6

   I had known the little door between the office and the steps down to the storage room hadn't been built with the likes of Coffey in mind, but I hadn't realized how great the disparity was until he stood before it, looking at it thoughtfully.
   Harry laughed, but John himself seemed to see no humor in the big man standing in front of the little door. He wouldn't have, of course; even if he'd been quite a few degrees brighter than he was, he wouldn't have. He'd been that big man for most of his life, and this door was just a scrap littler than most.
   He sat down, scooted through it that way, stood up again, and went down the stairs to where Brutal was waiting for him. There he stopped, looking across the empty room at the platform where Old Sparky waited, as silent—and as eerie—as the throne m the castle of a dead king. The cap hung with hollow jauntiness from one of the back-posts, looking less like a king's crown than a jester's cap, however, something a fool would wear, or shake to make his high-born audience laugh harder at his jokes. The chair's shadow, elongated and spidery, climbed one wall like a threat. And yes, I thought I could still smell burned flesh in the air. It was faint, but I thought it was more than just my imagination.
   Harry ducked through the door, then me. I didn't like the frozen, wide-eyed way John was looking at Old Sparky. Even less did I like what I saw on his arms when I got close to him: goosebumps.
   'Come on, big boy,' I said. I took his wrist and attempted to pull him in the direction of the door leading down to the tunnel. At first he wouldn't go, and I might as well have been trying to pull a boulder out of the ground with my bare hands.
   'Come on, John, we gotta go, 'less you want the coach-and-four to turn back into a pumpkin,' Harry said, giving his nervous laugh again. He took John's other arm and tugged, but John still wouldn't come. And then he said something in a low and dreaming voice. It wasn't me he was speaking to, it wasn't any of us, but I have still never forgotten it.
   'They're still in there. Pieces of them, still in there. I hear them screaming.'
   Harry's nervous chuckles ceased, leaving him with a smile that hung on his mouth like a crooked shutter hangs on an empty house. Brutal gave me a look that was almost terrified, and stepped away from John Coffey. For the second time in less than five minutes, I sensed the whole enterprise on the verge of collapse. This time I was the one who stepped in; when disaster threatened a third time, a little later on, it would be Harry. We all got our chance that night, believe me.
   I slid in between John and his view of the chair, standing on my tiptoes to make sure I was completely blocking his sight-line. Then I snapped my fingers in front of his eyes, twice, sharply.
   'Come on!' I said. 'Walk! You said you didn't need to be chained, now prove it! Walk, big boy! Walk, John Coffey! Over there! That door!'
   His eyes cleared. 'Yes, boss.' And praise God, he began to walk.
   'Look at the door, John Coffey, just at the door and nowhere else.'
   'Yes, boss.' John fixed his eyes obediently on the door.
   'Brutal,' I said, and pointed.
   He hurried in advance, shaking out his keyring, finding the right one. John kept his gaze fixed on the door to the tunnel and I kept my gaze fixed on John, but from the comer of one eye I could see Harry throwing nervous glances at the chair, as if he had never seen it before in his life.
   There are pieces of them still in there... I hear them screaming.
   If that was true, then Eduard Delacroix had to be screaming longest and loudest of all, and I was glad I couldn't hear what John Coffey did.
   Brutal opened the door. We went down the stairs with Coffey in the lead. At the bottom, he looked glumly down the tunnel, with its low brick ceiling. He was going to have a crick in his back by the time we got to the other end, unless—I pulled the gurney over. The sheet upon which we'd laid Del had been stripped (and probably incinerated), so the gurney's black leather pads were visible. 'Get on,' I told John. He looked at me doubtfully, and I nodded encouragement. 'It'll be easier for you and no harder for us.'
   'Okay, Boss Edgecombe.' He sat down, then lay back, looking up at us with worried brown eyes. His feet, clad in cheap prison slippers, dangled almost all the way to the floor. Brutal got in between them and pushed John Coffey along the dank corridor as he had pushed so many others. The only difference was that the current rider was still breathing. About halfway along—under the highway, we would have been, and able to hear the muffled drone of passing cars, had there been any at that hour—John began to smile. 'Say,' he said, 'this is fun.' He wouldn't think so the next time he rode the gurney; that was the thought which crossed my mind. In fact, the next time he rode the gurney, he wouldn't think or feel anything. Or would he? There are pieces of them still in there, he had said; he could hear them screaming.
   Walking behind the others and unseen by them, I shivered.
   'I hope you remembered Aladdin, Boss Edgecombe,' Brutal said as we reached the far end of the tunnel.
   'Don't worry,' I said. Aladdin looked no different from the other keys I carried in those days—and I had a bunch that must have weighed four pounds—but it was the master key of master keys, the one that opened everything. There was one Aladdin key for each of the five cellblocks in those days, each the property of the block super. Other guards could borrow it, but only the bull-goose screw didn't have to sign it out.
   There was a steel-barred gate at the far end of the tunnel. It always reminded me of pictures I'd seen of old castles; you know, in days of old when knights were bold and chivalry was in flower. Only Cold Mountain was a long way from Camelot. Beyond the gate, a flight of stairs led up to an unobtrusive bulkhead-style door with signs reading NO TRESPASSING and STATE PROPERTY and ELECTRIFIED WIRE on the outside.
   I opened the gate and Harry swung it back. We went up, John Coffey once more in the lead, shoulders slumped and head bent. At the top, Harry got around him (not without some difficulty, either, although he was the smallest of the three of us) and unlocked the bulkhead. It was heavy. He could move it, but wasn't able to flip it up.
   'Here, boss,' John said. He pushed to the front again—bumping Harry into the wall with one hip as he did so—and raised the bulkhead with one hand. You would have thought it was painted cardboard instead of sheet steel.
   Cold night air, moving with the ridge-running wind we would now get most of the time until March or April, blew down into our faces. A swirl of dead leaves came with it, and John Coffey caught one of them with his free hand. I will never forget the way he looked at it, or how he crumpled it beneath his broad, handsome nose so it would release its smell.
   'Come on,' Brutal said. 'Let's go, forward harch.'
   We climbed out. John lowered the bulkhead and Brutal locked it—no need for the Aladdin key on this door, but it was needed to unlock the gate in the pole-and-wire cage which surrounded the bulkhead.
   'Hands to your sides while you go through, big fella,' Harry murmured. 'Don't touch the wire, if you don't want a nasty bum.'
   Then we were clear, standing on the shoulder of the road in a little cluster (three foothills around a mountain is what I imagine we looked like), staring across at the walls and lights and guard-towers of Cold Mountain Penitentiary. I could actually see the vague shape of a guard inside one of those towers, blowing on his hands, but only for a moment; the road-facing windows in the towers were small and unimportant. Still, we would have to be very, very quiet. And if a car did come along now, we could be in deep trouble.
   'Come on,' I whispered. 'Lead the way, Harry.'
   We slunk north along the highway in a little congaline, Harry first, then John Coffey, then Brutal, then me. We breasted the first rise and walked down the other side, where all we could see of the prison was the bright glow of the lights in the tops of the trees. And still Harry led us onward.
   'Where'd you park it?' Brutal stage-whispered, vapor puffing from his mouth in a white cloud. 'Baltimore?'
   'It's right up ahead,' Harry replied, sounding nervous and irritable. 'Hold your damn water, Brutus.'
   But Coffey, from what I'd seen of him, would have been happy to walk until the sun came up, maybe until it went back down again. He looked everywhere, starting—not in fear but in delight, I am quite sure—when an owl hoo'd. It came to me that, while he might be afraid of the dark inside, he wasn't afraid of it out here, not at all. He was caressing the night, rubbing his senses across it the way a man might rub his face across the swells and concavities of a woman's breasts.
   'We turn here,' Harry muttered.
   A little finger of road—narrow, unpaved, weeds running up the center crown—angled off to the right. We turned up this and walked another quarter of a mile. Brutal was beginning to grumble again when Harry stopped, went to the left side of the track, and began to remove sprays of broken-off pine boughs. John and Brutal pitched in, and before I could join them, they had uncovered the dented snout of an old Farmall truck, its wired-on headlights staring at us like buggy eyes.
   'I wanted to be as careful as I could, you know,' Harry said to Brutal in a thin, scolding voice. 'This may be a big joke to you, Brutus Howell, but I come from a very religious family, I got cousins back in the hollers so damn holy they make the Christians look like lions, and if I get caught playing at something like this—!'
   'It's okay,' Brutal said. 'I'm just jumpy, that's all.'
   'Me too,' Harry said stiffly. 'Now if this cussed old thing will just start—'
   He walked around the hood of the truck, still muttering, and Brutal tipped me a wink. As far as Coffey was concerned, we had ceased to exist. His head was tilted back and he was drinking in the sight of the stars sprawling across the sky.
   'I'll ride in back with him, if you want,' Brutal offered. Behind us, the Farmall's starter whined briefly, sounding like an old dog trying to find its feet on a cold winter morning; then the engine exploded into life. Harry raced it once and let it settle into a ragged idle. 'No need for both of us to do it.'
   'Get up front,' I said. 'You can ride with him on the return trip. If we don't end up making that one locked into the back of our own stagecoach, that is.'
   'Don't talk that way,' he said, looking genuinely upset. It was as if he had realized for the first time how serious this would be for us if we were caught. 'Christ, Paul!'
   'Go on,' I said. 'In the cab.'
   He did as he was told. I yanked on John Coffey's arm until I could get his attention back to earth for a bit, then led him around to the rear of the truck, which was stake-sided. Harry had draped canvas over the posts, and that would be of some help if we passed cars or trucks going the other way. He hadn't been able to do anything about the open back, though.
   'Upsy-daisy, big boy,' I said.
   'Goin for the ride now?'
   'That's right.'
   'Good.' He smiled. It was sweet and lovely, that smile, perhaps the more so because it wasn't complicated by much in the way of thought. He got up in back. I followed him, went to the front of the truckbed, and banged on top of the cab. Harry ground the transmission into first and the truck pulled out of the little bower he had hidden it in, shaking and juddering.
   John Coffey stood spread-legged in the middle of the truckbed head cocked up at the stars again, smiling broadly, unmindful of the boughs that whipped at him as Harry turned his truck toward the highway. 'Look, boss!' he cried in a low, rapturous voice, pointing up into the black night. 'It's Cassie, the lady in the rockin chair!'
   He was right; I could see her in the lane of stars between the dark bulk of the passing trees. But it wasn't Cassiopeia I thought of when he spoke of the lady in the rocking chair; it was Melinda Moores.
   'I see her, John,' I said, and tugged on his arm. 'But you have to sit down now, all right?'
   He sat with his back against the cab, never taking his eyes off the night sky. On his face was a look of sublime unthinking happiness. The Green Mile fell farther behind us with each revolution of the Farmall's bald tires, and for the time being, at least, the seemingly endless flow of John Coffey's tears had stopped.

