7

   Two days later, on the eighteenth, Bill Dodge, Hank Bitterman, and someone else—I don't remember who, some floater—took John Coffey over to D Block for his shower, and we rehearsed his execution while he was gone. We didn't let Toot-Toot stand in for John; all of us knew, even without talking about it, that it would have been an obscenity.
   I did it.
   'John Coffey,' Brutal said in a not-quite-steady voice as I sat clamped into Old Sparky, 'you have been condemned to die in the electric chair, sentence passed by a jury of your peers... '
   John Coffey's peers? What a joke. So far as I knew, there was no one like him on the planet. Then I thought of what John had said while he stood looking at Sparky from the foot of the stairs leading down from my office: They're still in there. I hear them screaming.
   'Get me out of it,' I said hoarsely. 'Undo these clamps and let me up.'
   They did it, but for a moment I felt frozen there, as if Old Sparky did not want to let me go.
   As we walked back to the block, Brutal spoke to me in a low voice, so not even Dean and Harry, who were setting up the last of the chairs behind us, would overhear. 'I done a few things in my life that I'm not proud of, but this is the first time I ever felt really actually in danger of hell.'
   I looked at him to make sure he wasn't joking. I didn't think he was. 'What do you mean?'
   'I mean we're fixing to kill a gift of God,' he said. 'One that never did ary harm to us, or to anyone else. What am I going to say if I end up standing in front of God the Father Almighty and He asks me to explain why I did it? That it was my job? My job?'

8

   When John got back from his shower and the floaters had left, I unlocked his cell, went in, and sat down on the bunk beside him. Brutal was on the desk. He looked up, saw me in there on my own, but said nothing. He just went back to whatever paperwork he was currently mangling, licking away at the tip of his pencil the whole time.
   John looked at me with his strange eyes—bloodshot, distant, on the verge of tears... and yet calm, too, as if crying was not such a bad way of life, not once you got used to it. He even smiled a little. He smelled of Ivory soap, I remember, as clean and fresh as a baby after his evening bath.
   'Hello, boss,' he said, and then reached out and took both of my hands in both of his. It was done with a perfect unstudied naturalness.
   'Hello, John.' There was a little block in my throat, and I tried to swallow it away. 'I guess you know that we're coming down to it now. Another couple of days.'
   He said nothing, only sat there holding my hands in his. I think, looking back on it, that something had already begun to happen to me, but I was too fixed—mentally and emotionally—on doing my duty to notice.
   'Is there anything special you'd like that night for dinner, John? We can rustle you up most anything. Even bring you a beer, if you want. Just have to put her in a coffee cup, that's all.'
   'Never got the taste,' he said.
   'Something special to eat, then?'
   His brow creased below that expanse of clean brown skull. Then the lines smoothed out and he smiled. 'Meatloaf'd be good.'
   'Meatloaf it is. With gravy and mashed.' I felt a tingle like you get in your arm when you've slept on it, except this one was all over my body. In my body. 'What else to go with it?'
   'Dunno, boss. Whatever you got, I guess. Okra, maybe, but I's not picky.'
   'All right,' I said, and thought he would also have Mrs. Janice Edgecombe's peach cobbler for dessert. 'Now, what about a preacher? Someone you could say a little prayer with, night after next? It comforts a man, so I've seen that many times. I could get in touch with Reverend Schuster, he's the man who came when Del—'
   'Don't want no preacher,' John said. 'You been good to me, boss. You can say a prayer, if you want. That'd be all right. I could get kneebound with you a bit, I guess.'
   'Me! John, I couldn't—'
   He pressed down on my hands a little, and that feeling got stronger. 'You could,' he said. 'Couldn't you, boss?'
   'I suppose so,' I heard myself say. My voice seemed to have developed an echo. 'I suppose I could, if it came to that.'
   The feeling was strong inside me by then, and it was like before, when he'd cured my waterworks, but it was different, too. And not just because there was nothing wrong with me this time. It was different because this time he didn't know he was doing it. Suddenly I was terrified, almost choked with a need to get out of there. Lights were going on inside me where there had never been lights before. Not just in my brain; all over my body.
   'You and Mr. Howell and the other bosses been good to me,' John Coffey said. 'I know you been worryin, but you ought to quit on it now. Because I want to go, boss.'
   I tried to speak and couldn't. He could, though. What he said next was the longest I ever heard him speak.
   'I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin from or goin to or why. I'm tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would. But I cain't.'
   Stop it, I tried to say. Stop it, let go of my hands, I'm going to drown if you don't. Drown or explode.
   'You won't 'splode,' he said, smiling a little at the idea... but he let go of my hands.
   I leaned forward, gasping. Between my knees I could see every crack in the cement floor, every groove, every flash of mica. I looked up at the wall and saw names that had been written there in 1924, 1926, 1931. Those names had been washed away, the men who had written them had also been washed away, in a manner of speaking, but I guess you can never wash anything completely away, not from this dark glass of a world, and now I saw them again, a tangle of names overlying one another, and looking at them was like listening to the dead speak and sing and cry out for mercy. I felt my eyeballs pulsing in their sockets, heard my own heart, felt the windy whoosh of my blood rushing through all the boulevards of my body like letters being mailed to everywhere.
   I heard a train-whistle in the distance—the three-fifty to Priceford, I imagine, but I couldn't be sure, because I'd never heard it before. Not from Cold Mountain, I hadn't, because the closest it came to the state pen was ten miles east. I couldn't have heard it from the pen, so you would have said and so, until November of '32, I would have believed, but I heard it that day.
   Somewhere a lightbulb shattered, loud as a bomb.
   'What did you do to me?' I whispered. 'Oh John, what did you do?'
   'I'm sorry, boss,' he said in his calm way. 'I wasn't thinkin. Ain't much, I reckon. You feel like regular soon.'
   I got up and went to the cell door. It felt like walking in a dream. When I got there, he said: 'You wonder why they didn't scream. That's the only thing you still wonder about, ain't it? Why those two little girls didn't scream while they were still there on the porch.'
