy had bruises from Christmas to Easter. Seeing them made me feel bad. He was a murderer, and nobody's darling, but that's not the way we did things on E Block. Not until Percy came, anyhow.
   'Whoa! Whoa!' I roared. 'Quit that! What's it all about, anyway?' I was trying to get my body in between Delacroix's and Percy's, but it wasn't working very well. Percy's club continued to flail away, now on one side of me and now on the other. Sooner or later he was going to bring one down on me instead of on his intended target, and then there was going to be a brawl right here in this corridor, no matter who his relations were. I wouldn't be able to help myself, and Brutal was apt to join in. In some ways, you know, I wish we'd done it. It might have changed some of the things that happened later on.
   'Fucking faggot! I'll teach you to keep your hands off me, you lousy bum-puncher!'
   Whap! Whap! Whap! And now Delacroix was bleeding from one ear and screaming. I gave up trying to shield him, grabbed him by one shoulder, and hurled him into his cell, where he went sprawling on the bunk. Percy darted around me and gave him a final hard whap on the butt—one to go on, you could say. Then Brutal grabbed him—Percy—I mean—by the shoulders and hauled him across the corridor.
   I grabbed the cell door and ran it shut on its tracks. Then I turned to Percy, my shock and bewilderment at war with pure fury. Percy had been around about several months at that point, long enough for all of us to decide we didn't like him very much, but that was the first time I fully understood how out of control he was.
   He stood watching me, not entirely without fear—he was a coward at heart, I never had any doubt of that—but still confident that his connections would protect him. In that he was correct. I suspect there are people who wouldn't understand why that was, even after all I've said, but they would be people who only know the phrase Great Depression from the history books. If you were there, it was a lot more than a phrase in a book, and if you had a steady job, brother, you'd do almost anything to keep it.
   The color was fading out of Percy's face a little by then, but his cheeks were still flushed, and his hair, which was usually swept back and gleaming with brilliantine, had tumbled over his forehead.
   'What in the Christ was that all about?' I asked. 'I have never—I have never!—had a prisoner beaten onto my block before!'
   'Little fag bastard tried to cop my joint when I pulled him out of the van,' Percy said. 'He had it coming, and I'd do it again.'
   I looked at him, too flabbergasted for words. I couldn't imagine the most predatory homosexual on God's green earth doing what Percy had just described. Preparing to move into a crossbar apartment on the Green Mile did not, as a rule, put even the most deviant of prisoners in a sexy mood.
   I looked back at Delacroix, cowering on his bunk with his arms still up to protect his face. There were cuffs on his wrists and a chain running between his ankles. Then I turned to Percy 'Get out of here,' I said. 'I'll want to talk to you later.'
   'Is this going to be in your report?' he demanded truculently. 'Because if it is, I can make a report of my own, you know.'
   I didn't want to make a report; I only wanted him out of my sight. I told him so.
   'The matter's closed,' I finished. I saw Brutal looking at me disapprovingly, but ignored it. 'Go on, get out of here. Go over to Admin and tell them you're supposed to read letters and help in the package room.'
   'Sure.' He had his composure back, or the crack-headed arrogance that served him as composure. He brushed his hair back from his forehead with his hands—soft and white and small, the hands of a girl in her early teens, you would have thought—and then approached the cell. Delacroix saw him, and he cringed back even farther on his bunk, gibbering in a mixture of English and stewpot French.
   'I ain't done with you, Pierre,' he said, then jumped as one of Brutal's huge hands fell on his shoulder.
   'Yes you are,' Brutal said. 'Now go on. Get in the breeze.'
   'You don't scare me, you know,' Percy said. 'Not a bit.' His eyes shifted to me. 'Either of you.' But we did. You could see that in his eyes as clear as day, and it made him even more dangerous. A guy like Percy doesn't even know himself what he means to do from minute to minute and second to second.
   What he did right then was turn away from us and go walking up the corridor in long, arrogant strides. He had shown the world what happened when scrawny, half-bald little Frenchmen tried to cop his joint, by God, and he was leaving the field a victor.
   I went through my set speech, all about how we had the radio—Make Believe Ballroom and Our Gal Sunday, and how we'd treat him jake if he did the same for us. That little homily was not what you'd call one of my great successes. He cried all the way through it, sitting huddled up at the foot of his bunk, as far from me as he could get without actually fading into the corner. He cringed every time I moved, and I don't think he heard one word in six. Probably just as well. I don't think that particular homily made a whole lot of sense, anyway.
   Fifteen minutes later I was back at the desk, where a shaken-looking Brutus Howell was sitting and licking the tip of the pencil we kept with the visitors' book. 'Will you stop that before you poison yourself, for God's sake?' I asked.
   'Christ almighty Jesus,' he said, putting the pencil down. 'I never want to have another hooraw like that with a prisoner coming on the block.'
   'My Daddy always used to say things come in threes,' I said.
   'Well, I hope your Daddy was full of shit on that subject,' Brutal said, but of course he wasn't. There was a squall when John Coffey came in, and a fullblown storm when "Wild Bill" joined us—it's funny, but things really do seem to come in threes. The story of our introduction to Wild Bill, how he came onto the Mile trying to commit murder, is something I'll get to shortly; fair warning.
   'What's this about Delacroix copping his joint?' I asked.
   Brutal snorted. 'He was ankle-chained and ole Percy was just pulling him too fast, that's all. He stumbled and started to fall as he got out of the stagecoach. He put his hands out same as anyone would when they start to fall, and one of them brushed the front of Percy's pants. It was a complete accident.'
   'Did Percy know that, do you think?' I asked. 'Was he maybe using it as an excuse just because he felt like whaling on Delacroix a little bit? Showing him who bosses the shooting match around here?'
   Brutal nodded slowly. 'Yeah. I think that was probably it.'
   'We have to watch him, then,' I said, and ran my hands, through my hair. As if the job wasn't hard enough. 'God, I hate this. I hate him.'
   'Me, too. And you want to know something else, Paul? I don't understand him. He's got connections, I understand that, all right, but why would he use them to get a job on the Green fucking Mile? Anywhere in the state pen, for that matter? Why not as a page in the state senate, or the guy who makes the lieutenant governor's appointments? Surely his people could've gotten him something better if he'd asked them, so why here?'
   I shook my head. I didn't know. There were a lot of things I didn't know then. I suppose I was naive.