7

   It was twenty-five miles to Hal Moores's house on Chimney Ridge, and in Harry Terwilliger's slow and rattly farm truck, the trip took over an hour. It was an eerie ride, and although it seems to me now that every moment of it is still etched in my memory—every turn, every bump, every dip, the scary times (two of them) when trucks passed us going the other way—I don't think I could come even close to describing how I felt, sitting back there with John Coffey, both of us bundled up like Indians in the old blankets Harry had been thoughtful enough to bring along.
   It was, most of all, a sense of lostness—the deep and terrible ache a child feels when he realizes he has gone wrong somewhere, all the landmarks are strange, and he no longer knows how to find his way home. I was out in the night with a prisoner—not just any prisoner, but one who had been tried and convicted for the murder of two little girls, and sentenced to die for the crime. My belief that he was innocent wouldn't matter if we were caught; we would go to jail ourselves, and probably Dean Stanton would, too. I had thrown over a life of work and belief because of one bad execution and because I believed the overgrown lummox sitting beside me might be able to cure a woman's inoperable brain tumor. Yet watching john watch the stars, I realized with dismay that I no longer did believe that, if I ever really had; my urinary infection seemed faraway and unimportant now, as such harsh and painful things always do once they are past (if a woman could really remember how bad it hurt to have her first baby, my mother once said, she'd never have a second). As for Mr. Jingles, wasn't it possible, even likely, that we had been wrong about how badly Percy had hurt him? Or that John—who really did have some kind of hypnotic power, there was no doubt of that much, at least—had somehow fooled us into thinking we'd seen something we hadn't seen at all? Then there was the matter of Hal Moores. On the day I'd surprised him in his office, I'd encountered a palsied, weepy old man. But I didn't think that was the truest side of the warden. I thought the real Warden Moores was the man who'd once broken the wrist of a skatehound who tried to stab him; the man who had pointed out to me with cynical accuracy that Delacroix's nuts were going to cook no matter who was out front on the execution team. Did I think that Hal Moores would stand meekly aside and let us bring a convicted child-murderer into his house to lay hands on his wife?
   My doubt grew like a sickness as we rode along. I simply did not understand why I had done the things I had, or why I'd persuaded the others to go along with me on this crazy night journey, and I did not believe we had a chance of getting away with it—not a hound's chance of heaven, as the oldtimers used to say. Yet I made no effort to cry it off, either, which I might have been able to do; things wouldn't pass irrevocably out of our hands until we showed up at Moores's house. Something—I think it might have been no more than the waves of exhilaration coming off the giant sitting next to me—kept me from hammering on top of the cab and yelling at Harry to turn around and go back to the prison while there was still time.
   Such was my frame of mind as we passed off the highway and onto County 5, and from County 5 onto Chimney Ridge Road. Some fifteen minutes after that, I saw the shape of a roof blotting out the stars and knew we had arrived.
   Harry shifted down from second to low (I think he only made it all the way into top gear once during the whole trip). The engine lugged, sending a shudder through the whole truck, as if it, too, dreaded what now lay directly ahead of us.
   Harry swung into Moores's gravelled driveway and parked the grumbling truck behind the warden's sensible black Buick. Ahead and slightly to our right was a neat-as-a-pin house in the style which I believe is called Cape Cod. That sort of house should have looked out of place in our ridge country, perhaps, but it didn't. The moon had come up, its grin a little fatter this morning, and by its light I could see that the yard, always so beautifully kept, now looked uncared for. It was just leaves, mostly, that hadn't been raked away. Under normal circumstances that would have been Melly's job, but Melly hadn't been up to any leaf-raking this fall, and she would never see the leaves fall again. That was the truth of the matter, and I had been mad to think this vacant-eyed idiot could change it.
   Maybe it still wasn't too late to save ourselves, though. I made as if to get up, the blanket I'd been wearing slipping off my shoulders. I would lean over, tap on the driver's-side window, tell Harry to get the hell out before—
   John Coffey grabbed my forearm in one of his hamhock fists, pulling me back down as effortlessly as I might have done to a toddler. 'Look, boss,' he said, pointing. 'Someone's up.'
   I followed the direction of his finger and felt a sinking—not just of the belly, but of the heart. There was a spark of light in one of the back windows. The room where Melinda now spent her days and nights, most likely; she would be no more capable of using the stairs than she would of going out to rake the leaves which had fallen during the recent storm.
   They'd heard the truck, of course—Harry Terwilliger's goddam Farmall, its engine bellowing and farting down the length of an exhaust pipe unencumbered by anything so frivolous as a muffler. Hell, the Mooreses probably weren't sleeping that well these nights, anyway.
   A light closer to the front of the house went on (the kitchen), then the living-room overhead, then the one in the front hall, then the one over the stoop. I watched these forward-marching lights the way a man standing against a cement wall and smoking his last cigarette might watch the lockstep approach of the firing squad. Yet I did not entirely acknowledge to myself even then that it was too late until the uneven chop of the Farmall's engine faded into silence, and the doors creaked, and the gravel crunched as Harry and Brutal got out.
   John was up, pulling me with him. In the dim light, his face looked lively and eager. Why not? I remember thinking. Why shouldn't he look eager? He's a fool.
   Brutal and Harry were standing shoulder to shoulder at the foot of the truck, like kids in a thunderstorm, and I saw that both of them looked as scared, confused, and uneasy as I felt. That made me feel even worse.
   John got down. For him it was more of a step than a jump. I followed, stiff-legged and miserable. I would have sprawled on the cold gravel if he hadn't caught me by the arm.
   'This is a mistake,' Brutal said in a hissy little voice. His eyes were very wide and very frightened. 'Christ Almighty, Paul, what were we thinking?'
   'Too late now,' I said. I pushed one of Coffey's hips, and he went obediently enough to stand beside Harry. Then I grabbed Brutal's elbow like this was a date we were on and got the two of us walking toward the stoop where that light was now burning. 'Let me do the talking. Understand?'
   'Yeah,' Brutal said. 'Right now that's just about the only thing I do understand.'
   I looked back over my shoulder. 'Harry, stay by the truck with him until I call for you. I don't want Moores to see him until I'm ready.' Except I was never going to be ready. I knew that now.
   Brutal and I had just reached the foot of the steps when the front door was hauled open hard enough to flap the brass knocker against its plate. There stood Hal Moores in blue pajama pants and a strapstyle tee-shirt, his iron-gray hair standing up in tufts and twists. He was a man who had made a thousand enemies over the course of his career, and he knew it. Clasped in his right hand, the abnormally long barrel not quite pointing at the floor, was the pistol which had always been mounted over the mantel. It was the sort of gun known as a Ned Buntline Special, it had been his grandfather's, and right then (I saw this with a further sinking in my gut) it was fully cocked.
   'Who the hell goes there at two-thirty in the goddam morning?' he asked. I heard no fear at all in his voice. And—for the time being, at least—his shakes had stopped. The hand holding the gun was as steady as a stone. 'Answer me, or—' The barrel of the gun began to rise.
   'Stop it, Warden!' Brutal raised his hands, palms out, toward the man with the gun. I have never heard his voice sound the way it did then; it was as if the shakes turned out of Moores's hands had somehow found their way into Brutus Howell's throat. 'It's us! It's Paul and me and... it's us!'
   He took the first step up, so that the light over the stoop could fall fully on his face, I joined him. Hal Moores looked back and forth between us, his angry determination giving way to bewilderment. 'What are you doing here?' he asked. 'Not only is it the shank of the morning, you boys have the duty. I know you do, I've got the roster pinned up in my workshop. So what in the name of... oh, Jesus. It's not a lockdown, is it? Or a riot?' He looked between us, and his gaze sharpened. 'Who else is down by that truck?'
   Let me do the talking. So I had instructed Brutal, but now the time to talk was here and I couldn't even open my mouth. On my way into work that afternoon I had carefully planned out what I was going to say when we got here, and had thought that it didn't sound too crazy. Not normal—nothing about it was normal—but maybe close enough to normal to get us through the door and give us a chance. Give John a chance. But now all my carefully rehearsed words were lost in a roaring confusion. Thoughts and images—Del burning, the mouse dying, Toot jerking in Old Sparky's lap and screaming that he was a done tom turkey—whirled inside my head like sand caught in a dust-devil. I believe there is good in the world, all of it flowing in one way or another from a loving God. But I believe there's another force as well, one every bit as real as the God I have prayed to my whole life, and that it works consciously to bring all our decent impulses to ruin. Not Satan, I don't mean Satan (although I believe he is real, too), but a kind of demon of discord, a prankish and stupid thing that laughs with glee when an old man sets himself on fire trying to light his pipe or when a much-loved baby puts its first Christmas toy in its mouth and chokes to death on it. I've had a lot of years to think on this, all the way from Cold Mountain to Georgia Pines, and I believe that force was actively at work among us on that morning, swirling everywhere like a fog, trying to keep John Coffey away from Melinda Moores.
   'Warden... Hal... I... ' Nothing I tried made any sense.
   He raised the pistol again, pointing it between Brutal and me, not listening. His bloodshot eyes had gotten very wide. And here came Harry Terwilliger, being more or less pulled along by our big boy, who was wearing his wide and daffily charming smile.
   'Coffey,' Moores breathed. 'John Coffey.' He pulled in breath and yelled in a voice that was reedy but strong: 'Halt! Halt right there, or I shoot!'
   From somewhere behind him, a weak and wavery female voice called: 'Hal? What are you doing out there? Who are you talking to, you fucking cocksucker?'
   He turned in that direction for just a moment, his face confused and despairing. Just a moment, as I say, but it should have been long enough for me to snatch the long-barrelled gun out of his hand. Except I couldn't lift my own hands. They might have had weights tied to them. My head seemed full of static, like a radio trying to broadcast during an electrical storm. The only emotions I remember feeling were fright and a kind of dull embarrassment for Hal.
   Harry and John Coffey reached the foot of the steps. Moores turned away from the sound of his wife's voice and raised the gun again. He said later that yes, he fully intended to shoot Coffey; he suspected we were all prisoners, and that the brains behind whatever was happening were back by the truck, lurking in the shadows. He didn't understand why we should have been brought to his house, but revenge seemed the most likely possibility.
   Before he could shoot, Harry Terwilliger stepped up ahead of Coffey and then moved in front of him, shielding most of his body. Coffey didn't make him do it; Harry did it on his own.
   'No, Warden Moores!' he said. 'It's all right! No one's armed, no one's going to get hurt, we're here to help!'
   'Help?' Moores's tangled, tufted eyebrows drew together. His eyes blazed. I couldn't take my eyes off the cocked hammer of the Buntline. 'Help what? Help who?'
   As if in answer, the old woman's voice rose again, querulous and certain and utterly lost: 'Come in here and poke my mudhole, you son of a bitch! Bring your asshole friends, too! Let them all have a turn!'
   I looked at Brutal, shaken to my soul. I'd understood that she swore—that the tumor was somehow making her swear—but this was more than swearing. A lot more.
   'What are you doing here?' Moores asked us again. A lot of the determination had gone out of his voice—his wife's wavering cries had done that. 'I don't understand. Is it a prison break, or... '
   John set Harry aside—just picked him up and moved him over—and then climbed to the stoop. He stood between Brutal and me, so big he almost pushed us off either side and into Melly's holly bushes. Moores's eyes turned up to follow him, the way a person's eyes do when he's trying to see the top of a tall tree. And suddenly the world fell back into place for me. That spirit of discord, which had jumbled my thoughts like powerful fingers sifting through sand or grains of rice, was gone. I thought I also understood why Harry had been able to act when Brutal and I could only stand, hopeless and indecisive, in front of our boss. Harry had been with John... and whatever spirit it is that opposes that other, demonic one, it was in John Coffey that night. And, when John stepped forward to face Warden Moores, it was that other spirit—something white, that's how I think of it, as something white—which took control of the situation. The other thing didn't leave, but I could see it drawing back like a shadow in a sudden strong light.
   'I want to help,' John Coffey said. Moores looked up at him, eyes fascinated, mouth hanging open. When Coffey plucked the Buntline Special from his hand and passed it to me, I don't think Hal even knew it was gone. I carefully lowered the hammer. Later, when I checked the cylinder, I would find it had been empty all along. Sometimes I wonder if Hal knew that. Meanwhile, John was still murmuring. 'I came to help her. Just to help. That's all I want.'
   'Hal!' she cried from the back bedroom. Her voice sounded a little stronger now, but it also sounded afraid, as if the thing which had so confused and unmanned us had now retreated to her. 'Make them go away, whoever they are! We don't need no sales men in the middle of the night! No Electrolux! No Hoover! No French knickers with come in the crotch! Get them out! Tell them to take a flying fuck at a rolling d... d... ' Something broke—it could have been a waterglass—and then she began to sob.
   'Just to help,' John Coffey said in a voice so low it was hardly more than a whisper. He ignored the woman's sobbing and profanity equally. 'Just to help, boss, that's all.'
   'You can't,' Moores said. 'No one can.' It was a tone I'd heard before, and after a moment I realized it was how I'd sounded myself when I'd gone into Coffey's cell the night he cured my urinary infection. Hypnotized. You mind your business and I'll mind mine was what I'd told Delacroix... except it had been Coffey who'd been minding my business, just as he was minding Hal Moores's now.
   'We think he can,' Brutal said. 'And we didn't risk our jobs—plus a stretch in the can ourselves, maybe—just to get here and turn around and go back without giving it the old college try.'
   Only I had been ready to do just that three minutes before. Brutal, too.
   John Coffey took the play out of our hands. He pushed into the entry and past Moores, who raised a single strengthless hand to stop him (it trailed across Coffey's hip and fell off; I'm sure the big man never even felt it), and then shuffled down the hall toward the living room, the kitchen beyond it, and the back bedroom beyond that where that shrill unrecognizable voice raised itself again: 'You stay out of here! Whoever you are, just stay out! I'm not dressed, my tits are out and my bitchbox is taking the breeze!'
   John paid no attention, just went stolidly along, head bent so he wouldn't smash any of the light fixtures, his round brown skull gleaming, his hands swinging at his sides. After a moment we followed him, me first, Brutal and Hal side by side, and Harry bringing up the rear. I understood one thing perfectly well: it was all out of our hands now, and in John's.