   I turned and looked at him. I could see every red snap in his eyes, I could see every pore on his face... and I could feel his hurt, the pain that he took in from other people like a sponge takes in water. I could see the darkness he had spoken of, too. It lay in all the spaces of the world as he saw it, and in that moment I felt both pity for him and great relief. Yes, it was a terrible thing we'd be doing, nothing would ever change that... and yet we would be doing him a favor.
   'I seen it when that bad fella, he done grab me,' John said. 'That's when I knowed it was him done it. I seen him that day, I was in the trees and I seen him drop them down and run away, but—'
   'You forgot,' I said.
   'That's right, boss. Until he touch me, I forgot.'
   'Why didn't they scream, John? He hurt them enough to make them bleed, their parents were right upstairs, so why didn't they scream?'
   John looked at me from his haunted eyes. 'He say to the one, 'If you make noise, it's your sister I kill, not you,' He say that same to the other. You see?'
   'Yes,' I whispered, and I could see it. The Detterick porch in the dark. Wharton leaning over them like a ghoul. One of them had maybe started to cry out, so Wharton had hit her and she had bled from the nose. That's where most of it had come from.
   'He kill them with they love,' John said. 'They love for each other. You see how it was?'
   I nodded, incapable of speech.
   He smiled. The tears were flowing again, but he smiled. 'That's how it is every day,' he said, 'all over the worl'.' Then he lay down and turned his face to the wall.
   I stepped out into the Mile, locked his cell, and walked up to the duty desk. I still felt like a man in a dream. I realized I could hear Brutal's thoughts—a very faint whisper, how to spell some word, receive, I think it was. He was thinking i before e, except after c, is that how the dadratted thing goes? Then he looked up, started to smile, and stopped when he got a good look at me. 'Paul?' he asked. 'Are you all right?'
   'Yes.' Then I told him what John had told me—not all of it, and certainly not about what his touch had done to me (I never told anyone that part, not even Janice; Elaine Connelly will be the first to know of it—if, that is, she wants to read these last pages after reading all the rest of them), but I repeated what John had said about wanting to go. That seemed to relieve Brutal—a bit, anyway—but I sensed (heard?) him wondering if I hadn't made it up, just to set his mind at ease. Then I felt him deciding to believe it, simply because it would make things a little easier for him when the time came.
   'Paul, is that infection of yours coming back?' he asked. 'You look all flushed.'
   'No, I think I'm okay,' I said. I wasn't, but I felt sure by then that John was right and I was going to be. I could feel that tingle starting to subside.
   'All the same, it might not hurt you to go on in your office there and lie down a bit.'
   Lying down was the last thing I felt like right then—the idea seemed so ridiculous that I almost laughed. What I felt like doing was maybe building myself a little house, then shingling it, and plowing a garden in back, and planting it. All before suppertime.
   That's how it is, I thought. Every day. All over the world. That darkness. All over the world.
   'I'm going to take a turn over to Admin instead. Got a few things to check over there.'
   'If you say so.'
   I went to the door and opened it, then looked back. 'You've got it right,' I said: 'r-e-c-e-i-v-e; i before e, except after c. Most of the time, anyway; I guess there's exceptions to all the rules—'
   I went out, not needing to look back at him to know he was staring with his mouth open.
   I kept moving for the rest of that shift, unable to sit down for more than five minutes at a stretch before jumping up again. I went over to Admin, and then I tromped back and forth across the empty exercise yard until the guards in the towers must have thought I was crazy. But by the time my shift was over, I was starting to calm down again, and that rustle of thoughts in my head—like a stirring of leaves, it was—had pretty much quieted down.
   Still, halfway home that morning, it came back strong. The way my urinary infection had. I had to park my Ford by the side of the road, get out, and sprint nearly half a mile, head down, arms pumping, breath tearing in and out of my throat as warm as something that you've carried in your armpit. Then, at last, I began to feel really normal. I trotted halfway back to where the Ford was parked and walked the rest of the way, my breath steaming in the chilly air. When I got home, I told Janice that John Coffey had said he was ready, that he wanted to go. She nodded, looking relieved. Was she really? I couldn't say. Six hours before, even three, I would have known, but by then I didn't. And that was good. John had kept saying that he was tired, and now I could understand why. It would have tired anyone out, what he had. Would have made anyone long for rest and for quiet.
   When Janice asked me why I looked so flushed and smelled so sweaty, I told her I had stopped the car on my way home and gone running for awhile, running hard. I told her that much—as I may have said (there's too many pages here now for me to want to look back through and make sure), lying wasn't much a part of our marriage—but I didn't tell her why.
   And she didn't ask.

9

   There were no thunderstorms on the night it came John Coffey's turn to walk the Green Mile. It was seasonably cold for those parts at that time of year, in the thirties, I'd guess, and a million stars spilled across used-up, picked-out fields where frost glittered on fenceposts and glowed like diamonds on the dry skeletons of July's corn.
   Brutus Howell was out front for this one—he would do the capping and tell Van Hay to roll when it was time. Bill Dodge was in with Van Hay. And at around eleven-twenty on the night of November 20th, Dean and Harry and I went down to our one occupied cell, where John Coffey sat on the end of his bunk with his hands clasped between his knees and a tiny dab of meatloaf gravy on the collar of his blue shirt. He looked out through the bars at us, a lot calmer than we felt, it seemed. My hands were cold and my temples were throbbing. It was one thing to know he was willing—it made it at least possible for us to do our job—but it was another to know we were going to electrocute him for someone else's crime.
   I had last seen Hal Moores around seven that evening. He was in his office, buttoning up his overcoat. His face was pale, his hands shaking so badly that he was making quite some production of those buttons. I almost wanted to knock his fingers aside and do the coat up myself, like you would with a little kid. The irony was that Melinda had looked better when Jan and I went to see her the previous weekend than Hal had looked earlier on John Coffey's execution evening.