8

   After that, things went back to normal again... for awhile, at least. Down in the county seat, the state was preparing to bring John Coffey to trial, and Trapingus County Sheriff Homer Cribus was pooh-poohing the idea that a lynch-mob might hurry justice along a little bit. None of that mattered to us; on E Block, no one paid much attention to the news. Life on the Green Mile was, in a way, like life in a soundproof room. From time to time you heard mutterings that were probably explosions in the outside world, but that was about all. They wouldn't hurry with John Coffey; they'd want to make damned sure of him.
   On a couple of occasions Percy got to ragging Delacroix, and the second time I pulled him aside and told him to come up to my office. It wasn't my first interview with Percy on the subject of his behavior, and it wouldn't be the last, but it was prompted by what, was probably the clearest understanding of what he was. He had the heart of a cruel boy who goes to the zoo not so he can study the animals but so he can throw stones at them in their cages.
   'You stay away from him, now, you hear?' I said. 'Unless I give you a specific order, just stay the hell away from him.'
   Percy combed his hair back, then patted at it with his sweet little hands. That boy just loved touching his hair. 'I wasn't doing nothing to him,' he said. 'Only asking how it felt to know you had burned up some babies, is all.' Percy gave me a round-eyed, innocent stare.
   'You quit with it, or there'll be a report,' I said.
   He laughed. 'Make any report you want,' he said. 'Then I'll turn around and make my own. Just like I told you when he came in. We'll see who comes off the best.'
   I leaned forward, hands folded on my desk, and spoke in a tone I hoped would sound like a friend being confidential. 'Brutus Howell doesn't like you much,' I said. 'And when Brutal doesn't like someone, he's been known to make his own report. He isn't much shakes with a pen, and he can't quit from licking that pencil, so he's apt to report with his fists. If you know what I mean.'
   Percy's complacent little smile faltered. 'What are you trying to say'
   'I'm not trying to say anything. I have said it. And if you tell any of your...friends... about this discussion, I'll say you made the whole thing up.' I looked at him all wide-eyed and earnest. 'Besides, I'm trying to be your friend, Percy. A word to the wise is sufficient, they say. And why would you want to get into it with Delacroix in the first place? He's not worth it.'
   And for awhile that worked. There was peace. A couple of times I was even able to send Percy with Dean or Harry when Delacroix's time to shower had rolled around. We had the radio at night, Delacroix began to relax a little into the scant routine of E Block, and there was peace.
   Then, one night, I heard him laughing.
   Harry Terwilliger was on the desk, and soon he was laughing, too. I got up and went on down to Delacroix's cell to see what he possibly had to laugh about.
   'Look, Cap'n' he said when he saw me. 'I done tame me a mouse!'
   It was Steamboat Willy. He was in Delacroix's cell. More: he was sitting on Delacroix's shoulder and looking calmly out through the bars at us with his little oildrop eyes. His tail was curled around his paws, and he looked completely at peace. As for Delacroix—friend, you wouldn't have known it was the same man who'd sat cringing and shuddering at the foot of his bunk not a week before. He looked like my daughter used to on Christmas morning, when she came down the stairs and saw the presents.
   'Watch dis!' Delacroix said. The mouse was sitting on his right shoulder. Delacroix stretched out his left arm. The mouse scampered up to the top of Delacroix's head, using the man's hair (which was thick enough in back, at least) to climb up. Then he scampered down the other side, Delacroix giggling as his tail tickled the side of his neck. The mouse ran all the way down his arm to his wrist, then turned, scampered back up to Delacroix's left shoulder, and curled his tail around his feet again.
   'I'll be damned,' Harry said.
   'I train him to do that,' Delacroix said proudly. I thought, In a pig's ass you did, but kept my mouth shut. 'His name is Mr. Jingles.'
   'Nah,' Harry said goodnaturedly. 'It's Steamboat Willy, like in the pitcher-show. Boss Howell named him.'
   'It's Mr. Jingles,' Delacroix said. On any other subject he would have told you that shit was Shinola, if you wanted him to, but on the subject of the mouse's name he was perfectly adamant. 'He whisper it in my ear. Cap'n, can I have a box for him? Can I have a box for my mous,' so he can sleep in here wit me?' His voice began to fall into wheedling tones I had heard a thousand times before. 'I put him under my bunk and he never be a scrid of trouble, not one.'
   'Your English gets a hell of a lot better when you want something,' I said, stalling for time.
   'Oh-oh,' Harry murmured, nudging me. 'Here comes trouble.'
   But Percy didn't look like trouble to me, not that night. He wasn't running his hands through his hair or fiddling with that baton of his, and the top button of his uniform shirt was actually undone. It was the first time I'd seen him that way, and it was amazing, what a change a little thing like that could make. Mostly, though, what struck me was the expression on his face. There was a calmness there. Not serenity—I don't think Percy Wetmore had a serene bone in his body—but the look of a man who has discovered he can wait for the things he wants. It was quite a change from the young man I'd had to threaten with Brutus Howell's fists only a few days before.
   Delacroix didn't see the change, though; he cringed against the wall of his cell, drawing his knees up to his chest. His eyes seemed to grow until they were taking up half his face. The mouse scampered up on his bald pate and sat there. I don't know if he remembered that he also had reason to distrust Percy, but it certainly looked as if he did. Probably it was just smelling the little Frenchman's fear, and reacting off that.
   'Well, well,' Percy said. 'Looks like you found yourself a friend, Eddie.'
   Delacroix tried to reply—some hollow defiance about what would happen to Percy if Percy hurt his new pal would have been my guess—but nothing came out. His lower lip trembled a little, but that was all. On top of his head, Mr. Jingles wasn't trembling. He sat perfectly still with his back feet in Delacroix's hair and his front ones splayed on Delacroix's bald looking at Percy, seeming to size him up. The way you'd size up an old enemy.
   Percy looked at me. 'Isn't that the same one I chased? The one that lives in the restraint room?'
   I nodded. I had an idea Percy hadn't seen the newly named Mr. Jingles since that last chase, and he showed no signs of wanting to chase it now.
   'Yes, that's the one,' I said. 'Only Delacroix there says his name is Mr. Jingles, not Steamboat Willy. Says the mouse whispered it in his ear.'
   'Is that so,' Percy said. 'Wonders never cease, do they?' I half-expected him to pull out his baton and start tapping it against the bars, just to show Delacroix who was boss, but he only stood there with his hands on his hips, looking in.
   And for no reason I could have told you in words, I said: 'Delacroix there was just asking for a box, Percy. He thinks that mouse will sleep in it, I guess. That he can keep it for a pet.' I loaded my voice with skepticism, and sensed more than saw Harry looking at me in surprise. 'What do you think about that?'
   'I think it'll probably shit up his nose some night while he's sleeping and then run away,' Percy said evenly, 'but I guess that's the French boy's lookout. I seen a pretty nice cigar box on Toot-Toot's cart the other night. I don't know if he'd give it away, though. Probably want a nickel for it, maybe even a dime.'
   Now I did risk a glance at Harry, and saw his mouth hanging open. This wasn't quite like the change in Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas morning, after the ghosts had had their way with him, but it was damned close.
   Percy leaned closer to Delacroix, putting his face between the bars. Delacroix shrank back even farther. I swear to God that he would have melted into that wall if he'd been able.
   'You got a nickel or maybe as much as a dime to pay for a cigar box, you lugoon?' he asked.
   'I got four pennies,' Delacroix said. 'I give them for a box, if it a good one, s'il est bon.'
   'I'll tell you what,' Percy said. 'If that toothless old whoremaster will sell you that Corona box for four cents, I'll sneak some cotton batting out of the dispensary to line it with. We'll make us a regular Mousie Hilton, before we're through.' He shifted his eyes to me. 'I'm supposed to write a switch-room report about Bitterbuck,' he said. 'Is there some pens in your office, Paul?'
   'Yes, indeed,' I said. 'Forms, too. Lefthand top drawer.'
   'Well, that's aces,' he said, and went swaggering off.
   Harry and I looked at each other. 'Is he sick, do you think?' Harry asked. 'Maybe went to his doctor and found out he's only got three months to live?'
   I told him I didn't have the slightest idea what was up. It was the truth then, and for awhile after, but I found out in time. And a few years later, I had an interesting supper-table conversation with Hal Moores. By then we could talk freely, what with him being retired and me being at the Boys' Correctional. It was one of those meals where you drink too much and eat too little, and tongues get loosened. Hal told me that Percy had been in to complain about me and about life on the Mile in general. This was just after Delacroix came on the block, and Brutal and I had kept Percy from beating him half to death. What had griped Percy the most was me telling him to get out of my sight. He didn't think a man who was related to the governor should have to put up with talk like that.
   Well, Moores told me, he had stood Percy off for as long as he could, and when it became dear to him that Percy was going to try pulling some strings to get me reprimanded and moved to another part of the prison at the very least, he, Moores, had pulled Percy into his office and told him that if he quit rocking the boat, Moores would make sure that Percy was out front for Delacroix's execution. That he would, in fact, be placed right beside the chair. I would be in charge, as always, but the witnesses wouldn't know that; to them it would look as if Mr. Percy Wetmore was boss of the cotillion. Moores wasn't promising any more than what we'd already discussed and I'd gone along with, but Percy didn't know that. He agreed to leave off his threats to have me reassigned, and the atmosphere on E Block sweetened. He had even agreed that Delacroix could keep Percy's old nemesis as a pet. It's amazing how some men can change, given the right incentive; in Percy's case, all Warden Moores had to offer was the chance to take a bald little Frenchman's life.