8

   The woman in the back bedroom, propped up against the headboard and staring wall-eyed at the giant who had come into her muddled sight, didn't look at all like the Melly Moores I had known for twenty years; she didn't even look like the Melly Moores Janice and I had visited shortly before Delacroix's execution. The woman propped up in that bed looked like a sick child got up as a Halloween witch. Her livid skin was a hanging dough of wrinkles. It was puckered up around the eye on the right side, as if she were trying to wink. That same side of her mouth turned down, one old yellow eyetooth hung out over her liverish lower lip. Her hair was a wild thin fog around her skull. The room stank of the stuff our bodies dispose of with such decorum when things are running right. The chamberpot by her bed was half full of some vile yellowish goo. We had come too late anyway, I thought, horrified. It had only been a matter of days since she had been recognizable—sick but still herself Since then, the thing in her head must have moved with horrifying speed to consolidate its position. I didn't think even John Coffey could help her now.
   Her expression when Coffey entered was one of fear and horror—as if something inside her had recognized a doctor that might be able to get at it and pry it loose, after all... to sprinkle salt on it the way you do on a leech to make it let go its grip. Hear me carefully: I'm not saying that Melly Moores was possessed, and I'm aware that, wrought up as I was, all my perceptions of that night must be suspect. But I have never completely discounted the possibility of demonic possession, either. There was something in her eyes, I tell you, something that looked like fear. On that I think you can trust me; it's an emotion I've seen too much of to mistake.
   Whatever it was, it was gone in a hurry, replaced by a look of lively, irrational interest. That unspeakable mouth trembled in what might have been a smile.
   'Oh, so big!' she cried. She sounded like a little girl just coming down with a bad throat infection. She took her hands—as spongy-white as her face—out from under the counterpane and patted them together. 'Pull down your pants! I've heard about nigger-cocks my whole life but never seen one!'
   Behind me, Moores made a soft groaning sound, full of despair.
   John Coffey paid no attention to any of it. After standing still for a moment, as if to observe her from a little distance, he crossed to the bed, which was illuminated by a single bedside lamp. It threw a bright circle of light on the white counterpane drawn up to the lace at the throat of her nightgown. Beyond the bed, in shadow, I saw the chaise longue which belonged in the parlor. An afghan Melly had knitted with her own hands in happier days lay half on the chaise and half on the floor. It was here Hal had been sleeping—dozing, at least—when we pulled in.
   As John approached, her expression underwent a third change. Suddenly I saw Melly, whose kindness had meant so much to me over the years, and even more to Janice when the kids had flown from the nest and she had been left feeling so alone and useless and blue. Melly was still interested, but now her interest seemed sane and aware.
   'Who are you?' she asked in a clear, reasonable voice. 'And why have you so many scars on your hands and arms? Who hurt you so badly?'
   'I don't hardly remember where they all come from, ma'am,' John Coffey said in a humble voice, and sat down beside her on her bed.
   Melinda smiled as well as she could—the sneering right side of her mouth trembled, but wouldn't quite come up. She touched a white scar, curved like a scimitar, on the back of his left hand. 'What a blessing that is! Do you understand why?'
   'Reckon if you don't know who hurt you or dog you down, it don't keep you up nights,' John Coffey said in his almost-Southern voice.
   She laughed at that, the sound as pure as silver in the bad-smelling sickroom. Hal was beside me now, breathing rapidly but not trying to interfere. When Melly laughed, his rapid breathing paused for a moment, indrawn, and one of his big hands gripped my shoulder. He gripped it hard enough to leave a bruise—I saw it the next day—but right then I hardly felt it.
   'What's your name?' she asked.
   'John Coffey, ma'am.'
   'Coffey like the drink.'
   'Yes, ma'am, only spelled different.'
   She lay back against her pillows, propped up but not quite sitting up, looking at him. He sat beside her, looking back, and the light from the lamp circled them like they were actors on a stage—the hulking black man in the prison overall and the small dying white woman. She stared into John's eyes with shining fascination.
   'Ma'am?'
   'Yes, John Coffey?' The words barely breathed, barely slipping to us on the bad-smelling, air. I felt the muscles bunching on my arms and legs and back. Somewhere, far away, I could feel the warden clutching my arm, and to the side of my vision I could see Harry and Brutal with their arms around each other, like little kids lost in the night. Something was going to happen. Something big. We each felt it in our own way.
   John Coffey bent closer to her. The springs of the bed creaked, the bedclothes rustled, and the coldly smiling moon looked in through an upper pane of the bedroom window. Coffey's bloodshot eyes searched her upturned haggard face.
   'I see it,' he said. Speaking not to her—I don't think so, anyway—but to himself. 'I see it, and I can help. Hold still... hold right still... '
   Closer he bent, and closer still. For a moment his huge face stopped less than two inches from hers. He raised one hand off to the side, fingers splayed, as if telling something to wait... just wait... and then he lowered his face again. His broad, smooth lips pressed against hers and forced them open. For a moment I could see one of her eyes, staring up past Coffey, filling with an expression of what seemed to be surprise. Then his smooth bald head moved, and that was gone, too.
   There was a soft whistling sound as he inhaled the air which lay deep within her lungs. That was all for a second or two, and then the floor moved under us and the whole house moved around us. It wasn't my imagination; they all felt it, they all remarked on it later. It was a kind of rippling thump. There was a crash as something very heavy fell over in the parlor—the grandfather clock, it turned out to be. Hal Moores tried to have it repaired, but it never kept time for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch again.
   Closer by there was a crack followed by a tinkle as the pane of glass through which the moon had been peeking broke. A picture on the wall—a clipper ship cruising one of the seven seas—fell off its hook and crashed to the floor; the glass over its front shattered.
   I smelled something hot and saw smoke rising from the bottom of the white counterpane which covered her. A portion was turning black, down by the jittering lump that was her right foot. Feeling like a man in a dream, I shook free of Moores's hand and stepped to the night-table. There was a glass of water there, surrounded by three or four bottles of pills which had fallen over during the shake. I picked up the water and dumped it on the place that was smoking. There was a hiss.
   John Coffey went on kissing her in that deep and intimate way, inhaling and inhaling, one hand still held out, the other on the bed, propping up his immense weight. The fingers were splayed; the hand looked to me like a brown starfish.
   Suddenly, her back arched. One of her own hands flailed out in the air, the fingers clenching and unclenching in a series of spasms. Her feet drummed against the bed. Then something screamed. Again, that's not just me; the other men heard it, as well. To Brutal it sounded like a wolf or coyote with its leg caught in a trap. To me it sounded like an eagle, the way you'd sometimes hear them on still mornings back then, cruising down through the misty cuts with their wings stiffly spread.
   Outside, the wind gusted hard enough to give the house a second shake—and that was strange, you know, because until then there had been no wind to speak of at all.
   John Coffey pulled away from her, and I saw that her face had smoothed out. The right side of her mouth no longer drooped. Her eyes had regained their normal shape, and she looked ten years younger. He regarded her raptly for a moment or two, and then he began to cough. He turned his head so as not to cough in her face, lost his balance (which wasn't hard; big as he was, he'd been sitting with his butt halfway off the side of the bed to start with), and went down onto the floor. There was enough of him to give the house a third shake. He landed on his knees and hung his head over, coughing like a man in the last stages of TB.
   I thought, Now the bugs. He's going to cough them out, and what a lot there'll be this time.
   But he didn't. He only went on coughing in deep retching barks, hardly finding time between fits to snatch in the next breath of air. His dark, chocolatey skin was graying out. Alarmed, Brutal went to him, dropped to one knee beside him, and put an arm across his broad, spasming back. As if Brutal's moving had broken a spell, Moores went to his wife's bed and sat where Coffey had sat. He hardly seemed to register the coughing, choking giant's presence at all. Although Coffey was kneeling at his very feet, Moores had eyes only for his wife, who was gazing at him with amazement. Looking at her was like looking at a dirty mirror which has been wiped clean.
   'John!' Brutal shouted. 'Sick it up! Sick it up like you done before!'
   John went on barking those choked coughs. His eyes were wet, not with tears but with strain. Spit flew from his mouth in a fine spray, but nothing else came out.
   Brutal whammed him on the back a couple of times, then looked around at me. 'He's choking! Whatever he sucked out of her, he's choking on it!'
   I started forward. Before I got two steps, John knee-walked away from me and into the corner of the room, still coughing harshly and dragging for each breath. He laid his forehead against the wallpaper—wild red roses overspreading a garden wall—and made a gruesome deep hacking sound, as if he were trying to vomit up the lining of his own throat. That'll bring the bugs if anything can, I remember thinking, but there was no sign of them. All the same, his coughing fit seemed to ease a little.
   'I'm all right, boss,' he said, still leaning with his forehead against the wild roses. His eyes remained closed. I'm not sure how he knew I was there, but he clearly did. 'Honest I am. See to the lady.'
   I looked at him doubtfully, then turned to the bed. Hal was stroking Melly's brow, and I saw an amazing thing above it: some of her hair—not very much, but some—had gone back to black.
   'What's happened?' she asked him. As I watched, color began to blush into her cheeks. It was as if she had stolen a couple of roses right out of the wallpaper. 'How did I get here? We were going to the hospital up in Indianola, weren't we? A doctor was going to shoot X-rays into my head and take pictures of my brain.'
   'Shhh,' Hal said. 'Shhh, dearie, none of that matters now.'
   'But I don't understand!' she nearly wailed, 'We stopped at a roadside stand... you bought me a dime packet of posies... and then... I'm here. It's dark! Have you had your supper, Hal? Why am I in the guest room? Did I have the X-ray?' Her eyes moved across Harry almost without seeing him—that was shock, I imagine—and fixed on me. 'Paul? Did I have the X-ray?'
   'Yes,' I said. 'It was clear.'
   'They didn't find a tumor?'
   'No,' I said. 'They say the headaches will likely stop now.'
   Beside her, Hal burst into tears.
   She sat forward and kissed his temple. Then her eyes moved to the comer. 'Who is that Negro man? Why is he in the corner?'
   I turned and saw John trying to get up on his feet. Brutal helped him and John made it with a final lunge. He stood facing the wall, though, like a child who has been bad. He was still coughing in spasms, but these seemed to be weakening now.
   'John,' I said. 'Turn around, big boy, and see this lady.'
   He slowly turned. His face was still the color of ashes, and he looked ten years older, like a once powerful man at last losing a long battle with consumption. His eyes were cast down on his prison slippers, and he looked as if he wished for a hat to wring.
   'Who are you?' she asked again. 'What's your name?'
   'John Coffey, ma'am,' he said, to which she immediately replied, 'But not spelled like the drink.'
   Hal started beside her. She felt it, and patted his hand reassuringly without taking her eyes from the black man.
   'I dreamed of you,' she said in a soft, wondering voice. 'I dreamed you were wandering in the dark, and so was I. We found each other.'
   John Coffey said nothing.
   'We found each other in the dark,' she said. 'Stand up, Hal, you're pinning me in here.'
   He got up and watched with disbelief as she turned back the counterpane. 'Melly, you can't—'
   'Don't be silly,' she said, and swung her legs out. 'Of course I can.' She smoothed her nightgown, stretched, then got to her feet.
   'My God,' Hal whispered. 'My dear God in heaven, look at her.'
   She went to John Coffey. Brutal stood away from her, an awed expression on his face. She limped with the first step, did no more than favor her right leg a bit with the second, and then even that was gone. I remembered Brutal handing the colored spool to Delacroix and saying, 'Toss it—I want to see how he runs.' Mr. Jingles had limped then, but on the next night, the night Del walked the Mile, he had been fine.
   Melly put her arms around John and hugged him. Coffey stood there for a moment, letting himself be hugged, and then he raised one hand and stroked the top of her head. This he did with infinite gentleness. His face was still gray. I thought he looked dreadfully sick.
   She stood away from him, her face turned up to his. 'Thank you.'
   'Right welcome, ma'am.'
   She turned to Hal and walked back to him. He put his arms around her.
   'Paul—' It was Harry. He held his right wrist out to me and tapped the face of his watch. It was pressing on to three o'clock. Light would start showing by four-thirty. If we wanted to get Coffey back to Cold Mountain before that happened, we would have to go soon. And I wanted to get him back. Partly because the longer this went on the worse our chances of getting away with it became, yes, of course. But I also wanted John in a place where I could legitimately call a doctor for him, if the need arose. Looking at him, I thought it might.
   The Mooreses were sitting on the edge of the bed, arms around each other. I thought of asking Hal out into the living room for a private word, then realized I could ask until the cows came home and he wouldn't budge from where he was right then. He might be able to take his eyes off her—for a few seconds, at least—by the time the sun came up, but not now.
   'Hal,' I said. 'We have to go now.'
   He nodded, not looking at me. He was studying the color in his wife's cheeks, the natural unstrained curve of his wife's lips, the new black in his wife's hair.
   I tapped him on the shoulder, hard enough to get his attention for a moment, at least.
   'Hal, we never came here.'
   'What—?'
   'We never came here,' I said. 'Later on we'll talk, but for now that's all you need to know. We were never here.'
   'Yes, all right... ' He forced himself to focus on me for a moment, with what was clearly an effort. 'You got him out. Can you get him back in?'
   'I think so. Maybe. But we need to go.'
   'How did you know he could do this?' Then he shook his head, as if realizing for himself that this wasn't the time. 'Paul... thank you.'
   'Don't thank me,' I said. 'Thank John.'
   He looked at John Coffey, then put out one hand—just as I had done on the day Harry and Percy escorted John onto the block. 'Thank you. Thank you so much.'
   John looked at the hand. Brutal threw a none-too-subtle elbow into his side. John started, then took the hand and gave it a shake. Up, down, back to center, release. 'Welcome,' he said in a hoarse voice. It sounded to me like Melly's when she had clapped her hands and told John to pull down his pants. 'Welcome,' he said to the man who would, in the ordinary course of things, grasp a pen with that hand and then sign John Coffey's execution order with it.
   Harry tapped the face of his watch, more urgently this time.
   'Brute?' I said. 'Ready?'
   'Hello, Brutus,' Melinda said in a cheerful voice, as if noticing him for the first time. 'It's good to see you. Would you gentlemen like tea? Would you, Hal? I could make it.' She got up again. 'I've been ill, but I feel fine now. Better than I have in years.'
   'Thank you, Missus Moores, but we have to go,' Brutal said. 'It's past John's bedtime.' He smiled to show it was a joke, but the look he gave John was as anxious as I felt.
   'Well... if you're sure... '
   'Yes, ma'am. Come on, John Coffey.' He tugged John's arm to get him going, and John went.
   'Just a minute!' Melinda shook free of Hal's hand and ran as lightly as a girl to where John stood. She put her arms around him and gave him another hug. Then she reached around to the nape of her neck and pulled a fine-link chain out of her bodice. At the end of it was a silver medallion. She held it out to John, who looked at it uncomprehendingly.
   'It's St. Christopher,' she said. 'I want you to have it, Mr. Coffey, and wear it. He'll keep you safe. Please wear it. For me.'
   John looked at me, troubled, and I looked at Hal, who first spread his hands and then nodded.
   'Take it, John,' I said. 'It's a present.'
   John took it, slipped the chain around his bullneck, and dropped the St. Christopher medallion into the front of his shirt. He had completely stopped coughing now, but I thought he looked grayer and sicker than ever.
   'Thank you, ma'am,' he said.
   'No,' she replied. 'Thank you. Thank you, John Coffey.'