   'I won't be staying for this one,' he had said. 'Curtis will be there, and I know Coffey will be in good hands with you and Brutus.'
   'Yes, sir, we'll do our best,' I said. 'Is there any word on Percy?' Is he coming back around? is what I meant, of course. Is he even now sitting in a room somewhere and telling someone—some doctor, most likely—about how we zipped him into the nut-coat and threw him into the restraint room like any other problem child... any other lugoon, in Percy's language? And if he is, are they believing him?
   But according to Hal, Percy was just the same. Not talking, and not, so far as anyone could tell, in the world at all. He was still at Indianola—"being evaluated," Hal had said, looking mystified at the phrase—but if there was no improvement, he would be moving along soon.
   'How's Coffey holding up?' Hal had asked then. He had finally managed to do up the last button of his coat.
   I nodded. 'He'll be fine, Warden.'
   He'd nodded back, then gone to the door, looking old and ill. 'How can so much good and so much evil live together in the same man? How could the man who cured my wife be the same man who killed those little girls? Do you understand that?'
   I had told him I didn't, the ways of God were mysterious, there was good and evil in all of us, ours not to reason why, hotcha, hotcha, row-dee-dow. Most of what I told him were things I'd learned in the church of Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty, Hal nodding the whole time and looking sort of exalted. He could afford to nod, couldn't he? Yes. And look exalted, too. There was a deep sadness on his face—he was shaken, all right; I never doubted it—but there were no tears this time, because he had a wife to go home to, his companion to go home to, and she was fine. Thanks to John Coffey, she was well and fine and the man who had signed John 's death warrant could leave and go to her. He didn't have to watch what came next. He would be able to sleep that night in his wife's warmth while John Coffey lay on a slab in the basement of County Hospital, growing cool as the friendless, speechless hours moved toward dawn. And I hated Hal for those things. Just a little, and I'd get over it, but it was hate, all right. The genuine article.
   Now I stepped into the cell, followed by Dean and Harry, both of them pale and downcast. 'Are you ready, John?' I asked.
   He nodded. 'Yes, boss. Guess so.'
   'All right, then. I got a piece to say before we go out.'
   'You say what you need to, boss.'
   'John Coffey, as an officer of the court... '
   I said it right to the end, and when I'd finished, Harry Terwilliger stepped up beside me and held out his hand. John looked surprised for a moment, then smiled and shook it. Dean, looking paler than ever, offered his next. 'You deserve better than this, Johnny' he said hoarsely. 'I'm sorry.'
   'I be all right,' John said. 'This the hard part; I be all right in a little while.' He got up, and the St. Christopher's medal Melly had given him swung free of his shirt.
   'John, I ought to have that,' I said. 'I can put it back on you after the... after, if you want, but I should take it for now.' It was silver, and if it was lying against his skin when Jack Van Hay switched on the juice, it might fuse itself into his skin. Even if it didn't do that, it was apt to electroplate, leaving a kind of charred photograph of itself on the skin of his chest. I had seen it before. I'd seen most everything during my years on the Mile. More than was good for me. I knew that now.
   He slipped the chain over his head and put it in my hand. I put the medallion in my pocket and told him to step on out of the cell. There was no need to check his head and make sure the contact would be firm and the induction good; it was as smooth as the palm of my hand.
   'You know, I fell asleep this afternoon and had a dream, boss,' he said. 'I dreamed about Del's mouse.'
   'Did you, John?' I flanked him on the left. Harry took the right. Dean fell in behind, and then we were walking the Green Mile. For me, it was the last time I ever walked it with a prisoner.
   'Yep,' he said. 'I dreamed he got down to that place Boss Howell talked about, that Mouseville place. I dreamed there was kids, and how they laughed at his tricks! My!' He laughed himself at the thought of it, then grew serious again. 'I dreamed those two little blond-headed girls were there. They us laughin, too. I put my arms around em and there us no blood comin out they hair and they 'us fine. We all watch Mr. Jingles roll that spool, and how we did laugh. Fit to bus,' we was.'
   'Is that so?' I was thinking I couldn't go through with it, just could not, there was no way. I was going to cry or scream or maybe my heart would burst with sorrow and that would be an end to it.
   We went into my office. John looked around for a moment or two, then dropped to his knees without having to be asked. Behind him, Harry was looking at me with haunted eyes. Dean was as white as paper.
   I got down on my knees with John and thought there was a funny turnaround brewing here: after all the prisoners I'd had to help up so they could finish the journey, this time I was the one who was apt to need a hand. That's the way it felt, anyway.
   'What should we pray for, boss?' John asked.
   'Strength,' I said without even thinking. I closed my eyes and said, 'Lord God of 'Hosts, please help us finish what we've started, and please welcome this man, John Coffey—like the drink but not spelled the same—into heaven and give him peace. Please help us to see him off the way he deserves and let nothing go wrong. Amen.' I opened my eyes and looked at Dean and Harry. Both of them looked a little better. Probably it was having a few moments to catch their breath. I doubt it was my praying.
   I started to get up, and John caught my arm. He gave me a look that was both timid and hopeful. 'I 'member a prayer someone taught me when I 'us little,' he said. 'At least I think I do. Can I say it?'
   'You go right on and do her,' Dean said. 'Lots of time yet, John.'
   John closed his eyes and frowned with concentration. I expected now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep, or maybe a garbled version of the Lord's prayer, but I got neither; I had never heard what he came out with before, and have never heard it again, not that either the sentiments or expressions were particularly unusual. Holding his hands up in front of his closed eyes, John Coffey said: 'Baby Jesus, meek and mild, pray for me, an orphan child. Be my strength, be my friend, be with me until the end. Amen.' He opened his eyes, started to get up, then looked at me closely.
   I wipe my arm across my eyes. As I listened to him, I had been thinking about Del; he had wanted to pray one more at the end, too. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death. 'Sorry, John.'