9

   Toot-Toot felt that four cents was far too little for a prime Corona cigar box, and in that he was probably right—cigar boxes were highly prized objects in prison. A thousand different small items could be stored in them, the smell was pleasant, and there was something about them that reminded our customers of what it was like to be free men. Because cigarettes were permitted in prison but cigars were not, I imagine.
   Dean Stanton, who was back on the block by then, added a penny to the pot, and I kicked one in, as well. When Toot still proved reluctant, Brutal went to work on him, first telling him he ought to be ashamed of himself for behaving like such a cheapskate, then promising him that he, Brutus Howell, would personally put that Corona box back in Toot's hands the day after Delacroix's execution. 'Six cents might or might not be enough if you was speaking about selling that cigar box, we could have a good old barber-shop argument about that,' Brutal said, 'but you have to admit it's a great price for renting one. He's gonna walk the Mile in a month, six weeks at the very outside. Why, that box'll be back on the shelf under your cart almost before you know it's gone.'
   'He could get a soft-hearted judge to give im a stay and still be here to sing "Should old acquaintances be forgot," Toot said, but he knew better and Brutal knew he did. Old Toot-Toot had been pushing that damned Bible-quoting cart of his around Cold Mountain since Pony Express days, practically, and he had plenty of sources, better than ours, I thought then. He knew Delacroix was fresh out of soft-hearted judges. All he had left to hope for was the governor, who as a rule didn't issue clemency to folks who had baked half a dozen of his constituents.
   'Even if he don't get a stay, that mouse'd be shitting in that box until October, maybe even Thanksgiving,' Toot argued, but Brutal could see he was weakening. 'Who gonna buy a cigar box some mouse been using for a toilet?'
   'Oh jeez-Louise,' Brutal said. 'That's the numbest thing I've ever heard you say, Toot. I mean, that takes the cake. First, Delacroix will keep the box clean enough to eat a church dinner out of—the way he loves that mouse, he'd lick it clean if that's what it took.'
   'Easy on dat stuff,' Toot said, wrinkling his nose.
   'Second,' Brutal went on, 'mouse-shit is no big deal, anyway. It's just hard little pellets, looks like birdshot. Shake it right out. Nothing to it.'
   Old Toot knew better than to carry his protest any further; he'd been on the yard long enough to understand when he could afford to face into the breeze and when he'd do better to bend in the hurricane. This wasn't exactly a hurricane, but we bluesuits liked the mouse, and we liked the idea of Delacroix having the mouse, and that meant it was at least a gale. So Delacroix got his box, and Percy was as good as his word—two days later the bottom was lined with soft pads of cotton batting from the dispensary. Percy handed them over himself, and I could see the fear in Delacroix's eyes as he reached out through the bars to take them. He was afraid Percy would grab his hand and break his fingers. I was a little afraid of it too, but no such thing happened. That was the closest I ever came to liking Percy, but even then it was hard to mistake the look of cool amusement in his eyes. Delacroix had a pet; Percy had one too. Delacroix would keep his, petting it and loving it as long as he could; Percy would wait patiently (as patiently as a man like him could anyway), and then burn his alive.
   'Mousie Hilton, open for business.' Harry said. 'The only question is, will the little bugger use it?'
   That question was answered as soon as Delacroix caught Mr. Jingles up in one hand and lowered him gently into the box. The mouse snuggled into the white cotton as if it were Aunt Bea's comforter, and that was his home from then until... well, I'll get to the end of Mr. Jingles's story in good time.
   Old Toot-Toots worries that the cigar box would, fill up with mouse-shit proved to be entirely groundless. I never saw a single turd in there, and Delacroix said he never did, either, anywhere in his cell, for that matter. Much later, around the time Brutal showed me the hole in the beam and we found the colored splinters, I moved a chair out of the restraint room's east corner and found a little pile of mouse turds back there. He had always gone back to the same place to do his business, seemingly, and as far from us as he could get. Here's another thing: I never saw him peeing, and usually mice can hardly turn the faucet off for two minutes at a time, especially while they're eating. I told you, the damned thing was one of God's mysteries.
   A week or so after Mr. Jingles had settled into the cigar box, Delacroix called me and Brutal down to his cell to see something. He did that so much it was annoying—if Mr. Jingles so much as rolled over on his back with his paws in the air, it was the cutest thing on God's earth, as far as that half-pint Cajun was concerned—but this time what he was up to really was sort of amusing.
   Delacroix had been pretty much forgotten by the world following his conviction, but he had one relation—an old maiden aunt, I believe—who wrote him once a week. She had also sent him an enormous bag of peppermint candies, the sort which are marketed under the name Canada Mints these days. They looked like big pink pills. Delacroix was not allowed to have the whole bag at once, naturally—it was a five-pounder, and he would have gobbled them until he had to go to the infirmary with stomach-gripes. Like almost every murderer we ever had on the Mile, he had absolutely no understanding of moderation. We'd give them out to him half a dozen at a time, and only then if he remembered to ask.
   Mr. Jingles was sitting beside Delacroix on the bunk when we got down there, holding one of those pink candies in his paws and munching contentedly away at it. Delacroix was simply overcome with delight—he was like a classical pianist watching his five-year-old son play his first halting exercises. But don't get me wrong; it was funny, a real hoot. The candy was half the size of Mr. Jingles, and his whitefurred belly was already distended from it.
   'Take it away from him, Eddie,' Brutal said, half-laughing and half-horrified. 'Christ almighty Jesus, he'll eat till he busts. I can smell that peppermint from here. How many have you let him have?'
   'This his second,' Delacroix said, looking a little nervously at Mr. Jingles's belly. 'You really think he... you know... bus' his guts?'
   'Might,' Brutal said.
   That was enough authority for Delacroix. He reached for the half-eaten pink mint. I expected the mouse to nip him, but Mr. Jingles gave over that mint—what remained of it, anyway—as meek as could be. I looked at Brutal, and Brutal gave his head a little shake as if to say no, he didn't understand it, either. Then Mr. Jingles plopped down into his box and lay there on his side in an exhausted way that made all three of us laugh. After that, we got used to seeing the mouse sitting beside Delacroix, holding a mint and munching away on it just as neatly as an old lady at an afternoon tea-party, both of them surrounded by what I later smelled in that hole in the beam—the half-bitter, half-sweet smell of peppermint candy.
   There's one more thing to tell you about Mr. Jingles before moving on to the arrival of William Wharton, which was when the cyclone really touched down on E Block. A week or so after the incident of the peppermint candies—around the time when we'd pretty much decided Delacroix wasn't going to feed his pet to death, in other words—the Frenchman called me down to his cell. I was on my own for the time being, Brutal over at the commissary for something, and according to the regs, I was not supposed to approach a prisoner in such circumstances. But since I probably could have shot-putted Delacroix twenty yards one-handed on a good day, I decided to break the rule and see what he wanted.
   'Watch this, Boss Edgecombe,' he said. 'You gonna see what Mr. Jingles can do!' He reached behind the cigar box and brought up a small wooden spool.
   'Where'd you get that?' I asked him, although I supposed I knew. There was really only one person he could have gotten it from.
   'Old Toot-Toot,' he said. 'Watch this.'
   I was already watching, and could see Mr. Jingles in his box, standing up with his small front paws propped on the edge, his black eyes fixed on the spool Delacroix was holding between the thumb and first finger of his right hand. I felt a funny little chill go up my back. I had never seen a mere mouse attend to something with such sharpness—with such intelligence. I don't really believe that Mr. Jingles was a supernatural visitation, and if I have given you that idea, I'm sorry, but I have never doubted that he was a genius of his kind.
   Delacroix bent over and rolled the threadless spool across the floor of his cell. It went easily, like a pair of wheels connected by an axle. The mouse was out of his box in a flash and across the floor after it, like a dog chasing after a stick. I exclaimed with surprise, and Delacroix grinned.
   The spool hit the wall and rebounded. Mr. Jingles went around it and pushed it back to the bunk, switching from one end of the spool to the other whenever it looked like it was going to veer off-course. He pushed the spool until it hit Delacroix's foot. Then he looked up at him for a moment, as if to make sure Delacroix had no more immediate tasks for him (a few arithmetic problems to solve, perhaps, or some Latin to parse). Apparently satisfied on this score, Mr. Jingles went back to the cigar box and settled down in it again.
   'You taught him that,' I said.
   'Yessir, Boss Edgecombe,' Delacroix said, his smile only slightly dissembling. 'He fetch it every time. Smart as hell, ain't he?'
   'And the spool?' I asked. 'How did you know to fetch that for him, Eddie?'
   'He whisper in my ear that he want it,' Delacroix said serenely. 'Same as he whisper his name.'
   Delacroix showed all the other guys his mouse's trick... all except Percy. To Delacroix, it didn't matter that Percy had suggested the cigar box and procured the cotton with which to line it. Delacroix was like some dogs: kick them once and they never trust you again, no matter how nice you are to them.
   I can hear Delacroix now, yelling, Hey, you guys! Come and see what Mr. Jingles can do! And them going down in a bluesuit cluster—Brutal, Harry, Dean, even Bill Dodge. All of them had been properly amazed, too, the same as I had been.
   Three or four days after Mr. Jingles started doing the trick with the spool, Harry Terwilliger rummaged through the arts and crafts stuff we kept in the restraint room, found the Crayolas, and brought them to Delacroix with a smile that was almost embarrassed. 'I thought you might like to make that spool different colors,' he said. 'Then your little pal'd be like a circus mouse, or something.'
   'A circus mouse!' Delacroix said, looking completely, rapturously happy. I suppose he was completely happy, maybe for the first time in his whole miserable life. 'That just what he is, too! A circus mouse! When I get outta here, he gonna make me rich, like inna circus! You see if he don't.'
   Percy Wetmore would no doubt have pointed out to Delacroix that when he left Cold Mountain, he'd be riding in an ambulance that didn't need to run its light or siren, but Harry knew better. He just told Delacroix to make the spool as colorful as he could as quick as he could, because he'd have to take the crayons back after dinner.
   Del made it colorful, all right. When he was done, one end of the spool was yellow, the other end was green, and the drum in the middle was firehouse red. We got used to hearing Delacroix trumpet, 'Maintenant, m'sieurs et mesdames! Le cirque pr sentement le mous' amusant et amazeant!' That wasn't exactly it, but it gives you an idea of that stewpot French of his. Then he'd make this sound way down in his throat—I think it was supposed to represent a drumroll—and fling the spool. Mr. Jingles would be after it in a flash, either nosing it back or rolling it with his paws. That second way really was something you would have paid to see in a circus, I think. Delacroix and his mouse and his mouse's brightly colored spool were our chief amusements at the time that John Coffey came into our care and custody, and that was the way things remained for awhile. Then my urinary infection, which had lain still for awhile, came back, and William Wharton arrived, and all hell broke loose.

10

   The dates have mostly slipped out of my head. I suppose I could have my granddaughter, Danielle, look some of them out of the old newspaper files, but what would be the point? The most important of them, like the day we came down to Delacroix's cell and found the mouse sitting on his shoulder, or the day William Wharton came on the block and almost killed Dean Stanton, would not be in the papers, anyway. Maybe it's better to go on just as I have been; in the end, I guess the dates don't matter much, if you can remember the things you saw and keep them in the right order.
   I know that things got squeezed together a little. When Delacroix's DOE papers finally came to me from Curtis Anderson's office, I was amazed to see that our Cajun pal's date with Old Sparky had been advanced from when we had expected, a thing that was almost unheard of, even in those days when you didn't have to move half of heaven and all the earth to execute a man. It was a matter of two days, I think, from the twenty-seventh of October to the twenty-fifth. Don't hold me to it exactly, but I know that's close; I remember thinking that Toot was going to get his Corona box back even sooner than he had expected.
   Wharton, meanwhile, got to us later than expected. For one thing, his trial ran longer than Anderson's usually reliable sources had thought it would (when it came to Wild Billy, nothing was reliable, we would soon discover, including our time-tested and supposedly foolproof methods of prisoner control). Then, after he had been found guilty—that much, at least, went according to the script—he was taken to Indianola General Hospital for tests. He had had a number of supposed seizures during the trial, twice serious enough to send him crashing to the floor, where he lay shaking and flopping and drumming his feet on the boards. Wharton's court-appointed lawyer claimed he suffered from 'epilepsy spells' and had committed his crimes while of unsound mind; the prosecution claimed the fits were the sham acting of a coward desperate to save his own life. After observing the so-called 'epilepsy spells' at first hand, the jury decided the fits were an act. The judge concurred but ordered a series of pre-sentencing tests after the verdict came down. God knows why; perhaps he was only curious.
   It's a blue-eyed wonder that Wharton didn't escape from the hospital (and the irony that Warden Moore's wife, Melinda, was in the same hospital at the same time did not escape any of us), but he didn't. They had him surrounded by guards, I suppose, and perhaps he still had hopes of being declared incompetent by reason of epilepsy, if there is such a thing.
   He wasn't. The doctors found nothing wrong with his brain—physiologically, at least—and Billy "the Kid" Wharton was at last bound for Cold Mountain. That might have been around the sixteenth or the eighteenth; it's my recollection that Wharton arrived about two weeks after John Coffey and a week or ten days before Delacroix walked the Green Mile.
   The day our new psychopath joined us was an eventful one for me. I woke up at four that morning with my groin throbbing and my penis feeling hot and clogged and swollen. Even before I swung my feet out of bed, I knew that my urinary infection wasn't getting better, as I had hoped. It had been a brief turn for the better, that was all, and it was over.
   I went out to the privy to do my business—this was at least three years before we put in our first water-closet—and had gotten no further than the woodpile at the comer of the house when I realized I couldn't hold it any longer. I lowered my pajama pants just as the urine started to flow, and that flow was accompanied by the most excruciating. pain of my entire life. I passed a gall-stone in 1956, and I know people say that is the worst, but that gall-stone was like a touch of acid indigestion compared to this outrage.
   My knees came unhinged and I fell heavily onto them, tearing out the seat of my pajama pants when I spread my legs to keep from losing my balance and going face-first into a puddle of my own piss. I still might have gone over if I hadn't grabbed one of the woodpile logs with my left hand. All that, though, could have been going on in Australia, or even on another planet. All I was concerned with was the pain that had set me on fire; my lower belly was burning, and my penis—an organ which had gone mostly forgotten by me except when providing me the most intense physical pleasure a man can experience—now felt as if it were melting; I expected to look down and see blood gushing from its tip, but it appeared to be a perfectly ordinary stream of urine.
   I hung onto the woodpile with one hand and put the other across my mouth, concentrating on keeping my mouth shut. I did not want to frighten my wife awake with a scream. It seemed that I went on pissing forever, but at last the stream dried up. By then the pain had sunk deep into my stomach and my testicles, biting like rusty teeth. For a long while—it might have been as long as a minute—I was physically incapable of getting up. At last the pain began to abate, and I struggled to my feet. I looked at my urine, already soaking into the ground, and wondered if any sane God could make a world where such a little bit of dampness could come at the cost of such horrendous pain.
   I would call in sick, I thought, and go see Dr. Sadler after all. I didn't want the stink and the queasiness of Dr. Sadler's sulfa tablets, but anything would be better than kneeling beside the woodpile, trying not to scream while my prick was reporting that it had apparently been doused with coal-oil and set afire.
   Then, as I was swallowing aspirin in our kitchen and listening to Jan snore lightly in the other room, I remembered that today was the day William Wharton was scheduled on the block, and that Brutal wouldn't be there—the roster had him over on the other side of the prison, helping to move the rest of the library and some leftover infirmary equipment to the new building. One thing I didn't feel right about in spite of my pain was leaving Wharton to Dean and Harry. They were good men, but Curtis Anderson's report had suggested that William Wharton was exceptionally bad news. This man just doesn't care, he had written, underlining for emphasis.
   By then the pain had abated some, and I could think. The best idea, it seemed to me, was to leave for the prison early. I could get there at six, which was the time Warden Moores usually came in. He could get Brutus Howell reassigned to E Block long enough for Wharton's reception, and I'd make my long-overdue trip to the doctor. Cold Mountain was actually on my way.
   Twice on the twenty-mile ride to the Penitentiary that sudden need to urinate overcame me. Both times I was able to pull over and take care of the problem without embarrassing myself (for one thing, traffic on country roads at such an hour was all but nonexistent). Neither of these two voidings was as painful as the one that had taken me off my feet on the way to the privy, but both times I had to clutch the passenger-side doorhandle of my little Ford coupe to hold myself up, and I could feel sweat running down my hot face. I was sick, all right, good and sick.
   I made it, though, drove in through the south gate, parked in my usual place, and went right up to see the warden. It was going on six o'clock by then. Miss Hannah's office was empty—she wouldn't be in until the relatively civilized hour of seven—but the light was on in Moores's office; I could see it through the pebbled glass. I gave a perfunctory knock and opened the door. Moores looked up, startled to see anyone at that unusual hour, and I would have given a great deal not to have been the one to see him in that condition, with his face naked and unguarded. His white hair, usually so neatly combed, was sticking up in tufts and tangles; his hands were in it, yanking and pulling, when I walked in. His eyes were raw, the skin beneath them puffy and swollen. His palsy was the worst I had ever seen it; he looked like a man who had just come inside after a long walk on a terribly cold night.
   'Hal, I'm sorry, I'll come back—' I began.
   'No,' he said. 'Please, Paul. Come in. Shut the door and come in. I need someone now, if I ever needed anyone in my whole life. Shut the door and come in.'
   I did as he asked, forgetting my own pain for the first time since I'd awakened that morning.
   'It's a brain tumor,' Moores said. 'They got X-ray pictures of it. They seemed real pleased with their pictures, actually. One of them said they may be the best ones anyone's ever gotten, at least so far; said they're going to publish them in some biggety medical journal up in New England. It's the size of a lemon, they said, and way down deep inside, where they can't operate. They say she'll be dead by Christmas. I haven't told her. I can't think how. I can't think how for the life of me.'
   Then he began to cry, big, gasping sobs that filled me with both pity and a kind of terror—when a man who keeps himself as tightly guarded as Hal Moores finally does lose control, it's frightening to watch. I stood there for a moment, then went to him and put my arm around his shoulders. He groped out for me with both of his own arms, like a drowning man, and began to sob against my stomach, all restraint washed away. Later, after he got himself under control, he apologized. He did it without quite meeting my eyes, as a man does when he feels he has embarrassed himself dreadfully, maybe so deeply that he can never quite live it down. A man can end up hating the fellow who has seen him in such a state. I thought Warden Moores was better than that, but it never crossed my mind to do the business I had originally come for, and when I left Moores's office, I walked over to E Block instead of back to my car. The aspirin was working by then, and the pain in my midsection was down to a low throb. I would get through the day somehow, I reckoned, get Wharton settled in, check back with Hal Moores that afternoon, and get my sick-leave for tomorrow. The worst was pretty much over, I thought, with no slightest idea that the worst of that day's mischief hadn't even begun.