9

   I rode up in the cab with Harry going back, and was damned glad to be there. The heater was broken, but we were out of the open air, at least. We had gone about ten miles when Harry spotted a little turnout and veered the truck into it.
   'What is it?' I asked. 'Is it a bearing?' To my mind, the problem could have been that or anything; every component of the Farmall's engine and transmission sounded on the verge of going cataclysmically wrong or giving up the ghost entirely.
   'Nope,' Harry said, sounding apologetic. 'I got to take a leak, is all. My back teeth are floatin.'
   It turned out that we all did, except for John. When Brutal asked if he wouldn't like to step down and help us water the bushes, he just shook his head without looking up. He was leaning against the back of the cab and wearing one of the Army blankets over his shoulders like a serape. I couldn't get any kind of read on his complexion, but I could hear his breathing—dry and raspy, like wind blowing through straw. I didn't like it.
   I walked into a clump of willows, unbuttoned, and let go. I was still dose enough to my urinary infection so that the body's amnesia had not taken full hold, and I could be grateful simply to be able to pee without needing to scream. I stood there, emptying out and looking up at the moon, I was hardly aware of Brutal standing next to me and doing the same thing until he said in a low voice, 'Hell never sit in Old Sparky.'
   I looked around at him, surprised and a little frightened by the low certainty in his tone. 'What do you mean?'
   'I mean he swallered that stuff instead of spitting out like he done before for a reason. It might take a week-he's awful big and strong—but I bet it's quicker. One of us'll do a check-tour and there he'll be, lying dead as stone on his bunk.'
   I'd thought I was done peeing, but at that a little shiver twisted up my back and a little more squirted out. As I rebuttoned my fly, I thought that what Brutal was saying made perfect sense. And I hoped, all in all, that he was right. John Coffey didn't deserve to die at all, if I was right in my reasoning about the Detterick girls, but if he did die, I didn't want it to be by my hand. I wasn't sure I could lift my hand to do it, if it came to that.
   'Come on,' Harry murmured out of the dark. 'It's gettin late. Let's get this done.'
   As we walked back to the truck, I realized we had left John entirely alone—stupidity on the Percy Wetmore level. I thought that he would be gone; that he'd spat out the bugs as soon as he saw he was unguarded, and had then just lit out for the territories, like Huck and Jim on the Big Muddy. All we would find was the blanket he had been wearing around his shoulders.
   But he was there, still sitting with his back against the cab and his forearms propped on his knees. He looked up at the sound of our approach and tried to give us a smile. It hung there for a moment on his haggard face and then slipped off.
   'How you doing, Big John?' Brutal asked, climbing into the back of the truck again and retrieving his own blanket.
   'Fine, boss,' John said listlessly. 'I's fine.'
   Brutal patted his knee. 'We'll be back soon. And when we get squared away, you know what? I'm going to see you get a great big cup of hot coffee. Sugar and cream, too.'
   You bet, I thought, going around to the passenger side of the cab and climbing in. If we don't get arrested and thrown in jail ourselves first.
   But I'd been living with that idea ever since we'd thrown Percy into the restraint room, and it didn't worry me enough to keep me awake. I dozed off and dreamed of Calvary Hill. Thunder in the west and a smell that might have been juniper berries. Brutal and Harry and Dean and I were standing around in robes and tin hats like in a Cecil B. DeMille movie. We were Centurions, I guess. There were three crosses, Percy Wetmore and Eduard Delacroix flanking John Coffey. I looked down at my hand and saw I was holding a bloody hammer.
   We got to get him down from there, Paul! Brutal screamed. We got to get him down!
   Except we couldn't, they'd taken away the stepladder. I started to tell Brutal this, and then an extra-hard bounce of the truck woke me up. We were backing into the place where Harry had hidden the truck earlier on a day that already seemed to stretch back to the beginning of time.
   The two of us got out and went around to the back. Brutal hopped down all right, but John Coffey's knees buckled and he almost fell. It took all three of us to catch him, and he was no more than set solid on his feet again before he went off into another of those coughing fits, this one the worst yet. He bent over, the coughing sounds muffled by the heels of his palms, which he held pressed against his mouth.
   When his coughing eased, we covered the front of the Farmall with the pine boughs again and walked back the way we had come. The worst part of that whole surreal furlough was—for me, at least—the last two hundred yards, with us scurrying back south along the shoulder of the highway. I could see (or thought I could) the first faint lightening of the sky in the east, and felt sure some early farmer, out to harvest his pumpkins or dig his last few rows of yams, would come along and see us. And even if that didn't happen, we would hear someone (in my imagination it sounded like Curtis Anderson) shout 'Hold it right there!' as I used the Aladdin key to unlock the enclosure around the bulkhead leading to the tunnel. Then two dozen carbine-toting guards would step out of the woods and our little adventure would be over.
   By the time we actually got to the enclosure, my heart was whamming so hard that I could see little white dots exploding in front of my eyes with each pulse it made. My hands felt cold and numb and faraway, and for the longest time I couldn't get the key to go into the lock.
   'Oh Christ, headlights!' Harry moaned.
   I looked up and saw brightening fans of light on the road. My keyring almost fell out of my hand; I managed to clutch it at the last second.
   'Give them to me,' Brutal said. 'I'll do it.'
   'No, I've got it,' I said. The key at last slipped into its slot and turned. A moment later we were in. We crouched behind the bulkhead and watched as a Sunshine Bread truck went pottering past the prison. Beside me I could hear John Coffey's tortured breathing. He sounded like an engine which has almost run out of oil. He had held the bulkhead door up effortlessly for us on our way out, but we didn't even ask him to help this time; it would have been out of the question. Brutal and I got the door up, and Harry led john down the steps. The big man tottered as he went, but he got down. Brutal and I followed him as fast as we could, then lowered the bulkhead behind us and locked it again.
   'Christ, I think we're gonna—' Brutal began, but I cut him off with a sharp elbow to the ribs.
   'Don't say it,' I said. 'Don't even think it, until he's safe back in his cell.'
   'And there's Percy to think about,' Harry said. Our voices had a flat, echoey quality in the brick tunnel. 'The evening ain't over as long as we got him to contend with.'
   As it turned out, our evening was far from over.

Part Six.
Coffey on the Mile

1

   I sat in the Georgia Pines sunroom, my father's fountain pen in my hand, and time was lost to me as I recalled the night Harry and Brutal and I took John Coffey off the Mile and to Melinda Moores, in an effort to save her life. I wrote about the drugging of William Wharton, who fancied himself the second coming of Billy the Kid; I wrote of how we stuck Percy in the straitjacket and jugged him in the restraint room at the end of the Green Mile; I wrote about our strange night journey—both terrifying and exhilarating—and the miracle that befell at the end of it. We saw John Coffey drag a woman back, not just from the edge of her grave, but from what seemed to us to be the very bottom of it.
   I wrote and was very faintly aware of the Georgia Pines version of life going on around me. Old folks went down to supper, then trooped off to the Resource Center (yes, you are permitted a chuckle) for their evening dose of network sitcoms. I seem to remember my friend Elaine bringing me a sandwich, and thanking her, and eating it, but I couldn't tell you what time of the evening she brought it, or what was in it. Most of me was back in 1932, when our sandwiches were usually bought off old Toot-Toot's rolling gospel snack-wagon, cold pork a nickel, corned beef a dime.
   I remember the place quieting down as the relics who live here made ready for another night of thin and troubled sleep; I heard Mickey—maybe not the best orderly in the place, but certainly the kindest—singing "Red River Valley" in his good tenor as he went around dispensing the evening meds: "From this valley they say you are going... We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile... " The song made me think of Melinda again, and what she had said to John after the miracle had happened. I dreamed of you. I dreamed you were wandering in the dark, and so was I. We found each other.
   Georgia Pines grew quiet, midnight came and passed, and still I wrote. I got to Harry reminding us that, even though we had gotten John back to the prison without being discovered, we still had Percy waiting for us. 'The evening ain't over as long as we got him to contend with' is more or less what Harry said.
   That's where my long day of driving my father's pen at last caught up with me. I put it down—just for a few seconds, I thought, so I could flex some life back into the fingers—and then I put my forehead down on my arm and closed my eyes to rest them. When I opened them again and raised my head, morning sun glared in at me through the windows. I looked at my watch and saw it was past eight. I had slept, head on arms like an old drunk, for what must have been six hours. I got up, wincing, trying to stretch some life into my back. I thought about going down to the kitchen, getting some toast, and going for my morning walk, then looked down at the sheafs of scribbled pages scattered across the desk. All at once I decided to put off the walk for awhile. I had a chore, yes, but it could keep, and I didn't feel like playing hide-and-seek with Brad Dolan that morning.
   Instead of walking, I'd finish my story. Sometimes it's better to push on through, no matter how much your mind and body may protest. Sometimes it's the only way to get through. And what I remember most about that morning is how desperately I wanted to get free of John Coffey's persistent ghost.
   'Okay,' I said. 'One more mile. But first... '
   I walked down to the toilet at the end of the second floor hall. As I stood inside there, urinating, I happened to glance up at the smoke detector on the ceiling. That made me think of Elaine, and how she had distracted Dolan so I could go for my walk and do my little chore the day before. I finished peeing with a grin on my face.
   I walked back to the sunroom, feeling better (and a lot comfier in my nether regions). Someone—Elaine, I have no doubt—had set down a pot of tea beside my pages. I drank greedily, first one cup, then another, before I even sat down. Then I resumed my place, uncapped the fountain pen, and once more began to write.
   I was just slipping fully into my story when a shadow fell on me. I looked up and felt a sinking in my stomach. It was Dolan standing between me and the windows. He was grinning.
   'Missed you going on your morning walk, Paulie, he said, 'so I thought I'd come and see what you were up to. Make sure you weren't, you know, sick.'
   'You're all heart and a mile wide,' I said. My voice sounded all right—so far, anyway—but my heart was pounding hard. I was afraid of him, and I don't think that realization was entirely new. He reminded me of Percy Wetmore, and I'd never been afraid of him... but when I knew Percy, I had been young.
   Brad's smile widened, but became no less pleasant.
   'Folks tellin me you been in here all night, Paulie, just writing your little report. Now, that's just no good. Old farts like you need their beauty rest.'
   'Percy—' I began, then saw a frown crease his grin and realized my mistake. I took a deep breath and began again. 'Brad, what have you got against me?'
   He looked puzzled for a moment, maybe a bit unsettled. Then the grin returned. 'Old-timer,' he said, 'could be I just don't like your face. What you writin, anyway? Last will n testicles?'
   He came forward, craning. I slapped my hand over the page I'd been working on. The rest of them I began to rake together with my free hand, crumpling some in my hurry to get them under my arm and under cover.
   'Now,' he said, as if speaking to a baby, 'that ain't going to work, you old sweetheart. If Brad wants to look, Brad is going to look. And you can take that to the everfucking bank.'
   His hand, young and hideously strong, closed over my wrist, and squeezed. Pain sank into my hand like teeth, and I groaned.
   'Let go,' I managed.
   'When you let me see,' he replied, and he was no longer smiling. His face was cheerful, though; the kind of good cheer you only see on the faces of folks who enjoy being mean. 'Let me see, Paulie. I want to know what you're writing.' My hand began to move away from the top page. From our trip with John back through the tunnel under the road. 'I want to see if it has anything to do with where you—'
   'Let that man alone.'
   The voice was like a harsh whipcrack on a dry, hot day... and the way Brad Dolan jumped, you would have thought his ass had been the target. He let go of my hand, which thumped back down on my paperwork, and we both looked toward the door.
   Elaine Connelly was standing there, looking fresh and stronger than she had in days. She wore jeans that showed off her slim hips and long legs; there was a blue ribbon in her hair. She had a tray in her arthritic hands—juice, a scrambled egg, toast, more tea. And her eyes were blazing.
   'What do you think you're doing?' Brad asked. 'He can't eat up here.'
   'He can, and he's going to,' she said in that same dry tone of command. I had never heard it before, but I welcomed it now. I looked for fear in her eyes and saw not a speck—only rage. 'And what you're going to do is get out of here before you go beyond the cockroach level of nuisance to that of slightly larger vermin—Rattus Americanus, let us say!'
   He took a step toward her, looking both unsure of himself and absolutely furious. I thought it a dangerous combination, but Elaine didn't flinch as he approached. 'I bet I know who set off that goddam smoke alarm,' Dolan said. 'Might could have been a certain old bitch with claws for hands. Now get out of here. Me and Paulie haven't finished our little talk, yet!'
   'His name is Mr. Edgecombe,' she said, 'and if I ever hear you call him Paulie again, I think I can promise you that your days of employment here at Georgia Pines will end, Mr. Dolan.'
   'Just who do you think you are?' he asked her. He was hulking over her, now, trying to laugh and not quite making it.
   'I think,' she said calmly, 'that I am the grandmother of the man who is currently Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives. A man who loves his relatives, Mr. Dolan. Especially his older relatives.'
   The effortful smile dropped off his face the way that writing comes off a blackboard swiped with a wet sponge. I saw uncertainty, the possibility that he was being bluffed, the fear that he was not, and a certain dawning logical assumption: it would be easy enough to check, she must know that, ergo she was telling the truth.
   Suddenly I began to laugh, and although the sound was rusty, it was right. I was remembering how many times Percy Wetmore had threatened us with his connections, back in the bad old days. Now, for the first time in my long, long life, such a threat was being made again... but this time it was being made on my behalf.
   Brad Dolan looked at me, glaring, then looked back at her.
   'I mean it,' Elaine said. 'At first I thought I'd just let you be—I'm old, and that seemed easiest. But when my friends are threatened and abused, I do not just let be. Now get out of here. And without one more word.'
   His lips moved like those of a fish—oh, how badly he wanted to say that one more word (perhaps the one that rhymes with witch). He didn't, though. He gave me a final look, and then strode past her and out into the hall.
   I let out my breath in a long, ragged sigh as Elaine set the tray down in front of me and then set herself down across from me. 'Is your grandson really Speaker of the House?' I asked.
   'He really is.'
   'Then what are you doing here?'
   'Speaker of the statehouse makes him powerful enough to deal with a roach like Brad Dolan, but it doesn't make him rich,' she said, laughing. 'Besides, I like it here. I like the company.'
   'I will take that as a compliment,' I said, and I did.
   'Paul, are you all right? You look so tired.' She reached across the table and brushed my hair away from my forehead and eyebrows. Her fingers were twisted, but her touch was cool and wonderful. I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them again, I had made a decision.
   'I'm all right,' I said. 'And almost finished. Elaine, would you read something?' I offered her the pages I had clumsily swept together. They were probably no longer in the right order—Dolan really had scared me badly—but they were numbered and she could quickly put them right.
   She looked at me consideringly, not taking what I was offering. Yet, anyway. 'Are you done?'
   'It'll take you until afternoon to read what's there,' I said. 'If you can make it out at all, that is.'
   Now she did take the pages, and looked down at them. 'You write with a very fine hand, even when that hand is obviously tired,' she said. 'I'll have no trouble with this.'
   'By the time you finish reading, I will have finished writing,' I said. 'You can read the rest in a half an hour or so. And then... if you're still willing... I'd like to show you something.'
   'Is it to do with where you go most mornings and afternoons?'
   I nodded.
   She sat thinking about it for what seemed a long time, then nodded herself and got up with the pages in her hand. 'I'll go out back,' she said. 'The sun is very warm this morning.'
   'And the dragon's been vanquished,' I said. 'This time by the lady fair.'
   She smiled, bent, and kissed me over the eyebrow in the sensitive place that always makes me shiver. 'We'll hope so,' she said, 'but in my experience, dragons like Brad Dolan are hard to get rid of.' She hesitated. 'Good luck, Paul. I hope you can vanquish whatever it is that has been festering in you.'
   'I hope so, too,' I said, and thought of John Coffey. I couldn't help it, John had said. I tried, but it was too late.
   I ate the eggs she'd brought, drank the juice, and pushed the toast aside for later. Then I picked up my pen and began to write again, for what I hoped would be the last time.
   One last mile.
   A green one.