   'Don't be,' he said. He squeezed my arm and smiled. And then, as I'd thought he might have to do, he helped me to my feet.

10

   There weren't many witnesses—maybe fourteen in all, half the number that had been in the storage room for the Delacroix execution. Homer Cribus was there, overflowing his chair as per usual, but I didn't see Deputy McGee. Like Warden Moores, he had apparently decided to give this one a miss.
   Sitting in the front row was an elderly couple I didn't recognize at first, even though I had seen their pictures in a good many newspaper articles by that day in the third week of November. Then, as we neared the platform where Old Sparky waited, the woman spat, 'Die slow, you son of a bitch!' and I realized they were the Dettericks, Klaus and Marjorie. I hadn't recognized them because you don't often see elderly people who haven't yet climbed out of their thirties.
   John hunched his shoulders at the sound of the woman's voice and Sheriff Cribus's grunt of approval. Hank Bitterman, who had the guard-post near the front of the meager group of spectators, never took his eyes off Klaus Detterick. That was per my orders, but Detterick never made a move in John 's direction that night. Detterick seemed to be on some other planet.
   Brutal, standing beside Old Sparky, gave me a small finger-tilt as we stepped up onto the platform. He holstered his sidearm and took John 's wrist, escorting him toward the electric chair as gently as a boy leading his date out onto the floor for their first dance as a couple.
   'Everything all right, John?' he asked in a low voice.
   'Yes, boss, but... ' His eyes were moving from side to side in their sockets, and for the first time he looked and sounded scared. 'But they's a lot of folks here hate me. A lot. I can feel it. Hurts. Bores in like bee-stings an' hurts.'
   'Feel how we feel, then,' Brutal said in that same low voice. 'We don't hate you—can you feel that?'
   'Yes, boss.' But his voice was trembling worse now, and his eyes had begun to leak their slow tears again.
   'Kill him twice, you boys!' Marjorie Detterick suddenly screamed. Her ragged, strident voice was like a slap. John cringed against me and moaned. 'You go on and kill that raping baby-killer twice, that'd be just fine!' Klaus, still looking like a man dreaming awake, pulled her against his shoulder. She began to sob.
   I saw with dismay that Harry Terwilliger was crying, too. So far none of the spectators had seen his tears—his back was to them—but he was crying, all right. Still, what could we do? Besides push on with it, I mean?
   Brutal and I turned John around. Brutal pressed on one of the big man's shoulders and John sat. He gripped Sparky's wide oak arms, his eyes moving from side to side, his tongue darting out to wet first one corner of his mouth, then the other.
   Harry and I dropped to our knees. The day before, we'd had one of the shop-trusties weld temporary flexible extensions to the chair's ankle clamps, because John Coffey's ankles were nigh on the size of an ordinary fellow's calves. Still, I had a nightmarish moment when I thought they were still going to come up small, and we'd have to take him back to his cell while Sam Broderick, who was head of the shop guys in those days, was found and tinkered some more. I gave a final, extra-hard shove with the heels of my hands and the clamp on my side closed. John 's leg jerked and he gasped. I had pinched him.
   'Sorry, John,' I murmured, and glanced at Harry. He had gotten his clamp fixed more easily (either the extension on his side was a little bigger or John 's right calf was a little smaller), but he was looking at the result with a doubtful expression. I guessed I could understand why; the modified clamps had a hungry look, their jaws seeming to gape like the mouths of alligators.
   'It'll be all right,' I said, hoping that I sounded convincing... and that I was telling the truth. 'Wipe your face, Harry.'
   He swabbed at it with his arm, wiping away tears from his cheeks and beads of sweat from his forehead. We turned. Homer Cribus, who had been talking too loudly to the man sitting next to him (the prosecutor, judging from the string tie and rusty black suit), fell silent. It was almost time.
   Brutal had clamped one of John 's wrists, Dean the other. Over Dean's shoulder I could see the doctor, unobtrusive as ever, standing against the wall with his black bag between his feet. Nowadays I guess they just about run such affairs, especially the ones with the IV drips, but back then you almost had to yank them forward if you wanted them. Maybe back then they had a clearer idea of what was right for a doctor to be doing, and what was a perversion of the special promise they make, the one where they swear first of all to do no harm.
   Dean nodded to Brutal. Brutal turned his head, seemed to glance at the telephone that was never going to ring for the likes of John Coffey, and called 'Roll on one!' to Jack Van Hay.
   There was that hum, like an old fridge kicking on, and the lights burned a little brighter. Our shadows stood out a little sharper, black shapes that climbed the wall and seemed to hover around the shadow of the chair like vultures. John drew in a sharp breath. His knuckles were white.
   'Does it hurt yet?' Mrs. Detterick shrieked brokenly from against her husband's shoulder. 'I hope it does! I hope it hurts like hell!' Her husband squeezed her. One side of his nose was bleeding, I saw, a narrow trickle of red working its way down into his narrow-gauge mustache. When I opened the paper the following March and saw he'd died of a stroke, I was about the least surprised man on earth.
   Brutal stepped into John 's field of vision. He touched John's shoulder as he spoke. That was irregular, but of the witnesses, only Curtis Anderson knew it, and he did not seem to remark it. I thought he looked like a man who only wants to be done with his current job. Desperately wants to be done with it. He enlisted in the Army after Pearl Harbor, but never got overseas; he died at Fort Bragg, in a truck accident.
   John, meanwhile, relaxed beneath Brutal's fingers. I don't think he understood much, if any, of what Brutal was telling him, but he took comfort from Brutal's hand on his shoulder. Brutal, who died of a heart attack about twenty-five years later (he was eating a fish sandwich and watching TV wrestling when it happened, his sister said), was a good man. My friend. Maybe the best of us. He had no trouble understanding how a man could simultaneously want to go and still be terrified of the trip.
   'John Coffey, you have been condemned to die in the electric chair, sentence passed by a jury of your peers and imposed by a judge of good standing in this state. God save the people of this state. Do you have anything to say before sentence is carried out?'