11

   'We thought he was still doped from the tests,' Dean said late that afternoon. His voice was low, rasping, almost a bark, and there were blackish-purple bruises rising on his neck. I could see it was hurting him to talk and thought of telling him to let it go, but sometimes it hurts more to be quiet. I judged that this was one of those times, and kept my own mouth shut. 'We all thought he was doped, didn't we?'
   Harry Terwilliger nodded. Even Percy, sitting off by himself in his own sullen little party of one, nodded.
   Brutal glanced at me, and for a moment I met his eyes. We were thinking pretty much that same thing, that this was the way it happened. You were cruising along, everything going according to Hoyle, you made one mistake, and bang, the sky fell down on you. They had thought he was doped, it was a reasonable assumption to make, but no one had asked if he was doped. I thought I saw something else in Brutal's eyes, as well: Harry and Dean would learn from their mistake. Especially Dean, who could easily have gone home to his family dead. Percy wouldn't. Percy maybe couldn't. All Percy could do was sit in the corner and sulk because he was in the shit again.
   There were seven of them that went up to Indianola to take charge of Wild Bill Wharton: Harry, Dean, Percy, two other guards in the back (I have forgotten their names, although I'm sure I knew them once), plus two up front. They took what we used to call the stagecoach—a Ford panel-truck which had been steel-reinforced and equipped with supposedly bulletproof glass. It looked like a cross between a milk-wagon and an armored car.
   Harry Terwilliger was technically in charge of the expedition. He handed his paperwork over to the county sheriff (not Homer Cribus but some other elected yokel like him, I imagine), who in turn handed over Mr. William Wharton, hellraiser extraordinaire, as Delacroix might have put it. A Cold Mountain prison uniform had been sent ahead, but the sheriff and his men hadn't bothered to put Wharton in it; they left that to our boys. Wharton was dressed in a cotton hospital johnny and cheap felt slippers when they first met him on the second floor of the General Hospital, a scrawny man with a narrow, pimply face and a lot of long, tangly blond hair. His ass, also narrow and also covered with pimples, stuck out the back of the johnny. That was the part of him Harry and the others saw first, because Wharton was standing at the window and looking out at the parking lot when they came in. He didn't turn but just stood there, holding the curtains back with one hand, silent as a doll while Harry bitched at the county sheriff about being too lazy to get Wharton into his prison blues and the county sheriff lectured—as every county official I've ever met seems bound to do—about what was his job and what was not.
   When Harry got tired of that part (I doubt it took him long), he told Wharton to turn around. Wharton did. He looked, Dean told us in his raspy bark of a half-choked voice, like any one of a thousand backcountry stampeders who had wound their way through Cold Mountain during our years there. Boil that look down and what you got was a dullard with a mean steak. Sometimes you also discovered a yellow streak in them, once their backs were to the wall, but more often there was nothing there but fight and mean and then more fight and more mean. There are people who see nobility in folks like Billy Wharton, but I am not one of them. A rat will fight, too, if it is cornered. This man's face seemed to have no more personality than his acne-studded backside, Dean told us. His jaw was slack, his eyes distant, his shoulders slumped, his hands dangling. He looked shot up with morphine, all right, every bit as coo-coo as any dopefiend any of them had ever seen.
   At this, Percy gave another of his sullen nods.
   'Put this on,' Harry said, indicating the uniform on the foot of the bed—it had been taken out of the brown paper it was wrapped in, but otherwise not touched—it was still folded just as it had been in the prison laundry, with a pair of white cotton boxer shorts poking out of one shirtsleeve and a pair of white socks poking out of the other.
   Wharton seemed willing enough to comply, but wasn't able to get very far without help. He managed the boxers, but when it came to the pants, he kept trying to put both legs into the same hole. Finally Dean helped him, getting his feet to go where they belonged and then yanking the trousers up, doing the fly, and snapping the waistband.. Wharton only stood there, not even trying to help once he saw that Dean was doing it for him. He stared vacantly across the room, hands lax, and it didn't occur to any of them that he was shamming. Not in hopes of escape (at least I don't believe that was it) but only in hopes of making the maximum amount of trouble when the right time came.
   The papers were signed. William Wharton, who had become county property when he was arrested, now became the state's property. He was taken down the back stairs and through the kitchen, surrounded by bluesuits. He walked with his head down and his long-fingered hands dangling. The first time his cap fell off, Dean put it back on him. The second time, he just tucked it into his own back pocket.
   He had another chance to make trouble in the back of the stagecoach, when they were shackling him, and didn't. If he thought (even now I'm not sure if he did, or if he did, how much), he must have thought that the space was too small and the numbers too great to cause a satisfactory hooraw. So on went the chains, one set running between his ankles and another set too long, it turned out, between his wrists.
   The drive to Cold Mountain took an hour. During that whole time, Wharton sat on the lefthand bench up by the cab, head lowered, cuffed hands dangling between his knees. Every now and then he hummed a little, Harry said, and Percy roused himself enough from his funk to say that the lugoon dripped spittle from his lax lower lip, a drop at a time, until it had made a puddle between his feet. Like a dog dripping off the end of its tongue on a hot summer day.
   They drove in through the south gate when they got to the pen, right past my car, I guess. The guard on the south pass tan back the big door between the lot and the exercise yard, and the stagecoach drove through. It was a slack time in the yard, not many men out and most of them hoeing in the garden. Pumpkin time, it would have been. They drove straight across to E Block and stopped. The driver opened the door and told them he was going to take the stagecoach over to the motor-pool to have the oil changed, it had been good working with them. The extra guards went with the vehicle, two of them sitting in the back eating apples, the doors now swinging open.
   That left Dean, Harry and Percy with one shackled prisoner. It should have been enough, would have been enough, if they hadn't been lulled by the stick thin country boy standing head-down there in the dirt with chains on his wrists and ankles. They marched him the twelve or so paces to the door that opened into E Block, falling into the same formation we used when escorting prisoners down the Green Mile. Harry was on his left, Dean was on his right, and Percy was behind, with his baton in his hand. No one told me that, but I know damned well he had it out; Percy loved that hickory stick. As for me, I was sitting in what would be Wharton's home until it came time for him to check into the hot place—first cell on the right as you headed down the corridor toward the restraint room. I had my clipboard in my hands and was thinking of nothing but making my little set speech and getting the hell out. The pain in my groin was building up again, and all I wanted was to go into my office and wait for it to pass.
   Dean stepped forward to unlock the door. He selected the right key from the bunch on his belt and slid it into the lock. Wharton came alive just as Dean turned the key and pulled the handle. He voiced a screaming, gibbering cry—a kind of Rebel yell—that froze Harry to temporary immobility and pretty much finished Percy Wetmore for the entire encounter. I heard that scream through the partly opened door and didn't associate it with anything human at first; I thought a dog had gotten into the yard somehow and had been hurt; that perhaps some mean tempered con had hit it with a hoe.
   Wharton lifted his arms, dropped the chain which hung between his wrists over Dean's head, and commenced to choke him with it. Dean gave a strangled cry and lurched forward, into the cool electric light of our little world. Wharton was happy to go with him, even gave him a shove, all the time yelling and gibbering, even laughing. He had his arms cocked at the elbows with his fists up by Dean's ears, yanking the chain as tight as he could, whipsawing it back and forth.
   Harry landed on Wharton's back, wrapping one hand in our new boy's greasy blond hair and slamming his other fist into the side of Wharton's face as hard as he could. He had both a baton of his own and a sidearm pistol, but in his excitement drew neither. We'd had trouble with prisoners before, you bet, but never one who'd taken any of us by surprise the way that Wharton did. The man's slyness was beyond our experience. I had never seen its like before, and have never seen it again.
   And he was strong. All that slack looseness was gone. Harry said later that it was like jumping onto a coiled nest of steel springs that had somehow come to life. Wharton, now inside and near the duty desk, whirled to his left and flung Harry off. Harry hit the desk and went sprawling.
   'Whoooee, boys!' Wharton laughed. 'Ain't this a party, now? Is it, or what?'
   Still screaming and laughing, Wharton went back to choking Dean with his chain. Why not? Wharton knew what we all knew: they could only fry him once.
   'Hit him, Percy, hit him!' Harry screamed, struggling to his feet. But Percy only stood there, hickory baton in hand, eyes as wide as soup-plates. Here was the chance he'd been looking for, you would have said, his golden opportunity to put that tallywhacker of his to good use, and he was too scared and confused to do it. This wasn't some terrified little Frenchman or a black giant who hardly seemed to be in his own body; this was a whirling devil.
   I came out of Wharton's cell, dropping my clipboard and pulling my.38. I had forgotten the infection that was heating up my middle for the second time that day. I didn't doubt the story the others told of Wharton's blank face and dull eyes when they told it, but that wasn't the Wharton I saw. What I saw was the face of an animal—not an intelligent animal, but one filled with cunning... and meanness... and joy. Yes. He was doing what he had been made to do. The place and the circumstances didn't matter. The other thing I saw was Dean Stanton's red, swelling face. He was dying in front of my eyes. Wharton saw the gun and turned Dean toward it, so that I'd almost certainly have to hit one to hit the other. From over Dean's shoulder, one blazing blue eye dared me to shoot.