2

   When we brought John back to E Block that night, the gurney was a necessity instead of a luxury. I very much doubt if he could have made it the length of the tunnel on his own; it takes more energy to walk at a crouch than it does upright, and it was a damned low ceiling for the likes of John Coffey. I didn't like to think of him collapsing down there. How would we explain that, on top of trying to explain why we had dressed Percy in the madman's dinner-jacket and tossed him in the restraint room?
   But we had the gurney—thank God—and John Coffey lay on it like a beached whale as we pushed him back to the storage-room stairs. He got down off it, staggered, then simply stood with his head lowered, breathing harshly. His skin was so gray he looked as if he'd been rolled in flour. I thought he'd be in the infirmary by noon... if he wasn't dead by noon, that was.
   Brutal gave me a grim, desperate look. I gave it right back. 'We can't carry him up, but we can help him,' I said. 'You under his right arm, me under his left.'
   'What about me?' Harry asked.
   'Walk behind us. If he looks like going over backward, shove him forward again.'
   'And if that don't work, kinda crouch down where you think he's gonna land and soften the blow,' Brutal said.
   'Gosh,' Harry said thinly, 'you oughta go on the Orpheum Circuit, Brute, that's how funny you are.'
   'I got a sense of humor, all right,' Brutal admitted.
   In the end, we did manage to get John up the stairs. My biggest worry was that he might faint, but he didn't. 'Go around me and check to make sure the storage room's empty,' I gasped to Harry.
   'What should I say if it's not?' Harry asked, squeezing under my arm. ' "Avon calling," and then pop back in here?'
   'Don't be a wisenheimer,' Brutal said.
   Harry eased the door open a little way and poked his head through. It seemed to me that he stayed that way for a very long time. At last he pulled back, looking almost cheerful. 'Coast's clear. And it's quiet.'
   'Let's hope it stays that way,' Brutal said. 'Come on, John Coffey, almost home.'
   He was able to cross the storage room under his own power, but we had to help him up the three steps to my office and then almost push him through the little door. When he got to his feet again, he was breathing stertorously, and his eyes had a glassy sheen. Also—I noticed this with real horror—the right side of his mouth had pulled down, making it look like Melinda's had, when we walked into her room and saw her propped up on her pillows.
   Dean heard us and came in from the desk at the head of the Green Mile. 'Thank God! I thought you were never coming back, I'd half made up my mind you were caught, or the Warden plugged you, or—' He broke off, really seeing John for the first time. 'Holy cats, what's wrong with him? He looks like he's dying!'
   'He's not dying... are you, John?' Brutal said. His eyes flashed Dean a warning.
   'Course not, I didn't mean actually dyin'—Dean gave a nervous little laugh—'but, jeepers... '
   'Never mind,' I said. 'Help us get him back to his cell.'
   Once again we were foothills surrounding a mountain, but now it was a mountain that had suffered a few million years, worth of erosion, one that was blunted and sad. John Coffey moved slowly, breathing through his mouth like an old man who smoked too much, but at least he moved.
   'What about Percy?' I asked. 'Has he been kicking up a ruckus?'
   'Some at the start,' Dean said. 'Trying to yell through the tape you put over his mouth. Cursing, I believe.'
   'Mercy me,' Brutal said. 'A good thing our tender ears were elsewhere.'
   'Since then, just a mulekick at the door every once in awhile, you know.' Dean was so relieved to see us that he was babbling. His glasses slipped down to the end of his nose, which was shiny with sweat, and he pushed them back up. We passed Wharton's cell. That worthless young man was flat on his back, snoring like a sousaphone. His eyes were shut this time, all right.
   Dean saw me looking and laughed.
   'No trouble from that guy! Hasn't moved since he laid back down on his bunk. Dead to the world. As for Percy kicking the door every now and then, I never minded that a bit. Was glad of it, tell you the truth. If he didn't make any noise at all, I'd start wonderin if he hadn't choked to death on that gag you slapped over his cakehole. But that's not the best. You know the best? It's been as quiet as Ash Wednesday morning in New Orleans! Nobody's been down all night!' He said this last in a triumphant, gloating voice. 'We got away with it, boys! We did!'
   That made him think of why we'd gone through the whole comedy in the first place, and he asked about Melinda.
   'She's fine,' I said. We had reached John 's cell. What Dean had said was just starting to sink in: We got away with it, boys... we did.
   'Was it like... you know... the mouse?' Dear asked. He glanced briefly at the empty cell when Delacroix had lived with Mr. Jingles, then down a the restraint room, which had been the mouse's seeming point of origin. His voice dropped, the way people's voices do when they enter a big church where even the silence seems to whisper. 'Was it a... ' He gulped. 'Shoot, you know what I mean—was it a miracle?'
   The three of us looked at each other briefly, confirming what we already knew. 'Brought her back from her damn grave is what he did,' Harry said. 'Yeah, it was a miracle, all right.'
   Brutal opened the double locks on the cell, and gave John a gentle push inside. 'Go on, now, big boy. Rest awhile. You earned it. We'll just settle Percy's hash—'
   'He's a bad man,' John said in a low, mechanical voice.
   'That's right, no doubt, wicked as a warlock,' Brutal agreed in his most soothing voice, 'but don't you worry a smidge about him, we're not going to let him near you. You just ease down on that bunk of yours and I'll have that cup of coffee to you in no time. Hot and strong. You'll feel like a new man.'
   John sat heavily on his bunk. I thought he'd fall back on it and roll to the wall as he usually did, but he just sat there for the time being, hands clasped loosely between his knees, head lowered, breathing hard through his mouth. The St. Christopher's medal Melinda had given him had fallen out of the top of his shirt and swung back and forth in the air. He'll keep you safe, that's what she'd told him, but John Coffey didn't look a bit safe. He looked like he had taken Melinda's place on the lip of that grave Harry had spoken of.
   But I couldn't think about John Coffey just then I turned around to the others. 'Dean, get Percy's pistol and hickory stick.'
   'Okay.' He went back up to the desk, unlocked the drawer with the gun and the stick in it, and brought them back.
   'Ready?' I asked them. My men—good men, and was never prouder of them than I was that night, nodded. Harry and Dean both looked nervous; Brutal as stolid as ever. 'Okay. I'm going to do the talking. The less the rest of you open your mouths, the better it'll probably be and the quicker it'll probably wrap up... for better or worse. Okay?'
   They nodded again. I took a deep breath and walked down to the Green Mile restraint room.
   Percy looked up, squinting, when the light fell on him. He was sitting on the floor and licking at the tape I had slapped across his mouth. The part I'd wound around to the back of his head had come free (probably the sweat and brilliantine in his hair had loosened it), and he'd gotten a ways toward getting the rest off, as well. Another hour and he would've been bawling for help at the top of his lungs.
   He used his feet to shove himself a little way backward when we came in, then stopped, no doubt realizing that there was nowhere to go except for the southeast corner of the room.
   I took his gun and stick from Dean and held them out in Percy's direction. 'Want these back?' I asked.
   He looked at me warily, then nodded his head.
   'Brutal,' I said. 'Harry. Get him on his feet.'
   They bent, hooked him under the canvas arms of the straitjacket, and up he came. I moved toward him until we were almost nose to nose. I could smell the sour sweat in which he'd been basting. Some of it probably came from his efforts to get free of the quiet-down coat, or to administer the occasional kicks to the door Dean had heard, but I thought most of his sweat had come as a result of plain old fear: fear of what we might do to him when we came back.
   I'll be okay, they ain't killers, Percy would think... and then, maybe, he'd think of Old Sparky and it would cross his mind that yes, in a way we were killers. I'd done seventy-seven myself, more than any of the men I'd ever put the chest-strap on, more than Sergeant York himself got credit for in World War I. Killing Percy wouldn't be logical, but we'd already behaved illogically, he would have told himself as he sat there with his arms behind him, working with his tongue to get the tape off his mouth. And besides, logic most likely doesn't have much power over a person's thoughts when that person is sitting on the floor of a room with soft walls, wrapped up as neat and tight as any spider ever wrapped a fly.
   Which is to say, if I didn't have him where I wanted now, I never would.
   'I'll take the tape off your mouth if you promise not to start yowling,' I said. 'I want to have a talk with you, not a shouting match. So what do you say? Will you be quiet?'
   I saw relief come up in his eyes as he realized that, if I wanted to talk, he really did stand a good chance of getting out of this with a whole skin. He nodded his head.
   'If you start noising off, the tape goes back on,' I said. 'Do you understand that, too?'
   Another nod, rather impatient this time.
   I reached up, grabbed the end of the runner he'd worked loose, and gave it a hard yank. It made a loud peeling sound. Brutal winced. Percy yipped with pain and began rubbing his lips. He tried to speak, realized he couldn't do it with a hand over his mouth, and lowered it.
   'Get me out of this nut-coat, you lugoon,' he spat.
   'In a minute,' I said.
   'Now! Now! Right n—'
   I slapped his face. It was done before I'd even known I was going to do it... but of course I'd known it might come to that. Even back during the first talk about Percy that I'd had with Warden Moores, the one where Hal advised me to put Percy out for the Delacroix execution, I'd known it might come to that. A man's hand is like an animal that's only half-tame; mostly it's good, but sometimes it escapes and bites the first thing it sees.
   The sound was a sharp snap, like a breaking branch. Dean gasped. Percy stared at me in utter shock, his eyes so wide they looked as if they must fall out of their sockets. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, like the mouth of a fish in an aquarium tank.
   'Shut up and listen to me,' I said. 'You deserved to be punished for what you did to Del, and we gave you what you deserved. This was the only way we could do it. We all agreed, except for Dean, and he'll go along with us, because we'll make him sorry if he doesn't. Isn't that so, Dean?'
   'Yes,' Dean whispered. He was milk-pale. 'Guess it is.'
   'And we'll make you sorry you were ever born,' I went on. 'We'll see that people know about how you sabotaged the Delacroix execution—'
   'Sabotaged—!'
   '—how you almost got Dean killed. We'll blab enough to keep you out of almost any job your uncle can get you.'
   Percy was shaking his head furiously. He didn't believe that, perhaps couldn't believe that. My handprint stood out on his pale cheek like a fortune-teller's sign.
   'And no matter what, we'd see you beaten within an inch of your life. We wouldn't have to do it ourselves. We know people, too, Percy, are you so foolish you don't realize that? They aren't up in the state capital, but they still know how to legislate certain matters. These are people who have friends in here, people who have brothers in here, people who have fathers in here. They'd be happy to amputate the nose or the penis of a shitheels like you. They'd do it just so someone they care for could get an extra three hours in the exercise yard each week.'
   Percy had stopped shaking his head. Now he was only staring. Tears stood in his eyes, but didn't fall. I think they were tears of rage and frustration. Or maybe I just hoped they were.
   'Okay—now look on the sunny side, Percy. Your lips sting a little from having the tape pulled off them, I imagine, but otherwise there's nothing hurt but your pride... and nobody needs to know about that but the people in this room right now. And we'll never tell, will we, boys?'
   They shook their heads. 'Course not,' Brutal said. 'Green Mile business stays on the Green Mile. Always has.'
   'You're going on to Briar Ridge and we're going to leave you alone until you go,' I said. 'Do you want to leave it at that, Percy, or do you want to play hardball with us?'
   There was a long, long silence as he considered—I could almost see the wheels turning in his head as he tried out and rejected possible counters. And at last, I think a more basic truth must have overwhelmed the rest of his calculations: the tape was off his mouth, but he was still wearing the straitjacket and probably he had to piss like a racehorse.
   'All right,' he said. 'We'll consider the matter closed. Now get me out of this coat. It feels like my shoulders are—'
   Brutal stepped forward, shouldering me aside, and grabbed Percy's face with one big hand—fingers denting in Percy's right cheek, thumb making a deep dimple in his left.
   'In a few seconds,' he said. 'First, you listen to me. Paul here is the big boss, and so he has to talk elegant sometimes.'
   I tried to remember anything elegant I might've said to Percy and couldn't come up with much. Still, I thought it might be best to keep my mouth shut; Percy looked suitably terrorized, and I didn't want to spoil the effect.
   'People don't always understand that being elegant isn't the same as being soft, and that's where I come in. I don't worry about being elegant. I just say things straight out. So here it is, straight out: if you go back on your promise, we'll most likely take an ass-fucking. But then we'll find you—if we have to go all the way to Russia, we'll find you—and we will fuck you, not just up the ass but in every hole you own. We'll fuck you until you'll wish you were dead, and then we'll rub vinegar in the parts that are bleeding. Do you understand me?'
   He nodded. With Brutal's hand digging into the soft sides of his face the way it was, Percy looked eerily like Old Toot-Toot.
   Brutal let go of him and stepped back. I nodded to Harry, who went behind Percy and started unsnapping and unbuckling.
   'Keep it in mind, Percy,' Harry said. 'Keep it in mind and let bygones be bygones.'
   All of it suitably scary, three bogeymen in bluesuits... but I felt a kind of knowing despair sweep through me, all the same. He might keep quiet for a day or a week, continuing to calculate the odds on various actions, but in the end two things—his belief in his connections and his inability to walk away from a situation where he saw himself as the loser would combine. When that happened, he would spill his guts. We had perhaps helped to save Melly Moores's life by taking John to her, and I wouldn't have changed that ("not for all the tea in China," as we used to say back in those days), but in the end we were going to hit the canvas and the ref was going to count us out. Short of murder, there was no way we could make Percy keep his end of the bargain, not once he was away from us and had started to get back what passed for his guts.
   I took a little sidelong glance at Brutal and saw he knew this, too. Which didn't surprise me. There were no flies on Mrs. Howell's boy Brutus, never had been. He gave me a tiny shrug, just one shoulder lifting an inch and then dropping, but it was enough. So what? that shrug said. What else is there, Paul? We did what we had to do, and we did it the best we could.
   Yes. Results hadn't been half-bad, either.
   Harry undid the last buckle on the straitjacket. Grimacing with disgust and rage, Percy pawed it off and let it drop at his feet. He wouldn't look at any of us, not directly.
   'Give me my gun and my baton,' he said. I handed them over. He dropped the gun into its holster and shoved the hickory stick into its custom loop.
   'Percy, if you think about it—'
   'Oh, I intend to,' he said, brushing past me. 'I intend to think about it very hard. Starting right now. On my way home. One of you boys can clock me out at quitting time.' He reached the door of the restraint room and turned to survey us with a look of angry, embarrassed contempt—a deadly combination for the secret we'd had some fool's hope of keeping. 'Unless, of course, you want to try explaining why I left early.'
   He left the room and went striding up the Green Mile, forgetting in his agitation why that green floored central corridor was so wide. He had mad this mistake once before and had gotten away with it. He would not get away with it again.
   I followed him out the door, trying to think of a way to soothe him down—I didn't want him leaving E Block the way he was now, sweaty and dishevelled, with the red print of my hand still on his cheek. The other three followed me.
   What happened then happened very fast—it was all over in no more than a minute, perhaps even less. Yet I remember all of it to this day—mostly, I think, because I told Janice everything when I got home and that set it in my mind. What happened afterward—the dawn meeting with Curtis Anderson, the inquest, the press-meeting Hal Moores set up for us (he was back by then, of course), and the eventual Board of Enquiry in the state capital—those things have blurred over the years like so much else in my memory. But as to what actually happened next there on the Green Mile, yes, that I remember perfectly well.
   Percy was walking up the right side of the Mile with his head lowered, and I'll say this much: no ordinary Prisoner could have reached him. John Coffey wasn't an ordinary prisoner, though. John Coffey was a giant, and he had a giant's reach.
   I saw his long brown arms shoot out from between the bars and yelled, 'Watch it, Percy, watch it!' Percy started to turn, his left hand dropping to the butt of his stick. Then he was seized and yanked against the front of John Coffey's cell, the right side of his face smashing into the bars.
   He grunted and turned toward Coffey, raising the hickory club. John was certainly vulnerable to it; his own face was pressed so strenuously into the space between two of the center bars that he looked as if he was trying to squeeze his entire head through. It would have been impossible, of course, but that was how it looked. His right hand groped, found the nape of Percy's neck, curled around it, and yanked Percy's head forward. Percy brought the club down between the bars and onto John 's temple. Blood flowed, but John paid no attention. His mouth pressed against Percy's mouth. I heard a whispering rush—an exhalatory sound, as of long-held breath. Percy jerked like a fish on a hook, trying to get away, but he never had a chance; John 's right hand was pressed to the back of his neck, holding him firm. Their faces seemed to melt together, like the faces of lovers I have seen kissing passionately through bars.
   Percy screamed, the sound muffled as it had been through the tape, and made another effort to pull back. For an instant their lips came apart a little, and I saw the black, swirling tide that was flowing out of John Coffey and into Percy Wetmore. What wasn't going into him through his quivering mouth was flowing in by way of his nostrils. Then the hand on the nape of his neck flexed, and Percy was pulled forward onto John 's mouth again; was almost impaled on it.
   Percy's left hand sprang open. His treasured hickory baton fell to the green linoleum. He never picked it up again.
   I tried to lunge forward, I guess I did lunge forward, but my movements felt old and creaky to myself. I grabbed for my gun, but the strap was still across the burled-walnut grip, and at first I couldn't get it out of its holster. Beneath me, I seemed to feel the floor shake as it had in the back bedroom of the Warden's neat little Cape Cod. That I'm not sure of, but I know that one of the caged lightbulbs overhead broke. Fragments of glass showered down. Harry yelled in surprise.
   At last I managed to thumb loose the safety strap over the butt of my.38, but before I could pull it out of its holster, John had thrust Percy away from him and stepped back into his cell. John was grimacing and rubbing his mouth, as if he had tasted something bad.
   'What'd he do?' Brutal shouted. 'What'd he do, Paul?'
   'Whatever he took out of Melly, Percy's got it now,' I said.
   Percy was standing against the bars of Delacroix's old cell. His eyes were wide and blank—double zeros. I approached him carefully, expecting him to start coughing and choking the way John had after he'd finished with Melinda, but he didn't. At first he only stood there.
   I snapped my fingers in front of his eyes. 'Percy! Hey, Percy! Wake up!'
   Nothing. Brutal joined me, and reached toward Percy's empty face with both hands.
   'That isn't going to work,' I said.
   Ignoring me, Brutal clapped his hands sharply together twice, right in front of Percy's nose. And it did work, or appeared to work. His eyelids fluttered and he stared around—dazed, like someone hit over the head struggling back to consciousness. He looked from Brutal to me. All these years later, I'm pretty sure he didn't see either of us, but I thought he did then; I thought he was coming out of it.
   He pushed away from the bars and swayed a little on his feet. Brutal steadied him. 'Easy, boy, you all right?' Percy didn't answer, just stepped past Brutal and turned toward the duty desk. He wasn't staggering, exactly, but he was listing to port.
   Brutal reached out for him. I pushed his hand away. 'Leave him alone.' Would I have said the same if I'd known what was going to happen next? I've asked myself that question a thousand times since the fall of 1932. There's never any answer.
   Percy made twelve or fourteen paces, then stopped again, head lowered. He was outside of Wild Bill Wharton's cell by then. Wharton was still making those sousaphone noises. He slept through the whole thing. He slept through his own death, now that I think of it, which made him a lot luckier than most of the men who ended up here. Certainly luckier than he deserved.
   Before we knew what was happening, Percy drew his gun, stepped to the bars of Wharton's cell, and emptied all six shots into the sleeping man' just bam-bam-bam, bam-bam-bam, as fast as he could pull the trigger. The sound in that enclosed space was deafening; when I told Janice the story the next morning, I could still hardly hear the sound of my own voice for the ringing in my ears.
   We ran at him, all four of us. Dean got there first—I don't know how, as he was behind Brutal and me when Coffey had hold of Percy—but he did. He grabbed Percy's wrist, prepared to wrestle the gun out of Percy's hand, but he didn't have to. Percy just let go, and the gun fell to the floor. His eyes went across us like they were skates and we were ice. There was a low hissing sound and a sharp ammoniac smell as Percy's bladder let go, then a brrrap sound and a thicker stink as he filled the other side of his pants, as well. His eyes had settled on a far corner of the corridor. They were eyes that never saw anything in this real world of ours again, so far as I know. Back near the beginning of this I wrote that Percy was at Briar Ridge by the time that Brutal found the colored slivers of Mr. Jingles's spool a couple of months later, and I didn't lie about that. He never got the office with the fan in the comer, though; never got a bunch of lunatic patients to push around, either. But I imagine he at least got his own private room.
   He had connections, after all.
   Wharton was lying on his side with his back against the wall of his cell. I couldn't see much then but a lot of blood soaking into the sheet and splattered across the cement, but the coroner said Percy had shot like Annie Oakley. Remembering Dean's story of how Percy had thrown his hickory baton at the mouse that time and barely missed, I wasn't too surprised. This time the range had been shorter and the target not moving. One in the groin, one in the gut, one in the chest, three in the head.
   Brutal was coughing and waving at the haze of gunsmoke. I was coughing myself, but hadn't noticed it until then.
   'End of the line,' Brutal said. His voice was calm, but there was no mistaking the glaze of panic in his eyes.
   I looked down the hallway and saw John Coffey sitting on the end of his bunk. His hands were clasped between his knees again, but his head was up and he no longer looked a bit sick. He nodded at me slightly, and I surprised myself—as I had on the day I offered him my hand—by returning the nod.
   'What are we going to do?' Harry gibbered. 'Oh Christ, what are we going to do?'
   'Nothing we can do,' Brutal said in that same calm voice. 'We're hung. Aren't we, Paul?'
   My mind had begun to move very fast. I looked at Harry and Dean, who were staring at me like scared kids. I looked at Percy, who was standing there with his hands and jaw dangling. Then I looked at my old friend, Brutus Howell.
   'We're going to be okay,' I said.
   Percy at last commenced coughing. He doubled over, hands on his knees, almost retching. His face began to turn red. I opened my mouth, meaning to tell the others to stand back, but I never got a chance. He made a sound that was a cross between a dry heave and a bullfrog's croak, opened his mouth, and spewed out a cloud of black, swirling stuff. It was so thick that for a moment we couldn't see his head. Harry said 'Oh God save us' in a weak and watery voice. Then the stuff turned a white so dazzling it was like January sun on fresh snow. A moment later the cloud was gone. Percy straightened slowly up and resumed his vacant gaze down the length of the Green Mile.
   'We didn't see that,' Brutal said. 'Did we, Paul?'
   'No. I didn't and you didn't. Did you see it, Harry?'
   'No,' Harry said.
   'Dean?'
   'See what?' Dean took his glasses off and began to polish them. I thought he would drop them out of his trembling hands, but he managed not to.
   'See what, that's good. That's just the ticket. Now listen to your scoutmaster, boys, and get it right the first time, because time is short. It's a simple story. Let's not complicate it.'