   John wet his lips again, then spoke clearly. Six words. 'I'm sorry for what I am.'
   'You ought to be!' the mother of the two dead girls screamed. 'Oh you monster, you ought to be! YOU DAMN WELL OUGHT TO BE!'
   John's eyes turned to me. I saw no resignation in them, no hope of heaven, no dawning peace. How I would love to tell you that I did. How I would love to tell myself that. What I saw was fear, misery, incompletion, and incomprehension. They were the eyes of a trapped and terrified animal. I thought of what he'd said about how Wharton had gotten Cora and Kathe Detterick off the porch without rousing the house: He kill them with they love. That's how it is every day. All over the world.
   Brutal took the new mask from its brass hook on the back of the chair, but as soon as John saw it and understood what it was, his eyes widened in horror. He looked at me, and now I could see huge droplets of sweat standing out on the curve of his naked skull. As big as robin's eggs, they looked.
   'Please, boss, don't put that thing over my face,' he said in a moaning little whisper. 'Please don't put me in the dark, don't make me go into the dark, I's afraid of the dark.'
   Brutal was looking at me, eyebrows raised, frozen in place, the mask in his hands. His eyes said it was my call, he'd go either way. I thought as fast as I could and as well as I could—hard to do, with my head pounding the way it was. The mask was tradition, not law. It was, in fact, to spare the witnesses. And suddenly I decided that they did not need to be spared, not this once. John, after all, hadn't done a damned thing in his life to warrant dying under a mask. They didn't know that, but we did, and I decided I was going to grant this last request. As for Marjorie Detterick, she'd probably send me a thank-you note.
   'All right, John,' I murmured.
   Brutal put the mask back. From behind us, Homer Cribus called out indignantly in his deep-dish cracker voice: 'Say, boy! Put that-air mask on him! Think we want to watch his eyes pop?'
   'Be quiet, sir,' I said without turning. 'This is an execution, and you're not in charge of it.'
   'Any more than you were in charge of catching him, you tub of guts,' Harry whispered. Harry died in 1982, close to the age of eighty. An old man. Not in my league, of course, but few are. It was intestinal cancer of some kind.
   Brutal bent over and plucked the disk of sponge out of its bucket. He pressed a finger into it and licked the tip, but he hardly had to; I could see the ugly brown thing dripping. He tucked it into the cap, then put the cap on John 's head. For the first time I saw that Brutal was pale, too—pasty white, on the verge of passing out. I thought of him saying that he felt, for the first time in his life, that he was in danger of hell, because we were fixing to kill a gift of God. I felt a sudden strong need to retch. I controlled it, but only with an effort. Water from the sponge was dripping down the sides of John 's face.
   Dean Stanton ran the strap—let out to its maximum length on this occasion—across John 's chest and gave it to me. We had taken such pains to try and protect Dean on the night of our trip, because of his kids, never knowing that he had less than four months to live. After John Coffey, he requested and received a transfer away from Old Sparky, over to C Block, and there a prisoner stabbed him in the throat with a shank and let out his life's blood on the dirty board floor. I never knew why. I don't think anyone ever knew why. Old Sparky seems such a thing of perversity when I look back on those days, such a deadly bit of folly. Fragile as blown glass, we are, even under the best of conditions. To kill each other with gas and electricity, and in cold blood? The folly. The horror.
   Brutal checked the strap, then stood back. I waited for him to speak, but he didn't. As he crossed his hands behind his back and stood at parade rest, I knew that he wouldn't. Perhaps couldn't. I didn't think I could, either, but then I looked at John 's terrified, weeping eyes and knew I had to. Even if it damned me forever, I had to.
   'Roll on two,' I said in a dusty, cracking voice I hardly recognized as my own.
   The cap hummed. Eight large fingers and two large thumbs rose from the ends of the chair's broad oak arms and splayed tensely in ten different directions, their tips jittering. His big knees made caged pistoning motions, but the clamps on his ankles held. Overhead, three of the hanging lights blew out—Pow! Pow! Pow! Marjorie Detterick screamed at the sound and fainted in her husband's arms. She died in Memphis, eighteen years later. Harry sent me the obit. It was a trolley-car accident.
   John surged forward against the chest-strap. For a moment his eyes met mine. They were aware; I was the last thing he saw as we tilted him off the edge of the world. Then he fell against the seatback, the cap coming askew on his head a little, smoke—a sort of charry mist—drifting out from beneath it. But on the whole, you know, it was quick. I doubt if it was painless, the way the chair's supporters always claim (it's not an idea even the most rabid of them ever seems to want to investigate personally), but it was quick. The hands were limp again, the formerly bluish-white moons at the base of the fingernails now a deep eggplant hue, a tendril of smoke rising off cheeks still wet with salt water from the sponge... and his tears.
   John Coffey's last tears.

11

   I was all right until I got home. It was dawn by then, and birds singing. I parked my flivver, I got out, I walked up the back steps, and then the second greatest grief I have ever known washed over me. It was thinking of how he'd been afraid of the dark that did it. I remembered the first time we'd met, how he'd asked if we left a light on at night, and my legs gave out on me. I sat on my steps and hung my head over my knees and cried. It didn't feel like that weeping was just for John, either, but for all of us.
   Janice came out and sat down beside me. She put an arm over my shoulders.
   'You didn't hurt him any more than you could help, did you?'
   I shook my head no.
   'And he wanted to go.'
   I nodded.
   'Come in the house,' she said, helping me up. It made me think of the way John had helped me up after we'd prayed together. 'Come in and have coffee.'
   I did. The first morning passed, and the first afternoon, then the first shift back at work. Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again. That's all I know, except that this happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain.
   And the electric chair, of course.

12

   A round quarter past two in the afternoon, my friend Elaine Connelly came to me where I sat in the sunroom, with the last pages of my story squared up neatly in front of me. Her face was very pale, and there were shiny places under her eyes. I think she had been crying.