Part Three.
Coffey's Hands

1

   Looking back through what I've written, I see that I called Georgia Pines, where I now live, a nursing home. The folks who run the place wouldn't be very happy with that! According to the brochures they keep in the lobby and send out to prospective clients, its a "State-of-the-art retirement complex for the elderly." It even has a Resource Center—the brochure says so. The folks who have to live here (the brochure doesn't call us "inmates," but sometimes I do) just call it the TV room.
   Folks think I'm stand-offy because I don't go down to the TV room much in the day, but it's the programs I can't stand, not the folks. Oprah, Ricki Lake, Carnie Wilson, Rolanda—the world is falling down around our ears, and all these people care for is talking about fucking to women in short skirts and men with their shirts hanging open. Well, hell—judge not, lest ye be judged, the Bible says, so I'll get down off my soapbox. It's just that if I wanted to spend time with trailer trash, I'd move two miles down to the Happy Wheels Motor Court, where the police cars always seem to be headed on Friday and Saturday nights with their sirens screaming and their blue lights flashing. My special friend, Elaine Connelly, feels the same way. Elaine is eighty, tall and slim, still erect and clear-eyed, very intelligent and refined. She walks very slowly because there's something wrong with her hips, and I know that the arthritis in her hands gives her terrible misery, but she has a beautiful long neck—a swan neck, almost—and long, pretty hair that falls to her shoulders when she lets it down.
   Best of all, she doesn't think I'm peculiar, or stand-offy. We spend a lot of time together, Elaine and I. If I hadn't reached such a grotesque age, I suppose I might speak of her as my ladyfriend. Still, having a special friend—just that—is not so bad, and in some ways, it's even better. A lot of the problems and heartaches that go with being boyfriend and girlfriend have simply burned out of us. And although I know that no one under the age of, say, fifty would believe this, sometimes the embers are better than the campfire. It's strange, but it's true.
   So I don't watch TV during the day. Sometimes I walk; sometimes I read; mostly what I've been doing for the last month or so is writing this memoir among the plants in the solarium. I think there's more oxygen in that room, and it helps the old memory. It beats the hell out of Geraldo Rivera, I can tell you that.
   But when I can't sleep, I sometimes creep downstairs and put on the television. There's no Home Box Office or anything at Georgia Pines—I guess that's a resource just a wee bit too expensive for our Resource Center—but we have the basic cable services, and that means we have the American Movie Channel. That's the one (just in case you don't have the basic cable services yourself) where most of the films are in black and white and none of the women take their clothes off. For an old fart like me, that's sort of soothing. There have been a good many nights when I've slipped right off to sleep on the ugly green sofa in front of the TV while Francis the Talking Mule once more pulls Donald O'Connor's skillet out of the fire, or John Wayne cleans up Dodge, or Jimmy Cagney calls someone a dirty rat and then pulls a gun. Some of them are movies I saw with my wife, Janice (not just my ladyfriend but my best friend), and they calm me. The clothes they wear, the way they walk and talk, even the music on the soundtrack—all those things calm me. They remind me, I suppose, of when I was a man still walking on the skin of the world, instead of a moth-eaten relic mouldering away in an old folks' home where many of the residents wear diapers and rubber pants.
   There was nothing soothing about what I saw this morning, though. Nothing at all.
   Elaine sometimes joins me for AMC's so-called Early Bird Matinee, which starts at 4:00 a.m.—she doesn't say much about it, but I know her arthritis hurts her something terrible, and that the drugs they give her don't help much anymore.
   When she came in this morning, gliding like a ghost in her white terrycloth robe, she found me sitting on the lumpy sofa, bent over the scrawny sticks that used to be legs, and clutching my knees to try and still the shakes that were running through me like a high wind. I felt cold all over, except for my groin, which seemed to burn with the ghost of the urinary infection which had so troubled my life in the fall of 1932—the fall of John Coffey, Percy Wetmore, and Mr. Jingles, the trained mouse.
   The fall of William Wharton, it had been, too.
   'Paul!' Elaine cried, and hurried over to me—hurried as fast as the rusty nails and ground glass in her hips would allow, anyway. 'Paul, what's wrong?'
   'I'll be all right,' I said, but the words didn't sound very convincing—they came out all uneven, through teeth that wanted to chatter. 'Just give me a minute or two, I'll be right as rain.'
   She sat next to me and put her arm around my shoulders. 'I'm sure,' she said. 'But what happened? For heaven's sake, Paul, you look like you saw a ghost.'
   I did, I thought, and didn't realize until her eyes widened that I'd said it out loud.
   'Not really.' I said, and patted her hand (gently—so gently!). 'But for a minute. Elaine—God!'
   'Was it from the time when you were a guard at the prison?' she asked. 'The time that you've been writing about in the solarium?'
   I nodded. 'I worked on our version of Death Row—'
   'I know—'
   'Only we called it the Green Mile. Because of the linoleum on the floor. In the fall of '32, we got this fellow—we got this wildman—named William Wharton. Liked to think of himself as Billy the Kid, even had it tattooed on his arm. Just a kid, but dangerous. I can still remember what Curtis Anderson—he was the assistant warden back in those days—wrote about him. "Crazy-wild and proud of it. Wharton is nineteen years old, and he just doesn't care." He'd underlined that part.'
   The hand which had gone around my shoulders was now rubbing my back. I was beginning to calm. In that moment I loved Elaine Connelly, and could have kissed her all over her face as I told her so. Maybe I should have. It's terrible to be alone and frightened at any age, but I think it's worst when you're old. But I had this other thing on my mind, this load of old and still unfinished business.
   'Anyway,' I said, 'you're right—I've been scribbling about how Wharton came on the block and almost killed Dean Stanton—one of the guys I worked with back then—when he did.'
   'How could he do that?' Elaine asked.
   'Meanness and carelessness,' I said grimly. 'Wharton supplied the meanness, and the guards who brought him in supplied the carelessness. The real mistake was Wharton's wrist-chain—it was a little too long. When Dean unlocked the door to E Block, Wharton was behind him. There were guards on either side of him, but Anderson was right—Wild Billy just didn't care about such things. He dropped that wrist-chain down over Dean's head and started choking him with it.'
   Elaine shuddered.
   'Anyway, I got thinking about all that and couldn't sleep, so I came down here. I turned on AMC, thinking you might come down and we'd have us a little date—'
   She laughed and kissed my forehead just above the eyebrow. It used to make me prickle all over when Janice did that, and it still made me prickle all over when Elaine did it early this morning. I guess some things don't ever change.
   '—and what came on was this old black-and-white gangster movie from the forties. Kiss of Death, it's called.'
   I could feel myself wanting to start shaking again and tried to suppress it.
   'Richard Widmark's in it,' I said. 'It was his first big part, I think. I never went to see it with Jan—we gave the cops and robbers a miss, usually—but I remember reading somewhere that Widmark gave one hell of a performance as the punk. He sure did. He's pale... doesn't seem to walk so much as go gliding around... he's always calling people 'squirt'... talking about squealers how much he hates the squealers... '
   I was starting to shiver again in spite of my best efforts. I just couldn't help it.
   'Blond hair,' I whispered. 'Lank blond hair. I watched until the part where he pushed this old woman in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs, then I turned it off.'
   'He reminded you of Wharton?'
   'He was Wharton,' I said. 'To the life.'
   'Paul—' she began, and stopped. She looked at the blank screen of the TV (the cable box on top of it was still on, the red numerals still showing 10, the number of the AMC channel), then back at me.
   'What?' I asked. 'What, Elaine?' Thinking, She's going to tell, me I ought to quit writing about it. That I ought to tear up the pages I've written so far and just quit on it.
   What she said was 'Don't let this stop you.'
   I gawped at her.
   'Close your mouth, Paul—you'll catch a fly.'
   'Sorry. It's just that... well... '
   'You thought I was going to tell you just the opposite, didn't you?'
   'Yes.'
   She took my hands in hers (gently, so gently—her long and beautiful fingers, her bunched and ugly knuckles) and leaned forward, fixing my blue eyes with her hazel ones, the left slightly dimmed by the mist of a coalescing cataract. 'I may be too old and brittle to live,' she said, 'but I'm not too old to think. What's a few sleepless nights at our age? What's seeing a ghost on the TV, for that matter? Are you going to tell me it's the only one you've ever seen?'
   I thought about Warden Moores, and Harry Terwilliger, and Brutus Howell; I thought about MY mother, and about Jan, my wife, who died in Alabama. I knew about ghosts, all right.
   'No,' I said. 'It wasn't the first ghost I've ever seen. But Elaine—it was a shock. Because it was him.'
   She kissed me again, then stood up, wincing as she did so and pressing the heels of her hands to the tops of her hips, as if she were afraid they might actually explode out through her skin if she wasn't very careful.
   'I think I've changed my mind about the television,' she said. 'I've got an extra pill that I've been keeping for a rainy day... or night. I think I'll take it and go back to bed. Maybe you should do the same.'
   'Yes,' I said. 'I suppose I should.' For one wild moment I thought of suggesting that we go back to bed together, and then I saw the dull pain in her eyes and thought better of it. Because she might have said yes, and she would only have said that for me. Not so good.
   We left the TV room (I won't dignify it with that other name, not even to be ironic) side by side, me matching my steps to hers, which were slow and painfully careful. The building was quiet except for someone moaning in the grip of a bad dream behind some closed door.
   'Will you be able to sleep, do you think?' she asked.
   'Yes, I think so,' I said, but of course I wasn't able to; I lay in my bed until sunup, thinking about Kiss of Death. I'd see Richard Widmark, giggling madly, tying the old lady into her wheelchair and then pushing her down the stairs—"This is what we do to squealers," he told her—and then his face would merge into the face of William Wharton as he'd looked on the day when he came to E Block and the Green Mile—Wharton giggling like Widmark, Wharton screaming, Ain't this a party, now? Is it, or what? I didn't bother with breakfast, not after that; I just came down here to the solarium and began to write.
   Ghosts? Sure.
   I know all about ghosts.