3

   I told all this to Jan at around eleven o'clock that morning—the next morning, I almost wrote, but of course it was the same day. The longest one of my whole life, without a doubt. I told it pretty much as I have here, finishing with how William Wharton had ended up lying dead on his bunk, riddled with lead from Percy's sidearm.
   No, that's not right. What I actually finished with was the stuff that came out of Percy, the bugs or the whatever-it-was. That was a hard thing to tell, even to your wife, but I told it.
   As I talked, she brought me black coffee by the half-cup—at first my hands were shaking too badly to pick up a whole one without spilling it. By the time I finished, the shaking had eased some, and I felt that I could even take some food—an egg, maybe, or some soup.
   'The thing that saved us was that we didn't really have to lie, any of us.'
   'Just leave a few things out,' she said, and nodded. 'Little things, mostly, like how you took a condemned murderer out of prison, and how he cured a dying woman, and how he drove that Percy Wetmore crazy by—what?—spitting a pureed brain tumor down his throat?'
   'I don't know, Jan,' I said. 'I only know that if you keep talking like that, you'll end up either eating that soup yourself, or feeding it to the dog.'
   'I'm sorry. But I'm right, aren't I?'
   'Yeah,' I said. Except we got away with the—' The what? You couldn't call it an escape, and furlough wasn't right, either. '—the field trip. Not even Percy can tell them about that, if he ever comes back.'
   'If he comes back,' she echoed. 'How likely is that?'
   I shook my head to indicate I had no idea. But I did, actually; I didn't think he was going to come back, not in 1932, not in '42 or '52, either. In that I was right. Percy Wetmore stayed at Briar Ridge until it burned flat in 1944. Seventeen inmates were killed in that fire, but Percy wasn't one of them. Still silent and blank in every regard—the word I learned to describe that state is catatonic—he was led out by one of the guards long before the fire reached his wing. He went on to another institution—I don't remember the name and guess it doesn't matter, anyway—and died in 1965. So far as I know, the last time he ever spoke was when he told us we could clock him out at quitting time... unless we wanted to explain why he had left early.
   The irony was that we never had to explain much of anything. Percy had gone crazy and shot William Wharton to death. That was what we told, and so far as it went, every word was true. When Anderson asked Brutal how Percy had seemed before the shooting and Brutal answered with one word—"Quiet"—I had a terrible moment when I felt that I might burst out laughing. Because that was true, too, Percy had been quiet, for most of his shift he'd had a swatch of friction-tape across his mouth and the best he'd been able to come up with was mmmph, mmmph, mmmph.
   Curtis kept Percy there until eight o'clock, Percy as silent as a cigar-store Indian but a lot more eerie. By then Hal Moores had arrived, looking grim but competent, ready to climb back into the saddle. Curtis Anderson let him do just that, and with a sigh of relief the rest of us could almost hear. The bewildered, frightened old man was gone; it was the Warden who strode up to Percy, grabbed him by the shoulders with his big hands, and shook him hard.
   'Son!' he shouted into Percy's blank face—a face that was already starting to soften like wax, I thought. 'Son! Do you hear me? Talk to me if you hear me! I want to know what happened!'
   Nothing from Percy, of course. Anderson wanted to get the Warden aside, discuss how they were going to handle it—it was a political hot potato if there had ever been one—but Moores put him off, at least for the time being, and drew me down the Mile. John Coffey was lying on his bunk with his face to the wall, legs dangling outrageously, as they always did. He appeared to be sleeping and probably was... but he wasn't always what he appeared, as we had found out.
   'Did what happened at my house have anything to do with what happened here when you got back?' Moores asked in a low voice. 'I'll cover you as much as I can, even if it means my job, but I have to know.'
   I shook my head. When I spoke, I also kept my voice low-pitched. There were now almost a dozen screws milling around at the head of the aisle. Another was photographing Wharton in his cell. Curtis Anderson had turned to watch that, and for the time being, only Brutal was watching us. 'No, sir. We got John back into his cell just like you see, then let Percy out of the restraint room, where we'd stashed him for safekeeping. I thought he'd be hot under the collar, but he wasn't. Just asked for his sidearm and baton. He didn't say anything else, just walked off up the corridor. Then, when he got to Wharton's cell he pulled his gun and started shooting.'
   'Do You think being in the restraint room... something to his mind?'
   'No, sir.'
   'Did you put him in the straitjacket?'
   'No, sir. There was no need.'
   'He was quiet? Didn't struggle?'
   'No struggle.'
   'Even when he saw you meant to put him in restraint room, he was quiet and didn't struggle.'
   'That's right.' I felt an urge to embroider on this to give Percy at least a line or two—and conquered it. Simpler would be better, and I knew it. 'There, was no fuss. He just went over into one of the far corners and sat down.'
   'Didn't speak of Wharton then?'
   'No, sir. '
   'Didn't speak of Coffey, either?'
   I shook my head.
   'Could Percy have been laying for Wharton? Did he have something against the man?'
   'That might be,' I said, lowering my voice even more. 'Percy was careless about where he walked, Hal. One time Wharton reached out, grabbed him up against the bars, and messed him over some.' I paused. 'Felt him up, you could say.'
   'No worse than that? just... "messed him over"... and that was all?'
   'Yes, but it was pretty bad for Percy, just the same. Wharton said something about how he'd rather screw Percy than Percy's sister.'
   'Urn.' Moores kept looking sideways at John Coffey, as if he needed constant reassurance that Coffey was a real person, actually in the world. 'It doesn't explain what's happened to him, but it goes a good piece toward explaining why it was Wharton he turned on and not Coffey or one of you men. And speaking of your men, Paul, will they all tell the same story?'
   'Yes, sir,' I told him. 'And they will,' I said to Jan, starting in on the soup she brought to the table. 'I'll see to it.'
   'You did lie,' she said. 'You lied to Hal.'
   Well, that's a wife for you, isn't it? Always poking around for moth-holes in your best suit, and finding one more often than not.
   'I guess, if you want to look at it that way. I didn't tell him anything we both won't be able to live with, though. Hal's in the clear, I think. He wasn't even there, after all. He was home tending his wife until Curtis called him.'
   'Did he say how Melinda was?'
   'Not then, there wasn't time, but we spoke again just as Brutal and I were leaving. Melly doesn't remember much, but she's fine. Up and walking. Talking about next year's flower beds.'
   My wife sat watching me eat for some little time. Then she asked, 'Does Hal know it's a miracle, Paul? Does he understand that?'
   'Yes. We all do, all of us that were there.'
   'Part of me wishes I'd been there, too,' she said, 'but I think most of me is glad I wasn't. If I'd seen the scales fall from Saul's eyes on the road to Damascus. I probably would have died of a heart attack.'
   'Naw,' I said, tilting my bowl to capture the last spoonful, 'probably would have cooked him some soup. This is pretty fine, hon.'
   'Good.' But she wasn't really thinking about soup or cooking or Saul's conversion on the Damascus road. She was looking out the window toward the ridges, her chin propped on her hand, her eyes as hazy as those ridges look on summer mornings when it's going to be hot. Summer mornings like the one when the Detterick girls had been found, I thought for no reason. I wondered why they hadn't screamed. Their killer had hurt them; there had been blood on the porch, and on the steps. So why hadn't they screamed?
   'You think John Coffey really killed that man Wharton, don't you?' Janice asked, looking back from the window at last. 'Not that it was an accident, or anything like that; you think he used Percy Wetmore on Wharton like a gun.'
   'Yes.'
   'Why?'
   'I don't know.'
   'Tell me again about what happened when you took Coffey off the Mile, would you? Just that part.'
   So I did. I told her how the skinny arm shooting out from between the bars and grabbing John 's bicep had reminded me of a snake-one of the water moccasins we were all scared of when we were kids swimming in the river—and how Coffey had said Wharton was a bad man. Almost whispering it.
   'And Wharton said...?' My wife was looking out the window again, but she was listening, all right.
   'Wharton said, "That's right, nigger, bad as you'd want." '
   'And that's all.'
   'Yes. I had a feeling that something was going to happen right then, but nothing did. Brutal took Wharton's hand off John and told him to lie down, which Wharton did. He was out on his feet to start with. Said something about how niggers should have their own electric chair, and that was all. We went about our business.'
   'John Coffey called him a bad man.'
   'Yep. Said the same thing about Percy once, too. Maybe more than once. I can't remember exactly when, but I know he did.'
   'But Wharton never did anything to John Coffey personally, did he? Like he did to Percy, I mean.'
   'No. The way their cells were—Wharton up by the duty desk on one side, John down a ways on the other—they could hardly see each other.'
   'Tell me again how Coffey looked when Wharton grabbed him.'
   'Janice, this isn't getting us anywhere.'
   'Maybe it isn't and maybe it is. Tell me again how he looked.'
   I sighed. 'I guess you'd have to say shocked. He gasped. Like you would if you were sunning at the beach and I snuck up and trickled a little cold water down your back. Or like he'd been slapped.'
   'Well, sure,' she said. 'Being grabbed out of nowhere like that startled him, woke him up for a second.'
   'Yes,' I said. And then, 'No.'
   'Well which is it? Yes or no?'
   'No. It wasn't being startled. It was like when he wanted me to come into his cell so he could cure my infection. Or when he wanted me to hand him the mouse. It was being surprised, but not by being touched... not exactly, anyway... oh Christ, Jan, I don't know.'
   'All right, we'll leave it,' she said. 'I just can't imagine why John did it, that's all. It's not as if he's violent by nature. Which leads to another question, Paul: how can you execute him if you're right about those girls? How can you possibly put him in the electric chair if someone else—'
   I jerked in my chair. My elbow struck my bowl and knocked it off onto the floor, where it broke. An idea had come to me. It was more intuition than logic at that point, but it had a certain black elegance.
   'Paul?' Janice asked, alarmed. 'What's wrong?'
   'I don't know,' I said. 'I don't know anything for sure, but I'm going to find out if I can.'