   Me, I'd been looking. Just that. Looking out the window and over the hills to the east, my right hand throbbing at the end of its wrist. But it was a peaceful throb, somehow. I felt empty, husked out. A feeling that was terrible and wonderful at the same time.
   It was hard to meet Elaine's eyes—I was afraid of the hate and contempt I might see there—but they were all right. Sad and wondering, but all right. No hate, no contempt, and no disbelief.
   'Do you want the rest of the story?' I asked. I tapped the little pile of script with my aching hand.
   'It's here, but I'll understand if you'd just as soon not—'
   'It isn't a question of what I want,' she said. 'I have to know how it came out, although I guess there is no doubt that you executed him. The intervention of Providence-with-a-capital-P is greatly overrated in the lives of ordinary humans, I think. But before I take those pages... Paul... '
   She stopped, as if unsure how to go on. I waited. Sometimes you can't help people. Sometimes it's better not even to try.
   'Paul, you speak in here as though you had two grown children in 1932—not just one, but two. If you didn't get married to your Janice when you were twelve and she was eleven, something like that—'
   I smiled a little. 'We were young when we married—a lot of hill-people are, my own mother was—but not that young.'
   'Then how old are you? I've always assumed you were in your early eighties, my age, possibly even a little younger, but according to this... '
   'I was forty the year John walked the Green Mile,' I said. 'I was born in 1892. That makes me a hundred and four, unless my reckoning's out.'
   She stared at me, speechless.
   I held out the rest of the manuscript, remembering again how John had touched me, there in his cell. You won't 'splode, he'd said, smiling a bit at the very idea, and I hadn't... but something had happened to me, all the same. Something lasting.
   'Read the rest of it,' I said. 'What answers I have are in there.'
   'All right,' she almost whispered. 'I'm a little afraid to, I can't lie about that, but... all right. Where will you be?'
   I stood up, stretched, listened to my spine crackle in my back. One thing that I knew for sure was that I was sick to death of the sunroom. 'Out on the croquet course. There's still something I want to show you, and it's in that direction.'
   'Is it... scary?' In her timid look I saw the little girl she had been back when men wore straw boaters in the summer and raccoon coats in the winter.
   'No,' I said, smiling. 'Not scary.'
   'All right.' She took the pages. 'I'm going to take these down to my room. I'll see you out on the croquet course around... ' She riffled the manuscript, estimating. 'Four? Is that all right?'
   'Perfect,' I said, thinking of the too-curious Brad Dolan. He would be gone by then.
   She reached out, gave my arm a little squeeze, and left the room. I stood where I was for a moment, looking down at the table, taking in the fact that it was bare again except for the breakfast tray Elaine had brought me that morning, my scattered papers at last gone. I somehow couldn't believe I was done... and as you can see, since all this was written after I recorded John Coffey's execution and gave the last batch of pages to Elaine, I was not. And even then, part of me knew why.
   Alabama.
   I filched the last piece of cold toast off the tray, went downstairs, and out onto the croquet course. There I sat in the sun, watching half a dozen pairs and one slow but cheerful foursome pass by waving their mallets, thinking my old man's thoughts and letting the sun warm my old man's bones.
   Around two-forty-five, the three-to-eleven shift started to trickle in from the parking lot, and at three, the day-shift folks left. Most were in groups, but Brad Dolan, I saw, was walking alone. That was sort of a happy sight; maybe the world hasn't gone entirely to hell, after all. One of his joke-books was sticking out of his back pocket. The path to the parking lot goes by the croquet course, so he saw me there, but he didn't give me either a wave or a scowl. That was fine by me. He got into his old Chevrolet with the bumper sticker reading I HAVE SEEN GOD AND HIS NAME IS NEWT. Then he was gone to wherever he goes when he isn't here, laying a thin trail of discount motor oil behind.
   Around four o'clock, Elaine joined me, just as she had promised. From the look of her eyes, she'd done a little more crying. She put her arms around me and hugged me tight. 'Poor John Coffey,' she said. 'And poor Paul Edgecombe, too.'
   Poor Paul, I heard Jan saying. Poor old guy.
   Elaine began to cry again. I held her, there on the croquet course in the late sunshine. Our shadows looked as if they were dancing. Perhaps in the Make Believe Ballroom we used to listen to on the radio back in those days.
   At last she got herself under control and drew back from me. She found a Kleenex in her blouse pocket and wiped her streaming eyes with it. 'What happened to the Warden's wife, Paul? What happened with Melly?'
   'She was considered the marvel of the age, at least by the doctors at Indianola Hospital,' I said. I took her arm and we began to walk toward the path which led away from the employees, parking lot and into the woods. Toward the shed down by the wall between Georgia Pines and the world of younger people. 'She died—of a heart attack, not a brain tumor—ten or eleven years later. In forty-three, I think. Hal died of a stroke right around Pearl Harbor Day—could have been on Pearl Harbor Day, for all I remember—so she outlived him by two years. Sort of ironic.'
   'And Janice?'
   'I'm not quite prepared for that today,' I said. 'I'll tell you another time.'
   'Promise?'
   'Promise.' But that was one I never kept. Three months after the day we walked down into the woods together (I would have held her hand, if I hadn't been afraid of hurting her bunched and swollen fingers), Elaine Connelly died quietly in her bed. As with Melinda Moores, death came as the result of a heart attack. The orderly who found her said she looked peaceful, as if it had come suddenly and without much pain. I hope he was right about that. I loved Elaine. And I miss her. Her and Janice and Brutal and just all of them.
   We reached the second shed on the path, the one down by the wall. It stood back in a bower of scrub pines, its sagging roof and boarded-over windows laced and dappled with shadows. I started toward it. Elaine hung back a moment, looking fearful.
   'It's all right,' I said. 'Really. Come on.'
   There was no latch on the door—there had been once, but it had been torn away—and so I used a folded-over square of cardboard to wedge it shut. I pulled it free now, and stepped into the shed. I left the door as wide open as it would go, because it was dark inside.