2

   'Woooee, boys!' Wharton laughed. 'Ain't this a party, now? Is it, or what?'
   Still screaming and laughing, Wharton went back to choking Dean with his chain. Why not? Wharton knew what Dean and Harry and my friend Brutus Howell knew—they could only fry a man once.
   'Hit him!' Harry Terwilliger screamed. He had grappled with Wharton, tried to stop things before they got fairly started, but Wharton had thrown him off and now Harry was trying to find his feet. 'Percy, hit him!'
   But Percy only stood there, hickory baton in hand, eyes as wide as soup-plates. He loved that damned baton of his, and you would have said this was the chance to use it he'd been pining for ever since he came to Cold Mountain Penitentiary... but now that it had come, he was too scared to use the opportunity. This wasn't some terrified little Frenchman like Delacroix or a black giant who hardly seemed to know he was in his own body, like John Coffey; this was a whirling devil.
   I came out of Wharton's cell, dropping my clipboard and pulling my.38. For the second time that day I had forgotten the infection that was heating up my middle. I didn't doubt the story the others told of Wharton's blank face and dull eyes when they recounted it later, but that wasn't the Wharton I saw. What I saw was the face of an animal—not an intelligent animal, but one filled with cunning... and meanness... and joy. Yes. He was doing what he had been made to do. The place and the circumstances didn't matter. The other thing I saw was Dean Stanton's red, swelling face. He was dying in front of my eyes. Wharton saw the gun in my hand and turned Dean toward it, so that I'd almost certainly have to hit one to hit the other. From over Dean's shoulder, one blazing blue eye dared me to shoot. Wharton's other eye was hidden by Dean's hair. Behind them I saw Percy standing irresolute, with his baton half-raised. And then, filling the open doorway to the prison yard, a miracle in the flesh: Brutus Howell. They had finished moving the last of the infirmary equipment, and he had come over to see who wanted coffee.
   He acted without a moment's hesitation—shoved Percy aside and into the wall with tooth-rattling force, pulled his own baton out of its loop, and brought it crashing down on the back of Wharton's head with all the force in his massive right arm. There was a dull whock! Sound—an almost hollow sound, as if there were no brain at all under Wharton's skull—and the chain finally loosened around Dean's neck. Wharton went down like a sack of meal and Dean crawled away, hacking harshly and holding one hand to his throat, his eyes bulging.
   I knelt by him and he shook his head violently. 'Okay,' he rasped. 'Take care... him!' He motioned at Wharton. 'Lock! Cell!'
   I didn't think he'd need a cell, as hard as Brutal had hit him; I thought he'd need a coffin. No such luck, though. Wharton was conked out, but a long way from dead. He lay sprawled on his side, one arm thrown out so that the tips of his fingers touched the linoleum of the Green Mile, his eyes shut, his breathing slow but regular. There was even a peaceful little smile on his face, as if he'd gone to sleep listening to his favorite lullaby. A tiny red rill of blood was seeping out of his hair and staining the collar of his new prison shirt. That was all.
   'Percy,' I said. 'Help me!'
   Percy didn't move, only stood against the wall, staring with wide, stunned eyes. I don't think he knew exactly where he was.
   'Percy, goddammit, grab hold of him!'
   He got moving, then, and Harry helped him. Together the three of us hauled the unconscious Mr. Wharton into his cell while Brutal helped Dean to his feet and held him as gently as any mother while Dean bent over and hacked air back into his lungs.
   Our new problem child didn't wake up for almost three hours, but when he did, he showed absolutely no ill effects from Brutal's savage hit. He came to the way he moved—fast. At one moment he was lying on his bunk, dead to the world. At the next he was standing at the bars—he was silent as a cat—and staring out at me as I sat at the duty desk, writing a report on the incident. When I finally sensed someone looking at me and glanced up, there he was, his grin displaying a set of blackening, dying teeth with several gaps among them already. It gave me a jump to see him there like that. I tried not to show it, but I think he knew. 'Hey, flunky,' he said. 'Next time it'll be you. And I won't miss.'
   'Hello, Wharton,' I said, as evenly as I could. 'Under the circumstances, I guess I can skip the speech and the Welcome Wagon, don't you think?'
   His grin faltered just a little. It wasn't the sort of response he had expected, and probably wasn't the one I would have given under other circumstances. But something had happened while Wharton was unconscious. It is, I suppose, one of the major things I have trudged through all these pages to tell you about. Now let's just see if you believe it.