4

   The aftermath of the shooting was a three-ring circus with the governor in one ring, the prison in another, and poor brain-blasted Percy Wetmore in the third. And the ringmaster? Well, the various gentlemen of the press took turns at that job. They weren't as bad then as they are now—they didn't allow themselves to be as bad—but even back then before Geraldo and Mike Wallace and the rest of them, they could gallop along pretty good when they really got the bit in their teeth. That was what happened this time, and while the show lasted, it was a good one.
   But even the liveliest circus, the one with the scariest freaks, funniest clowns, and wildest animals, has to leave town eventually. This one left after the Board of Enquiry, which sounds pretty special and fearsome, but actually turned out to be pretty tame and perfunctory. Under other circumstances, the governor undoubtedly would have demanded someone's head on a platter, but not this time. His nephew by marriage—his wife's own blood kin—had gone crackers and killed a man. Had killed a killer—there was that, at least, and thank God for it—but Percy had still shot the man as he lay sleeping in his cell, which was not quite sporting. When you added in the fact that the young man in question remained just as mad as a March hare, you could understand why the governor only wanted it to go away, and as soon as possible.
   Our trip to Warden Moores's house in Harry Terwilliger's truck never came out. The fact that Percy had been straitjacketed and locked in the restraint room during the time we were away never came out. The fact that William Wharton had been doped to the gills when Percy shot him never came out, either. Why would it? The authorities had no reason to suspect anything in Wharton's system but half a dozen slugs. The coroner removed those, the mortician put him in a pine box, and that was the end of the man with Billy the Kid tattooed on his left forearm. Good riddance to bad rubbish, you might say.
   All in all, the uproar lasted about two weeks. During that time I didn't dare fart sideways, let alone so take a day off to investigate the idea I'd gotten at my kitchen table on the morning after all the upheavals. I knew for sure that the circus had left town when I got to work on a day just shy of the middle of November—the twelfth, I think, but don't hold me to that. That was the day I found the piece of paper I'd been dreading on the middle of my desk: the DOE on John Coffey. Curtis Anderson had signed it instead of Hal Moores, but of course it was just as legal either way, and of course it had needed to go through Hal in order to get to me. I could imagine Hal sitting at his desk in Administration with that piece of paper in his hand, sitting there and thinking of his wife, who had become something of a nine days, wonder to the doctors at Indianola General Hospital. She'd had her own DOE papers handed to her by those doctors, but John Coffey had tom them up. Now, however, it was Coffey's turn to walk the Green Mile, and who among us could stop it? Who among us would stop it?
   The date on the death warrant was November 20th. Three days after I got it—the fifteenth, I think—I had Janice call me in sick. A cup of coffee later I was driving north in my badly sprung but otherwise reliable Ford. Janice had kissed me on my way and wished me good luck; I'd thanked her but no longer had any clear idea what good luck would be—finding what I was looking for or not finding it. All I knew for sure is that I didn't feel much like singing as I drove. Not that day.
   By three that afternoon I was well up in the ridge country. I got to the Purdom County Courthouse just before it closed, looked at some records, then had a visit from the Sheriff, who had been informed by the county clerk that a stranger was poking in amongst the local skeletons. Sheriff Catlett wanted to know what I thought I was doing. I told him. Catlett thought it over and then told me something interesting. He said he'd deny he'd ever said a word if I spread it around, and it wasn't conclusive anyway, but it was something, all right. It was sure something. I thought about it all the way home, and that night there was a lot of thinking and precious little sleeping on my side of the bed.
   The next day I got up while the sun was still just a rumor in the east and drove downstate to Trapingus County. I skirted around Homer Cribus, that great bag of guts and waters, speaking to Deputy Sheriff Rob McGee instead. McGee didn't want to hear what I was telling him. Most vehemently didn't want to hear it. At one point I was pretty sure he was going to punch me in the mouth so he could stop hearing it, but in the end he agreed to go out and ask Klaus Detterick a couple of questions. Mostly, I think, so he could be sure I wouldn't. 'He's only thirty-nine, but he looks like an old man these days,' McGee said, 'and he don't need a smartass prison guard who thinks he's a detective to stir him up just when some of the sorrow has started to settle. You stay right here in town. I don't want you within hailing distance of the Detterick farm, but I want to be able to find you when I'm done talking to Klaus. If you start feeling restless, have a piece of pie down there in the diner. It'll weight you down.' I ended up having two pieces, and it was kind of heavy.
   When McGee came into the diner and sat down at the counter next to me, I tried to read his face and failed. 'Well?' I asked.
   'Come on home with me, we'll talk there,' he said. 'This place is a mite too public for my taste.'
   We had our conference on Rob McGee's front porch. Both. of us were bundled up and chilly, but Mrs. McGee didn't allow smoking anywhere in her house. She was a woman ahead of her time. McGee talked awhile. He did it like a man who doesn't in the least enjoy what he's hearing out of his own mouth.
   'It proves nothing, you know that, don't you?' he asked when he was pretty well done. His tone was belligerent, and he poked his home-rolled cigarette at me in an aggressive way as he spoke, but his face was sick. Not all proof is what you see and hear in a court of law, and we both knew it. I have an idea that was the only time in his life when Deputy McGee wished he was as country-dumb as his boss.
   'I know,' I said.
   'And if you're thinking of getting him a new trial on the basis of this one thing, you better think again, se or. John Coffey is a Negro, and in Trapingus County we're awful particular about giving new trials to Negroes.'
   'I know that, too.'
   'So what are you going to do?'
   I pitched my cigarette over the porch rail and into the street. Then I stood up. It was going to be a long, cold ride back home, and the sooner I got going the sooner the trip would be done. 'That I wish I did know, Deputy McGee,' I said, 'but I don't. The only thing I know tonight for a fact is that second piece of pie was a mistake.'
   'I'll tell you something, smart guy,' he said, still speaking in that tone of hollow belligerence. 'I don't think you should have opened Pandora's Box in the first place.'
   'It wasn't me opened it,' I said, and then drove home.
   I got there late—after midnight—but my wife was waiting up for me. I'd suspected she would be, but it still did my heart good to see her, and to have her put her arms around my neck and her body nice and firm against mine. 'Hello, stranger,' she said, and then touched me down below. 'Nothing wrong with this fellow now, is there? He's just as healthy as can be.'
   'Yes ma'am,' I said, and lifted her up in my arms. I took her into the bedroom and we made love as sweet as sugar, and as I came to my climax, that delicious feeling of going out and letting go, I thought of John Coffey's endlessly weeping eyes. And of Melinda Moores saying I dreamed you were wandering in the dark, and so was I.
   Still lying on top of my wife, with her arms around my neck and our thighs together, I began to weep myself.
   'Paul!' she said, shocked and afraid. I don't think she'd seen me in tears more than half a dozen times before in the entire course of our marriage. I have never been, in the ordinary course of things, a crying man. 'Paul, what is it?'
   'I know everything there is to know,' I said through my tears. 'I know too goddam much, if you want to know the truth. I'm supposed to electrocute John Coffey in less than a week's time, but it was William Wharton who killed the Detterick girls. It was Wild Bill.'