   'Paul, what?... Oh. Oh!' That second 'oh' was just shy of a scream.
   There was a table pushed off to one side. On it was a flashlight and a brown paper bag. On the dirty floor was a Hav-A-Tampa cigar box I'd gotten from the concession man who refills the home's soft-drink and candy machines. I'd asked him for it special, and since his company also sells tobacco products, it was easy for him to get. I offered to pay him for it—they were valuable commodities when I worked at Cold Mountain, as I may have told you—but he just laughed me off.
   Peering over the edge of it were a pair of bright little oilspot eyes.
   'Mr. Jingles,' I said in a low voice. 'Come over here. Come on over here, old boy, and see this lady.'
   I squatted down—it hurt, but I managed—and held out my hand. At first I didn't think he was going to be able to get over the side of the box this time, but he made it with one final lunge. He landed on his side, then regained his feet, and came over to me. He ran with a hitching limp in one of his back legs; the injury that Percy had inflicted had come back in Mr. Jingles's old age. His old, old age. Except for the top of his head and the tip of his tail, his fur had gone entirely gray.
   He hopped onto the palm of my hand. I raised him up and he stretched his neck out, sniffing at my breath with his ears laid back and his tiny dark eyes avid. I held my hand out toward Elaine, who looked at the mouse with wide-eyed wonder, her lips parted.
   'It can't be,' she said, and raised her eyes to me. 'Oh Paul, it isn't... it can't be!'
   'Watch,' I said, 'and then tell me that.'
   From the bag on the table I took a spool which I had colored myself—not with Crayolas but with Magic Markers, an invention undreamed of in 1932. It came to the same, though. It was as bright as Del's had been, maybe brighter. Messieurs et mesdames, I thought. Bienvenue au cirque du mousie!
   I squatted again, and Mr. Jingles ran off my palm. He was old, but as obsessed as ever. From the moment I had taken the spool out of the bag, he'd had eyes for nothing else. I rolled it across the shed's uneven, splintery floor, and he was after it at once. He didn't run with his old speed, and his limp was painful to watch, but why should he have been either fast or surefooted? As I've said, he was old, a Methuselah of a mouse. Sixty-four, at least.
   He reached the spool, which struck the far wall and bounced back. He went around it, then lay down on his side. Elaine started forward and I held her back. After a moment, Mr. Jingles found his feet again. Slowly, so slowly, he nosed the spool back to me. When he'd first come—I'd found him lying on the steps leading to the kitchen in just that same way, as if he'd travelled a long distance and was exhausted—he had still been able to guide the spool with his paws, as he had done all those years ago on the Green Mile. That was beyond him, now; his hindquarters would no longer support him. Yet his nose was as educated as ever. He just had to go from one end of the spool to the other to keep it on course. When he reached me, I picked him up in one hand—no more than a feather, he weighed—and the spool in the other. His bright dark eyes never left it.
   'Don't do it again, Paul,' Elaine said in a broken voice. 'I can't bear to watch him.'
   I understood how she felt, but thought she was wrong to ask it. He loved chasing and fetching the spool; after all the years, he still loved it just as much. We should all be so fortunate in our passions.
   'There are peppermint candies in the bag, too,' I said. 'Canada Mints. I think he still likes them—he won't stop sniffing, if I hold one out to him—but his digestion has gotten too bad to eat them. I bring him toast, instead.'
   I squatted again, broke a small fragment off the piece I'd brought with me from the sunroom, and put it on the floor. Mr. Jingles sniffed at it, then picked it up in his paws and began to eat. His tail was coiled neatly around him. He finished, then looked expectantly up.
   'Sometimes us old fellas can surprise you with our appetites,' I said to Elaine, and handed her the toast. 'You try.'
   She broke off another fragment and dropped it on the floor. Mr. Jingles approached it, sniffed, looked at Elaine... then picked it up and began to eat.
   'You see?' I said. 'He knows you're not a floater.'
   'Where did he come from, Paul?'
   'Haven't a clue. One day when I went out for my early-morning walk, he was just here, lying on the kitchen steps. I knew who he was right away, but I got a spool out of the laundry room occasional basket just to be sure. And I got him a cigar box. Lined it with the softest stuff I could find. He's like us, Ellie, I think—most days just one big sore place. Still, he hasn't lost all his zest for living. He still likes his spool, and he still likes a visit from his old blockmate. Sixty years I held the story of John Coffey inside me, sixty and more, and now I've told it. I kind of had the idea that's why he came back. To let me know I should hurry up and do it while there was still time. Because I'm like him—getting there.'
   'Getting where?'
   'Oh, you know,' I said, and we watched Mr. Jingles for awhile in silence. Then, for no reason I could tell you, I tossed the spool again, even though Elaine had asked me not to. Maybe only because, in a way, him chasing a spool was like old people having their slow and careful version of sex—you might not want to watch it, you who are young and convinced that, when it comes to old age, an exception will be made in your case, but they still want to do it.
   Mr. Jingles set off after the rolling spool again, clearly with pain, and just as clearly (to me, at least) with all his old, obsessive enjoyment.
   'Ivy-glass windows,' she whispered, watching him go.
   'Ivy-glass windows,' I agreed, smiling.
   'John Coffey touched the mouse the way he touched you. He didn't just make you better of what was wrong with you then, he made you... what, resistant?'
   'That's as good a word as any, I think.'
   'Resistant to the things that eventually bring the rest of us down like trees with termites in them. You... and him. Mr. Jingles. When he cupped Mr. Jingles in his hands.'
   'That's right. Whatever power worked through John did that—that's what I think, anyway—and now it's finally wearing off. The termites have chewed their way through our bark. It took a little longer than it does ordinarily, but they got there. I may have a few more years, men still live longer than mice, I guess, but Mr. Jingles's time is just about up.'