3

   Except for shouting once at Delacroix, Percy kept his mouth shut once the excitement was over. This was probably the result of shock rather than any effort at tact—Percy Wetmore knew as much about tact as I do about the native tribes of darkest Africa, in my opinion—but it was a damned good thing, just the same. If he'd started in whining about how Brutal had pushed him into the wall or wondering why no one had told him that nasty men like Wild Billy Wharton sometimes turned up on E Block, I think we would have killed him. Then we could have toured the Green Mile in a whole new way. That's sort of a funny idea, when you consider it. I missed my chance to make like James Cagney in White Heat.
   Anyway, when we were sure that Dean was going to keep breathing and that he wasn't going to pass out on the spot, Harry and Brutal escorted him over to the infirmary. Delacroix, who had been absolutely silent during the scuffle (he had been in prison lots of times, that one, and knew when it was prudent to keep his yap shut and when it was relatively safe to open it again), began bawling loudly down the corridor as Harry and Brutal helped Dean out. Delacroix wanted to know what had happened. You would have thought his constitutional rights had been violated.
   'Shut up, you little queer!' Percy yelled back, so furious that the veins stood out on the sides of his neck. I put a hand on his arm and felt it quivering beneath his shirt. Some of this was residual fright, of course (every now and then I had to remind myself that part of Percy's problem was that he was only twenty-one, not much older than Wharton), but I think most of it was rage. He hated Delacroix. I don't know just why, but he did.
   'Go see if Warden Moores is still here,' I told Percy. 'If he is, give him a complete verbal report on what happened. Tell him he'll have my written report on his desk tomorrow, if I can manage it.'
   Percy swelled visibly at this responsibility; for a horrible moment or two, I actually thought he might salute. 'Yes, sir. I will.'
   'Begin by telling him that the situation in E Block is normal. It's not a story, and the warden won't appreciate you dragging it out to heighten the suspense.'
   'I won't.'
   'Okay. Off you go.'
   He started for the door, then turned back. The one thing you could count on with him was contrariness. I desperately wanted him gone, my groin was on fire, and now he didn't seem to want to go.
   'Are you all right, Paul?' he asked. 'Running a fever, maybe? Got a touch of the grippe? Cause there's sweat all over your face.'
   'I might have a touch of something, but mostly I'm fine,' I said. 'Go on, Percy, tell the warden.'
   He nodded and left—thank Christ for small favors. As soon as the door was closed, I lunged into my office. Leaving the duty desk unmanned was against regulations, but I was beyond caring about that. It was bad—like it had been that morning.
   I managed to get into the little toilet cubicle behind the desk and to get my business out of my pants before the urine started to gush, but it was a near thing. I had to put a hand over my mouth to stifle a scream as I began to flow, and grabbed blindly for the lip of the washstand with the other. It wasn't like my house, where I could fall to my knees and piss a puddle beside the woodpile; if I went to my knees here, the urine would go all over the floor.
   I managed to keep my feet and not to scream, but it was a close thing on both counts. It felt like my urine had been filled with tiny slivers of broken glass. The smell coming up from the toilet bowl was swampy and unpleasant, and I could see white stuff—pus, I guess—floating on the surface of the water.
   I took the towel off the rack and wiped my face with it. I was sweating, all right; it was pouring off me. I looked into the metal mirror and saw the flushed face of a man running a high fever looking back at me. Hundred and three? Hundred and four? Better not to know, maybe. I put the towel back on its bar, flushed the toilet, and walked slowly back across my office to the cellblock door. I was afraid Bill Dodge or someone else might have come in and seen three prisoners with no attendants, but the place was empty. Wharton still lay unconscious on his bunk, Delacroix had fallen silent, and John Coffey had never made a single noise at all, I suddenly realized. Not a peep. Which was worrisome.
   I went down the Mile and glanced into Coffey's cell, half-expecting to discover he'd committed suicide in one of the two common Death Row ways either hanging himself with his pants, or gnawing into his wrists. No such thing, it turned out. Coffey merely sat on the end of his bunk with his hands in his lap, the largest man I'd ever seen in my life, looking at me with his strange, wet eyes.
   'Cap'n?' he said.
   'What's up, big boy?'
   'I need to see you.'
   'Ain't you looking right at me, John Coffey?'
   He said nothing to this, only went on studying me with his strange, leaky gaze. I sighed.
   'In a second, big boy.'
   I looked over at Delacroix, who was standing at the bars of his cell. Mr. Jingles, his pet mouse (Delacroix would tell you he'd trained Mr. Jingles to do tricks, but us folks who worked on the Green Mile were pretty much unanimous in the opinion that Mr. Jingles had trained himself), was jumping restlessly back and forth from one of Del's outstretched hands to the other, like an acrobat doing leaps from platforms high above the center ring. His eyes were huge, his ears laid back against his sleek brown skull. I hadn't any doubt that the mouse was reacting to Delacroix's nerves. As I watched, he ran down Delacroix's pants leg and across the cell to where the brightly colored spool lay against one wall. He pushed the spool back to Delacroix's foot and then looked up at him eagerly, but the little Cajun took no notice of his friend, at least for the time being.
   'What happen, boss?' Delacroix asked. 'Who been hurt?'
   'Everything's jake,' I said. 'Our new boy came in like a lion, but now he's passed out like a lamb. All's well that ends well.'
   'It ain't over yet,' Delacroix said, looking up the Mile toward the cell where Wharton was jugged. 'L'homme mauvais, c'est' vrai!'
   'Well,' I said, 'don't let it get you down, Del. Nobody's going to make you play skiprope with him out in the yard.'
   There was a creaking sound from behind me as Coffey got off his bunk. 'Boss Edgecombe!' he said again. This time he sounded urgent. 'I need to talk to you!'
   I turned to him, thinking, all right, no problem, talking was my business. All the time trying not to shiver, because the fever had turned cold, as they sometimes will. Except for my groin, which still felt as if it had been slit open, filled with hot coals, and then sewed back up again.
   'So talk, John Coffey,' I said, trying to keep my voice light and calm. For the first time since he'd come onto E Block, Coffey looked as though he was really here, really among us. The almost ceaseless trickle of tears from the corners of his eyes had ceased, at least for the time being, and I knew he was seeing what he was looking at—Mr. Paul Edgecombe, E Block's bull-goose screw, and not some place he wished he could return to, and take back the terrible thing he'd done.
   'No,' he said. 'You got to come in here.'
   'Now, you know I can't do that,' I said, still trying for the light tone, 'at least not right this minute. I'm on my own here for the time being, and you outweigh me by just about a ton and a half. We've had us one hooraw this afternoon, and that's enough. So we'll just have us a chat through the bars, if it's all the same to you, and—'
   'Please!' He was holding the bars so tightly that his knuckles were pale and his fingernails were white. His face was long with distress, those strange eyes sharp with some need I could not understand. I remember thinking that maybe I could've understood it if I hadn't been so sick, and knowing that would have given me a way of helping him through the rest of it. When you know what a man needs, you know the man, more often than not. 'Please, Boss Edgecombe! You have to come in!'
   That's the nuttiest thing I ever heard, I thought, and then realized something even nuttier: I was going to do it. I had my keys off my belt and I was hunting through them for the ones that opened John Coffey's cell. He could have picked me up and broken me over his knee like kindling on a day when I was well and feeling fine, and this wasn't that day. All the same, I was going to do it. On my own, and less than half an hour after a graphic demonstration of where stupidity and laxness could get you when you were dealing with condemned murderers, I was going to open this black giant's cell, go in, and sit with him. If I was discovered, I might well lose my job even if he didn't do anything crazy, but I was going to do it, just the same.
   Stop, I said to myself, you just stop now, Paul. But I didn't. I used one key on the top lock, another on the bottom lock, and then I slid the door back on its track.
   'You know, boss, that maybe not such a good idear,' Delacroix said in a voice so nervous and prissy it would probably have made me laugh under other circumstances.
   'You mind your business and I'll mind mine,' I said without looking around. My eyes were fixed on John Coffey's, and fixed so hard they might have been nailed there. It was like being hypnotized. My voice sounded to my own ears like something which had come echoing down a long valley. Hell, maybe I was hypnotized. 'You just lie down and take you a rest.'
   'Christ, this place is crazy,' Delacroix said in a trembling voice. 'Mr. Jingles, I just about wish they'd fry me and be done widdit!'
   I went into Coffey's cell. He stepped away as I stepped forward. When he was backed up against his bunk—it hit him in the calves, that's how tall he was—he sat down on it. He patted the mattress beside him, his eyes never once leaving mine. I sat down there next to him, and he put his arm around my shoulders, as if we were at the movies and I was his girl.
   'What do you want, John Coffey?' I asked, still looking into his eyes—those sad, serene eyes.
   'Just to help,' he said. He sighed like a man will when he's faced with a job he doesn't much want to do, and then he put his hand down in my crotch, on that shelf of bone a foot or so below the navel.
   'Hey!' I cried. 'Get your goddam hand—'
   A jolt slammed through me then, a big painless whack of something. It made me jerk on the cot and bow my back, made me think of Old Toot shouting that he was frying, he was frying, he was a done tom turkey. There was no heat, no feeling of electricity, but for a moment the color seemed to jump out of everything, as if the world had been somehow squeezed and made to sweat. I could see every pore on john Coffey's face, I could see every bloodshot snap in his haunted eyes, I could see a tiny healing scrape on his chin. I was aware that my fingers were hooked down into claws on thin air, and that my feet were drumming on the floor of Coffey's cell.
   Then it was over. So was my urinary infection. Both the heat and the miserable throbbing pain were gone from my crotch, and the fever was likewise gone from my head. I could still feel the sweat it had drawn out of my skin, and I could smell it, but it was gone, all right.
   'What's going on?' Delacroix called shrilly. His voice still came from far away, but when John Coffey bent forward, breaking eye-contact with me, the little Cajun's voice suddenly came clear. It was as if someone had pulled wads of cotton or a pair of shooters' plugs out of my ears. 'What's he doing to you?'
   I didn't answer. Coffey was bent forward over his own lap with his face working and his throat bulging. His eyes were bulging, too. He looked like a man with a chicken bone caught in his throat.
   'John!' I said. I clapped him on the back; it was all I could think of to do. 'John, what's wrong?'
   He hitched under my hand, then made an unpleasant gagging, retching sound. His mouth opened the way horses sometimes open their mouths to allow the bit—reluctantly, with the lips peeling back from the teeth in a kind of desperate sneer. Then his teeth parted, too, and he exhaled a cloud of tiny black insects that looked like gnats or noseeums. They swirled furiously between his knees, turned white, and disappeared.
   Suddenly all the strength went out of my middsection. It was as if the muscles there had turned to water. I slumped back against the stone side of Coffey's cell. I remember thinking the name of the Savior—Christ, Christ, Christ, over and over, like that—and I remember thinking that the fever had driven me delirious. That was all.
   Then I became aware that Delacroix was bawling for help; he was telling the world that John Coffey was killing me, and telling it at the top of his lungs. Coffey was bending over me, all right, but only to make sure I was okay.
   'Shut up, Del,' I said, and got on my feet. I waited for the pain to rip into my guts, but it didn't happen. I was better. Really. There was a moment of dizziness, but that passed even before I was able to reach out and grab the bars of Coffey's cell door for balance. 'I'm totally okey-doke.'
   'You get on outta here,' Delacroix said, sounding like a nervy old woman telling a kid to climb down out of that-ere apple tree. 'You ain't suppose to be in there wit no one else on the block.'
   I looked at John Coffey, who sat on the bunk with his huge hands on the tree stumps of his knees. John Coffey looked back at me. He had to tilt his head up a little, but not much.
   'What did you do, big boy?' I asked in a low voice. 'What did you do to me?'
   'Helped,' he said. 'I helped it, didn't I?'
   'Yeah, I guess, but how? How did you help it?'
   He shook his head—right, left, back to dead center. He didn't know how he'd helped it (how he'd cured it) and his placid face suggested that he didn't give a rat's ass—any more than I'd give a rat's ass about the mechanics of running when I was leading in the last fifty yards of a Fourth of July Two-Miler. I thought about asking him how he'd known I was sick in the first place, except that would undoubtedly have gotten the same headshake. There's a phrase I read somewhere and never forgot, something about "an enigma wrapped in a mystery." That's what John Coffey was, and I suppose the only reason he could sleep at night was because he didn't care. Percy called him the ijit, which was cruel but not too far off the mark. Our big boy knew his name, and knew it wasn't spelled like the drink, and that was just about all he cared to know.
   As if to emphasize this for me, he shook his head m that deliberate way one more time, then lay down on his bunk with his hands clasped under his left cheek like a pillow and his face to the wall. His legs dangled off the end of the bunk from the shins on down, but that never seemed to bother him. The back of his shirt had pulled up, and I could see the scars that crisscrossed his skin.
   I left the cell, turned the locks, then faced Delacroix, who was standing across the way with his hands wrapped around the bars of his cell, looking at me anxiously. Perhaps even fearfully. Mr. Jingles perched on his shoulder with his fine whiskers quivering like filaments. 'What dat darkie-man do to you?' Delacroix asked. 'Waddit gris-gris? He th'ow some gris-gris on you?' Spoken in that Cajun accent of his, gris-gris rhymed with pee-pee.
   'I don't know what you're talking about, Del.'
   'Devil you don't! Lookit you! All change! Even walk different, boss!'
   I probably was walking different, at that. There was a beautiful feeling of calm in my groin, a sense of peace so remarkable it was almost ecstasy—anyone who's suffered bad pain and then recovered will know what I'm talking about.
   'Everything's all right, Del,' I insisted. 'John Coffey had a nightmare, that's all.'
   'He a gris-gris man!' Delacroix said vehemently. There was a nestle of sweat-beads on his upper lip. He hadn't seen much, just enough to scare him half to death. 'He a hoodoo man!'
   'What makes you say that?'
   Delacroix reached up and took the mouse in one hand. He cupped it in his palm and lifted it to his face. From his pocket, Delacroix took out a pink fragment—one of those peppermint candies. He held it out, but at first the mouse ignored it, stretching out its neck toward the man instead, sniffing at his breath the way a person might sniff at a bouquet of flowers. Its little oildrop eyes slitted most of the way closed in an expression that looked like ecstasy. Delacroix kissed its nose, and the mouse allowed its nose to be kissed. Then it took the offered piece of candy and began to munch it. Delacroix looked at it a moment longer, then looked at me. All at once I got it.
   '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.