5

   The next day, the same bunch of screws who had eaten lunch in my kitchen after the botched Delacroix execution ate lunch there again. This time there was a fifth at our council of war: my wife. It was Jan who convinced me to tell the others; my first impulse had been not to. Wasn't it bad enough, I asked her, that we knew?
   'You're not thinking clear about it,' she'd answered. 'Probably because you're still upset. They already know the worst thing, that John's on the spot for a crime he didn't commit. If anything, this makes it a little better.'
   I wasn't so sure, but I deferred to her judgement. I expected an uproar when I told Brutal, Dean, and Harry what I knew (I couldn't prove it, but I knew, all right), but at first there was only thoughtful silence. Then, taking another of Janice's biscuits and beginning to put an outrageous amount of butter on it, Dean said: 'Did John see him, do you think? Did he see Wharton drop the girls, maybe even rape them?'
   'I think if he'd seen that, he would have tried to stop it,' I said. 'As for seeing Wharton, maybe as he ran off, I suppose he might have. If he did, he forgot it later.'
   'Sure,' Dean said. 'He's special, but that doesn't make him bright. He only found out it was Wharton when Wharton reached through the bars of his cell and touched him.'
   Brutal was nodding. 'That's why John looked so surprised... so shocked. Remember the way his eyes opened?'
   I nodded. 'He used Percy on Wharton like a gun, that was what Janice said, and it was what I kept thinking about. Why would John Coffey want to kill Wild Bill? Percy, maybe—Percy stamped on Delacroix's mouse right in front of him, Percy burned Delacroix alive and John knew it—but Wharton? Wharton messed with most of us in one way or another, but he didn't mess with John at all, so far as I know—hardly passed four dozen words with him the whole time they were on the Mile together, and half of those were that last night. Why would he want to? He was from Purdom County, and as far as white boys from up there are concerned, you don't even see a Negro unless he happens to step into your road. So why did he do it? What could he've seen or felt when Wharton touched him that was so bad that he saved back the poison he took out of Melly's body?'
   'And half-killed himself doing it, too,' Brutal said.
   'More like three-quarters. And the Detterick twins were all I could think of that was bad enough to explain what he did. I told myself the idea was nuts, too much of a coincidence, it just couldn't be. Then I remembered something Curtis Anderson wrote in the first memo I ever got about Wharton—that Wharton was crazy-wild, and that he'd rambled all over the state before the holdup where he killed all those people. Rambled all over the state. That stuck with me. Then there was the way he tried to choke Dean when he came in. That got me thinking about—'
   'The dog,' Dean said. He was rubbing his neck where Wharton had wrapped the chain. I don't think he even knew he was doing it. 'How the dog's neck was broken.'
   'Anyway, I went on up to Purdom County to check Wharton's court records—all we had here were the reports on the murders that got him to the Green Mile. The end of his career, in other words. I wanted the beginning.'
   'Lot of trouble?' Brutal asked.
   'Yeah. Vandalism, petty theft, setting haystack fires, even theft of an explosive—he and a friend swiped a stick of dynamite and set it off down by a creek. He got going early, ten years old, but what I wanted wasn't there. Then the Sheriff turned up to see who I was and what I was doing, and that was actually lucky. I fibbed, told him that a cell-search had turned up a bunch of pictures in Wharton's mattress—little girls with no clothes on. I said I'd wanted to see if Wharton had any kind of history as a pederast, because there were a couple of unsolved cases up in Tennessee that I'd heard about. I was careful never to mention the Detterick twins. I don't think they crossed his mind, either.'
   'Course not,' Harry said. 'Why would they have? That case is solved, after all.'
   'I said I guessed there was no sense chasing the idea, since there was nothing in Wharton's back file. I mean, there was plenty in the file, but none of it about that sort of thing. Then the Sheriff—Catlett, his name is—laughed and said not everything a bad apple like Bill Wharton did was in the court files, and what did it matter, anyway? He was dead, wasn't he?
   'I said I was doing it just to satisfy my own curiosity, nothing else, and that relaxed him. He took me back to his office, sat me down, gave me a cup of coffee and a sinker, and told me that sixteen months ago, when Wharton was barely eighteen, a man in the western part of the county caught him in the barn with his daughter. It wasn't rape, exactly; the fellow described it to Catlett as "not much more'n stinkfinger." Sorry, honey.'
   'That's all right,' Janice said. She looked pale, though.
   'How old was the girl?' Brutal asked.
   'Nine,' I said.
   He winced.
   'The man might've taken off after Wharton himself, if he'd had him some big old brothers or cousins to give him a help, but he didn't. So he went to Catlett, but made it clear he only wanted Wharton warned. No one wants a nasty thing like that right out in public, if it can be helped. Anyway, Sheriff C. had been dealing with Wharton's antics for quite some time—had him in the reform school up that way for eight months or so when Wharton was fifteen—and he decided enough was enough. He got three deputies, they went out to the Wharton place, set Missus Wharton aside when she started to weep and wail, and then they warned Mr. William "Billy the Kid" Wharton what happens to big pimple-faced galoots who go up in the hayloft with girls not even old enough to have heard about their monthly courses, let alone started them. "We warned that little punk good," Catlett told me. "Warned him until his head was bleedin, his shoulder was dislocated, and his ass was damn near broke."
   Brutal was laughing in spite of himself. 'That sounds like Purdom County, all right,' he said. 'Like as not.'
   'It was three months later, give or take, that Wharton broke out and started the spree that ended with the holdup,' I said. 'That and the murders that got him to us.'
   'So he'd had something to do with an underage girl once,' Harry said. He took off his glasses, huffed on them, polished them. 'Way underage. Once isn't exactly a pattern, is it?'
   'A man doesn't do a thing like that just once,' my wife said, then pressed her lips together so tight they almost weren't there.
   Next I told them about my visit to Trapingus County. I'd been a lot more frank with Rob McGee—I'd had no choice, really. To this day I have no idea what sort of story he spun for Mr. Detterick, but the McGee who sat down next to me in the diner seemed to have aged seven years.
   In mid-May, about a month before the holdup and the murders which finished Wharton's short career as an outlaw, Klaus Detterick had painted his barn (and, incidentally, Bowser's doghouse next to it). He hadn't wanted his son crawling around up on a high scaffolding, and the boy had been in school, anyway, so he had hired a fellow. A nice enough fellow. Very quiet. Three days, work it had been. No, the fellow hadn't slept at the house, Detterick wasn't foolish enough to believe that nice and quiet always meant safe, especially in those days, when there was so much dust-bowl riffraff on the roads. A man with a family had to be careful. In any case, the man hadn't needed lodging; he told Detterick he had taken a room in town, at Eva Price's. There was a lady named Eva Price in Tefton, and she did rent rooms, but she hadn't had a boarder that May who fit the description of Detterick's hired man, just the usual fellows in checked suits and derby hats, hauling sample cases—drummers, in other words. McGee had been able to tell me that because he stopped at Mrs. Price's and checked on his way back from the Detterick farm—that's how upset he was.
   'Even so,' he added, 'there's no law against a man sleeping rough in the woods, Mr. Edgecombe. I've done it a time or two myself.'
   The hired man didn't sleep at the Dettericks' house, but he took dinner with them twice. He would have met Howie. He would have met the girls, Cora and Kathe. He would have listened to their chatter, some of which might have been about how much they looked forward to the coming summer, because if they were good and the weather was good, Mommy sometimes let them sleep out on the porch, where they could pretend they were pioneer wives crossing the Great Plains in Conestoga wagons.
   I can see him sitting there at the table, eating roast chicken and Mrs. Detterick's rye bread, listening, keeping his wolf's eyes well veiled, nodding, smiling a little, storing it all up.
   'This doesn't sound like the wildman you told me about when he first came on the Mile, Paul,' Janice said doubtfully. 'Not a bit.'
   'You didn't see him up at Indianola Hospital, ma'am,' Harry said. 'Just standin there with his mouth open and his bare butt hangin out the back of his Johnny. Lettin us dress him. We thought he was either drugged or foolish. Didn't we, Dean?'
   Dean nodded.
   'The day after he finished the barn and left, a man wearing a bandanna mask robbed Hampey's Freight Office in Jarvis,' I told them. 'Got away with seventy dollars. He also took an 1892 silver dollar the freight agent carried as a lucky piece. That silver dollar was on Wharton when he was captured, and Jarvis is only thirty miles from Tefton.'
   'So this robber... this wildman... you think he stopped for three days to help Klaus Detterick pain his barn,' my wife said. 'Ate dinner with them and said please pass the peas just like folks.'
   'The scariest thing about men like him is how unpredictable they are,' Brutal said. 'He might've been planning to kill the Dettericks and rifle their house, then changed his mind because a cloud came over the sun at the wrong time, or something like. Maybe he just wanted to cool off a little. But most likely he already had his eye on those two girls and was planning to come back. Do you think, Paul?'
   I nodded. Of course I thought it. 'And then there's the name he gave Detterick.'
   'What name?' Jan asked.
   'Will Bonney.'
   'Bonney? I don't—'
   'It was Billy the Kid's real name.'
   'Oh.' Then her eyes widened. 'Oh! So you can get John Coffey off! Thank God! All you have to do is show Mr. Detterick a picture of William Wharton... his mug-shot should do... '
   Brutal and I exchanged an uncomfortable look. Dean was looking a bit hopeful, but Harry was staring down at his hands, as if all at once fabulously interested in his fingernails.
   'What's wrong?' Janice asked. 'Why are you looking at each other that way? Surely this man McGee will have to—'
   'Rob McGee struck me as a good man, and I think he's a hell of a law officer,' I said, 'but he swings no weight in Trapingus County. The power there is Sheriff Cribus, and the day he reopens the Detterick case on the basis of what I was able to find out would be the day it snows in hell.'
   'But... if Wharton was there... if Detterick can identify a picture of him and they know he was there... '
   'Him being there in May doesn't mean he came back and killed those girls in June,' Brutal said. He spoke in a low, gentle voice, the way you speak when you're telling someone there's been a death in the family. 'On one hand you've got this fellow who helped Klaus Detterick paint a barn and then went away. Turns out he was committing crimes all over the place, but there's nothing against him for the three days in May he was around Tefton. On the other hand, you've got this big Negro, this huge Negro, that you found on the riverbank, holding two little dead girls, both of them naked, in his arms.'
   He shook his head.
   'Paul's right, Jan. McGee may have his doubts, but McGee doesn't matter. Cribus is the only one who can reopen the case, and Cribus doesn't want to mess with what he thinks of as a happy ending—'it was a nigger' thinks he, 'and not one of our'n in any case. Beautiful. I'll go up there to Cold Mountain, have me a steak and a draft beer at Ma's, then watch him fry, and there's an end to it.'
   Janice listened to all this with a mounting expression of horror on her face, then turned to me. 'But McGee believes it, doesn't he, Paul? I could see it on your face. Deputy McGee knows he arrested the wrong man. Won't he stand up to the Sheriff?'
   'All he can do by standing up to him is lose his job,' I said. 'Yes, I think that in his heart he knows it was Wharton. But what he says to himself is that, if he keeps his mouth shut and plays the game until Cribus either retires or eats himself to death, he gets the job. And things will be different then. That's what he tells himself to get to sleep, I imagine. And he's probably not so much different than Homer about one thing. He'll tell himself, "After all, it's only a Negro. It's not like they're going to burn a white man for it." '
   'Then you'll have to go to them,' Janice said, and my heart turned cold at the decisive, no-doubt-about-it tone of her voice. 'Go and tell them what you found out.'
   'And how should we tell them we found it out, Jan?' Brutal asked her in that same low voice.
   'Should we tell them about how Wharton grabbed John while we were taking him out of the prison to work a miracle on the Warden's wife?'
   'No... of course not, but... ' She saw how thin the ice was in that direction and skated in another one. 'Lie, then,' she said. She looked defiantly at Brutal, then turned that look on me. It was hot enough to smoke a hole in newspaper, you'd have said.
   'Lie,' I repeated. 'Lie about what?'
   'About what got you going, first up to Purdom County and then down to Trapingus. Go down there to that fat old Sheriff Cribus and say that Wharton told you he raped and murdered the Detterick girls. That he confessed.' She switched her hot gaze to Brutal for a moment. 'You can back him up, Brutus. You can say you were there when he confessed, you heard it, too. Why, Percy probably heard it as well, and that was probably what set him off. He shot Wharton because he couldn't stand thinking of what Wharton had done to those children. It snapped his mind. Just... What? What now, in the name of God?'
   It wasn't just me and Brutal; Harry and Dean were looking at her, too, with a kind of horror.
   'We never reported anything like that, ma'am,' Harry said. He spoke as if talking to a child. 'The first thing people'd ask is why we didn't. We're supposed to report anything our cell-babies say about prior crimes. Theirs or anyone else's.'
   'Not that we would've believed him,' Brutal put in. 'A man like Wild Bill Wharton lies about anything, Jan. Crimes he's committed, bigshots he's known, women he's gone to bed with, touchdowns he scored in high school, even the damn weather.'
   'But... but... ' Her face was agonized. I went to put my arm around her and she pushed it violently away. 'But he was there! He painted their goddamned barn! HE ATE DINNER WITH THEM!'
   'All the more reason why he might take credit for the crime,' Brutal said.' After all, what harm? Why not boast? You can't fry a man twice, after all.'
   'Let me see if I've got this right. We here at this table know that not only did John Coffey not kill those girls, he was trying to save their lives. Deputy McGee doesn't know all that, of course, but he does have a pretty good idea that the man condemned to die for the murders didn't do them. And still... still... you can't get him a new trial. Can't even reopen the case.'
   'Yessum,' Dean said. He was polishing his glasses furiously. 'That's about the size of it.'
   She sat with her head lowered, thinking. Brutal started to say something and I raised a hand, shushing him. I didn't believe Janice could think of a way to get John out of the killing box he was in, but I didn't believe it was impossible, either. She was a fearsomely smart lady, my wife. Fearsomely determined, as well. That's a combination that sometimes turns mountains into valleys.
   'All right,' she said at last. 'Then you've got to get him out on your own.'
   'Ma'am?' Harry looked flabbergasted. Frightened, too.
   'You can do it. You did it once, didn't you? You can do it again. Only this time you won't bring him back.'
   'Would you want to be the one to explain to my kids why their daddy is in prison, Missus Edgecombe?' Dean asked. 'Charged with helping a murderer escape jail?'
   'There won't be any of that, Dean; we'll work out a plan. Make it look like a real escape.'
   'Make sure it's a plan that could be worked out by a fellow who can't even remember how to tie his own shoes, then,' Harry said. 'They'll have to believe that.'
   She looked at him uncertainly.
   'It wouldn't do any good,' Brutal said. 'Even if we could think of a way, it wouldn't do any good.'
   'Why not?' She sounded as if she might be going to cry. 'Just why the damn hell not?'
   'Because he's a six-foot-eight-inch baldheaded black man with barely enough brains to feed himself,' I said. 'How long do you think it would be before he was recaptured? Two hours? Six?'
   'He got along without attracting much attention before,' she said. A tear trickled down her cheek. She slapped it away with the heel of her hand.
   That much was true. I had written letters to some friends and relatives of mine farther down south, asking if they'd seen anything in the papers about a man fitting John Coffey's description. Anything at all. Janice had done the same. We had come up with just one possible sighting so far, in the town of Muscle Shoals, Alabama. A twister had struck a church there during choir practice—in 1929, this had been—and a large black man had hauled two fellows out of the rubble. Both had looked dead to onlookers at first, but as it turned out, neither had been even seriously hurt. It was like a miracle, one of the witnesses was quoted as saying. The black man, a drifter who had been hired by the church pastor to do a day's worth of chores, had disappeared in the excitement.
   'You're right, he got along,' Brutal said. 'But you have to remember that he did most of his getting along before he was convicted of raping and murdering two little girls.'
   She sat without answering. She sat that way for almost a full minute, and then she did something which shocked me as badly as my sudden flow of tears must have shocked her. She reached out and shoved everything off the table with one wide sweep of her arm—plates, glasses, cups, silverware, the bowl of collards, the bowl of squash, the platter with the carved ham on it, the milk, the pitcher of cold tea. All off the table and onto the floor, ker-smash.
   'Holy shit!' Dean cried, rocking back from the table so hard he damned near went over on his back.
   Janice ignored him. It was Brutal and me she was looking at, mostly me. 'Do you mean to kill him, you cowards?' she asked. 'Do you mean to kill the man who saved Melinda Moores's life, who tried to save those little girls, lives? Well, at least there will be one less black man in the world won't there? You can console yourselves with that. One less nigger.'
   She got up, looked at her chair, and kicked it into the wall. It rebounded and fell into the spilled squash. I took her wrist and she yanked it free.
   'Don't touch me,' she said. 'Next week this time you'll be a murderer, no better than that man Wharton, so don't touch me.'
   She went out onto the back stoop, put her apron up to her face, and began to sob into it. The four of us looked at each other. After a little bit I got on my feet and set about cleaning up the mess. Brutal joined me first, then Harry and Dean. When the place looked more or less shipshape again, they left. None of us said a word the whole time. There was really nothing left to say.

6

   That was my night off. I sat in the living room of our little house, smoking cigarettes, listening to the radio, and watching the dark come up out of the ground to swallow the sky. Television is all right, I've nothing against it, but I don't like how it turns you away from the rest of the world and toward nothing but its own glassy self. In that one way, at least, radio was better.
   Janice came in, knelt beside the arm of my chair, and took my hand. For a little while neither of us said anything, just stayed that way, listening to Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge and watching the stars come out. It was all right with me.
   'I'm so sorry I called you a coward,' she said. 'I feel worse about that than anything I've ever said to you in our whole marriage.'
   'Even the time when we went camping and you called me Old Stinky Sam?' I asked, and then we laughed and had a kiss or two and it was better again between us. She was so beautiful, my Janice, and I still dream of her. Old and tired of living as I am, I'll dream that she walks into my room in this lonely, forgotten place where the hallways all smell of piss and old boiled cabbage, I dream she's young and beautiful with her blue eyes and her fine high breasts that I couldn't hardly keep my hands off of, and she'll say, Why, honey, I wasn't in that bus crash. You made a mistake, that's all. Even now I dream that, and sometimes when I wake up and know it was a dream, I cry. I, who hardly ever cried at all when I was young.
   'Does Hal know?' she asked at last.
   'That John 's innocent? I don't see how he can.'
   'Can he help? Does he have any influence with Cribus?'
   'Not a bit, honey
   She nodded, as if she had expected this. 'Then don't tell him. If he can't help, for God's sake don't tell him.'
   'No.'
   She looked up at me with steady eyes. 'And you won't call in sick that night. None of you will. You can't.'
   'No, we can't. If we're there, we can at least make it quick for him. We can do that much. It won't be like Delacroix.' For a moment, mercifully brief, I saw the black silk mask burning away from Del's face and revealing the cooked blobs of jelly which had been his eyes.
   'There's no way out for you, is there?' She took my hand, rubbed it down the soft velvet of her cheek. 'Poor Paul. Poor old guy.'
   I said nothing. Never before or after in my life did I feel so much like running from a thing. Just taking Jan with me, the two of us with a single packed carpetbag between us, running to anywhere.
   'My poor old guy,' she repeated, and then: 'Talk to him.'
   'Who? John?'
   'Yes. Talk to him. Find out what he wants.'
   I thought about it, then nodded. She was right. She usually was.