4

   Before 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 turdstudded 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.
   'Allright,' 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 Prison. 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.
   When Hammersmith had finished, he said: 'So why do you want to know? I never had me a visit from a Big House screw before, it's a first.'
   'I told you—'
   'Curiosity, yep. Folks get curious, I know it, I even thank God for it, I'd be out of a job and might actually have to go to work for a living without it. But fifty miles is a long way to come to satisfy simple curiosity, especially when the last twenty is over bad roads. So why don't you tell me the truth, Edgecombe? I satisfied yours, so now you satisfy mine.'
   Well, I could say, I had this urinary infection, and John Coffey put his hands on me and healed it. The man who raped and murdered those two little girls did that. So I wondered about him, of course—anyone would. I even wondered if maybe Homer Cribus and Deputy Rob McGee didn't maybe collar the wrong man. In spite of all the evidence against him I wonder that. Because a man who has a power like that in his hands, you don't usually think of him as the kind of man who rapes and murders children.
   No, maybe that wouldn't do.
   'There are two things I've wondered about,' I said. 'The first is if he ever did anything like that before.'
   Hammersmith turned to me, his eyes suddenly sharp and bright with interest, and I saw he was a smart fellow. Maybe even a brilliant fellow, in a quiet way. 'Why?' he asked. 'What do you know, Edgecombe? What has he said?'
   'Nothing. But a man who does this sort of thing once has usually done it before. They get a taste for it.'
   'Yes,' he said. 'They do. They certainly do.'
   'And it occurred to me that it would be easy enough to follow his backtrail and find out. A man his size, and a Negro to boot, can't be that hard to trace.'
   'You'd think so, but you'd be wrong,' he said. 'In Coffey's case, anyhow. I know.'
   'You tried?'
   'I did, and came up all but empty. There were a couple of railroad fellows who thought they saw him in the Knoxville yards two days before the Detterick girls were killed. No surprise there; he was just across the river from the Great Southern tracks when they collared him, and that's probably how he came down here from Tennessee. I got a letter from a man who said he'd hired a big bald black man to shift crates for him in the early spring of this year—this as in Kentucky. I sent him a picture of Coffey and he said that was the man. But other than that—' Hammersmith shrugged and shook his head.
   'Doesn't that strike you as a little odd?'
   'Strikes me as a lot odd, Mr. Edgecombe. It's like he dropped out of the sky. And he's no help; he can't remember last week once this week comes.'
   'No, he can't,' I said. 'How do you explain it?'
   'We're in a Depression,' he said, 'that's how I explain it. People all over the roads. The Okies want to pick peaches in California, the poor whites from up in the brakes want to build cars in Detroit, the black folks from Mississippi want to go up to New England and work in the shoe factories or the textile mills. Everyone—black as well as white—thinks it's going to be better over the next jump of land. It's the American damn way. Even a giant like Coffey doesn't get noticed everywhere he goes... until, that is, he decides to kill a couple of little girls. Little white girls.'
   'Do you believe that?' I asked.
   He gave me a bland look from his too-thin face. 'Sometimes I do,' he said.
   His wife leaned out of the kitchen window like an engineer from the cab of a locomotive and called, 'Kids! Cookies are ready!' She turned to me. 'Would you like an oatmeal-raisin cookie, Mr. Edgecombe?'
   'I'm sure they're delicious, ma'am, but I'll take a pass this time.'
   'All right,' she said, and drew her head back inside.
   'Have you seen the scars on him?' Hammersmith asked abruptly. He was still watching his kids, who couldn't quite bring themselves to abandon the pleasures of the swing—not even for oatmeal-raisin cookies.
   'Yes.' But I was surprised he had.
   He saw my reaction and laughed. 'The defense attorney's one big victory was getting Coffey to take off his shirt and show those scars to the jury. The prosecutor, George Peterson, objected like hell, but the judge allowed it. Old George could have saved, his breath—juries around these parts don't buy all that psychology crap about how people who've been mistreated just can't help themselves. They believe people can help themselves. It's a point of view I have a lot of sympathy for... but those scars were pretty ghastly, just the same. Notice anything about them, Edgecombe?'
   I had seen the man naked in the shower, and I'd noticed, all right; I knew just what he was talking about. 'They're all broken up. Latticed, almost.'
   'You know what that means?'
   'Somebody whopped the living hell out of him when he was a kid,' I said. 'Before he grew.'
   'But they didn't manage to whop the devil out of him, did they, Edgecombe? Should have spared the rod and just drowned him in the river like a stray kitten, don't you think?'
   I suppose it would have been politic to simply agree and get out of there, but I couldn't. I'd seen him. And I'd felt him, as well. Felt the touch of his hands.
   'He's... strange,' I said. 'But there doesn't seem to be any real violence in him. I know how he was found, and it's hard to jibe that with what I see, day in and day out, on the block. I know violent men, Mr. Hammersmith.' It was Wharton I was thinking about, of course, Wharton strangling Dean Stanton with his wrist-chain and bellowing Whoooee, boys! Ain't this a party, now?
   He was looking at me closely now, and smiling a little, incredulous smile that I didn't care for very much. 'You didn't come up here to get an idea about whether or not he might have killed some other little girls somewhere else,' he said. 'You came up here to see if I think he did it at all. That's it, isn't it? 'Fess up, Edgecombe.'
   I swallowed the last of my cold drink, put the bottle down on the little table, and said: 'Well? Do you?'
   'Kids!' he called down the hill, leaning forward a little in his chair to do it. 'Y'all come on up here now n get your cookies!' Then he leaned back in his chair again and looked at me. That little smile—the one I didn't much care for—had reappeared.
   'Tell you something,' he said. 'You want to listen close, too, because this might just be something you need to know.'
   'I'm listening.'
   'We had us a dog named Sir Galahad,' he said, and cocked a thumb at the doghouse. 'A good dog. No particular breed, but gentle. Calm. Ready to lick your hand or fetch a stick. There are plenty of mongrel dogs like him, wouldn't you say?'
   I shrugged, nodded.
   'In many ways, a good mongrel dog is like your negro,' he said. 'You get to know it, and often you grow to love it. It is of no particular use, but you keep it around because you think it loves you. If you're lucky, Mr. Edgecombe, you never have to find out any different. Cynthia and I, we were not lucky.' He sighed—a long and somehow skeletal sound, like the wind rummaging through fallen leaves. He pointed toward the doghouse again, and I wondered how I had missed its general air of abandonment earlier, or the fact that many of the turds had grown whitish and powdery at their tops.
   'I used to clean up after him,' Hammersmith said, 'and keep the roof of his house repaired against the rain. In that way also Sir Galahad was like your Southern negro, who will not do those things for himself. Now I don't touch it, I haven't been near it since the accident—if you can call it an accident. I went over there with my rifle and shot him, but I haven't been over there since. I can't bring myself to. I suppose I will, in time. I'll clean up his messes and tear down his house.'
   Here came the kids, and all at once I didn't want them to come; all at once that was the last thing on earth I wanted. The little girl was all right, but the boy—
   They pounded up the steps, looked at me, giggled, then went on toward the kitchen door.
   'Caleb,' Hammersmith said. 'Come here. Just for a second.'
   The little girl—surely his twin, they had to be of an age—went on into the kitchen. The little boy came to his father, looking down at his feet. He knew he was ugly. He was only four, I guess, but four is old enough to know that you're ugly. His father put two fingers under the boy's chin and tried to raise his face. At first the boy resisted, but when his father said 'Please, son,' in tones of sweetness and calmness and love, he did as he was asked.
   A huge, circular scar ran out of his hair, down his forehead, through one dead and indifferently cocked eye, and to the comer of his mouth, which had been disfigured into the knowing leer of a gambler or perhaps a whoremaster. One cheek was smooth and pretty; the other was bunched up like the stump of a tree. I guessed there had been a hole in it, but that, at least, had healed.
   'He has the one eye,' Hammersmith said, caressing the boy's bunched cheek with a lover's kind fingers. 'I suppose he's lucky not to be blind. We get down on our knees and thank God for that much, at least. Eh, Caleb?'
   'Yes, sir,' the boy said shyly—the boy who would be beaten mercilessly on the play-yard by laughing, jeering bullies for all his miserable years of education, the boy who would never be asked to play Spin the Bottle or Post Office and would probably never sleep with a woman not bought and paid for once he was grown to manhood's times and needs, the boy who would always stand outside the warm and lighted circle of his peers, the boy who would look at himself in his mirror for the next fifty or sixty or seventy years of his life and think ugly, ugly, ugly.
   'Go on in and get your cookies,' his father said, and kissed his son's sneering mouth.
   'Yes, sir,' Caleb, said, and dashed inside.
   Hammersmith took a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped at his eyes with it—they were dry, but I suppose he'd gotten used to them being wet.
   'The dog was here when they were born,' he said. 'I brought him in the house to smell them when Cynthia brought them home from the hospital, and Sir Galahad licked their hands. Their little hands.' He nodded, as if confirming this to himself. 'He played with them; used to lick Arden's face until she giggled. Caleb used to pull his ears, and when he was first learning to walk, he'd sometimes go around the yard, holding to Galahad's tail. The dog never so much as growled at him. Either of them.'
   Now the tears were coming; he wiped at them automatically, as a man does when he's had lots of practice.
   'There was no reason,' he said. 'Caleb didn't hurt him, yell at him, anything. I know. I was there. If I hadn't have been, the boy would almost certainly have been killed. What happened, Mr. Edgecombe, was nothing. The boy just got his face set the right way in front of the dog's face, and it came into Sir Galahad's mind—whatever serves a dog for a mind—to lunge and bite. To kill, if he could. The boy was there in front of him and the dog bit. And that's what happened with Coffey. He was there, he saw them on the porch, he took them, he raped them, he killed them. You say there should be some hint that he did something like it before, and I know what you mean, but maybe he didn't do it before. My dog never bit before; just that once. Maybe, if Coffey was let go, he'd never do it again. Maybe my dog never would have bit again. But I didn't concern myself with that, you know. I went out with my rifle and grabbed his collar and blew his head off.'
   He was breathing hard.
   'I'm as enlightened as the next man, Mr. Edgecombe, went to college in Bowling Green, took history as well as journalism, some philosophy, too. I like to think of myself as enlightened. I don't suppose folks up North would, but I like to think of myself as enlightened. I'd not bring slavery back for all the tea in China. I think we have to be humane and generous in our efforts to solve the race problem. But we have to remember that your negro will bite if he gets the chance, just like a mongrel dog will bite if he gets the chance and it crosses his mind to do so. You want to know if he did it, your weepy Mr. Coffey with the scars all over him?'
   I nodded.
   'Oh, yes,' Hammersmith said. 'He did it. Don't you doubt it, and don't you turn your back on him. You might get away with it once or a hundred times... even a thousand... but in the end—' He raised a hand before my eyes and snapped the fingers together rapidly against the thumb, turning the hand into a biting mouth. 'You understand?'
   I nodded again.
   'He raped them, he killed them, and afterward he was sorry... but those little girls stayed raped, those little girls stayed dead. But you'll fix him, won't you, Edgecombe? In a few weeks you'll fix him so he never does anything like that again.' He got up, went to the porch rail, and looked vaguely at the doghouse, standing at the center of its beaten patch, in the middle of those aging turds. 'Perhaps you'll excuse me,' he said. 'Since I don't have to spend the afternoon in court, I thought I might visit with my family for a little bit. A man's children are only young once.'
   'You go ahead,' I said. My lips felt numb and distant. 'And thank you for your time.'
   'Don't mention it,' he said.
   I drove directly from Hammersmith's house to the prison. It was a long drive, and this time I wasn't able to shorten it by singing songs. It felt like all the songs had gone out of me, at least for awhile. I kept seeing that poor little boy's disfigured face. And Hammersmith's hand, the fingers going up and down against the thumb in a biting motion.