   He reached the spool, limped around it, fell over on his side, breathing rapidly (we could see his respiration moving through his gray fur like ripples), then got up and began to push it gamely back with his nose. His fur was gray, his gait was unsteady, but the oilspots that were his eyes gleamed as brightly as ever.
   'You think he wanted you to write what you have written,' she said. 'Is that so, Paul?'
   'Not Mr. Jingles,' I said. 'Not him but the force that—'
   'Why, Paulie! And Elaine Connelly, too!' a voice cried from the open door. It was loaded with a kind of satiric horror. 'As I live and breathe! What in the goodness can you two be doing here?'
   I turned, not at all surprised to see Brad Dolan there in the doorway. He was grinning as a man only does when he feels he's fooled you right good and proper. How far down the road had he driven after his shift was over? Maybe only as far as The Wrangler for a beer or two and maybe a lap-dance before coming back.
   'Get out,' Elaine said coldly. 'Get out right now.'
   'Don't you tell me to get out, you wrinkledy old bitch,' he said, still smiling. 'Maybe you can tell me that up the hill, but you ain't tip the hill now. This ain't where you're supposed to be. This is off-limits. Little love-nest, Paulie? Is that what you got here? Kind of a Playboy pad for the geriatric... ' His eyes widened as he at last saw the shed's tenant. 'What the fuck?'
   I didn't turn to look. I knew what was there, for one thing; for another, the past had suddenly doubled over the present, making one terrible image, three-dimensional in its reality. It wasn't Brad Dolan standing there in the doorway but Percy Wetmore. In another moment he would rush into the shed and crush Mr. Jingles (who no longer had a hope of outrunning him) under his shoe, and this time there was no John Coffey to bring him back from the edge of death. Any more than there had been a John Coffey when I needed him on that rainy day in Alabama.
   I got to my feet, not feeling any ache in my joints or muscles this time, and rushed toward Dolan. 'Leave him alone!' I yelled. 'You leave him alone, Percy, or by God I'll—'
   'Who you callin Percy?' he asked, and pushed me back so hard I almost fell over. Elaine grabbed me, although it must have hurt her to do so, and steadied me. 'Ain't the first time you done it, either. And stop peein in your pants. I ain't gonna touch im. Don't need to. That's one dead rodent.'
   I turned, thinking that Mr. Jingles was only lying on his side to catch his breath, the way he sometimes did. He was on his side, all right, but that rippling motion through his fur had stopped. I tried to convince myself that I could still see it, and then Elaine burst into loud sobs. She bent painfully, and picked up the mouse I had first seen on the Green Mile, coming up to the duty desk as fearlessly as a man approaching his peers... or his friends. He lay limp on her hand. His eyes were dull and still. He was dead.
   Dolan grinned unpleasantly, revealing teeth which had had very little acquaintance with a dentist. 'Aw, sakes, now!' he said. 'Did we just lose the family pet? Should we have a little funeral, with paper flowers and—'
   'SHUT UP!' Elaine screamed at him, so-loudly and so powerfully that he backed away a step, the smile slipping off his face. 'GET OUT OF HERE! GET OUT OR YOU'LL NEVER WORK ANOTHER DAY HERE! NOT ANOTHER HOUR! I SWEAR IT!'
   'You won't be able to get so much as a slice of bread on a breadline,' I said, but so low neither of them heard me. I couldn't take my eyes off Mr. Jingles, lying on Elaine's palm like the world's smallest bearskin rug.
   Brad thought about coming back at her, calling her bluff—he was right, the shed wasn't exactly approved territory for the Georgia Pines inmates, even I knew that much—and then didn't. He was, at heart, a coward, just like Percy. And he might have checked on her claim that her grandson was Somebody Important and had discovered it was a true claim. Most of all, perhaps, his curiosity had been satisfied, his thirst to know slaked. And after all his wondering, the mystery had turned out not to be such of a much. An old man's pet mouse had apparently been living in the shed. Now it had croaked, had a heart attack or something while pushing a colored spool.
   'Don't know why you're getting so het up,' he said. 'Either of you. You act like it was a dog, or something.'
   'Get out,' she spat. 'Get out, you ignorant man. What little mind you have is ugly and misdirected.'
   He flushed dully, the spots where his high school pimples had been filling in a darker red. There had been a lot of them, by the look. 'I'll go,' he said, 'but when you come down here tomorrow... Paulie... you're going to find a new lock on this door. This place is off-limits to the residents, no matter what bad-tempered things old Mrs. My Shit Don't Stink has to say about me. Look at the floor! Boards all warped and rotted! If you was to go through, your scrawny old leg'd be apt to snap like a piece of kindling. So just take that dead mouse, if you want it, and get gone. The Love Shack is hereby closed.'
   He turned and strode away, looking like a man who believes he's earned at least a draw. I waited until he was gone, and then gently took Mr. Jingles from Elaine. My eyes happened on the bag with the peppermint candies in it, and that did it—the tears began to come. I don't know, I just cry easier somehow these days.
   'Would you help me to bury an old friend?' I asked Elaine when Brad Dolan's heavy footsteps had faded away.
   'Yes, Paul.' She put her arm around my waist and laid her head against my shoulder. With one old and twisted finger, she stroked Mr. Jingles's moveless side. 'I would be happy to do that.'
   And so we borrowed a trowel from the gardening shed and we buried Del's pet mouse as the afternoon shadows drew long through the trees, and then we walked back to get our supper and take up what remained of our lives. And it was Del I found myself thinking of, Del kneeling on the green carpet of my office with his hands folded and his bald pate gleaming in the lamplight, Del who had asked us to take care of Mr. Jingles, to make sure the bad 'un wouldn't hurt him anymore. Except the bad 'un hurts us all in the end, doesn't he?
   'Paul?' Elaine asked. Her voice was both kind and exhausted. Even digging a grave with a trowel and laying a mouse to rest in it is a lot of excitement for old sweeties like us, I guess. 'Are you all right?'
   My arm was around her waist. I squeezed it. 'I'm fine,' I said.
   'Look,' she said. 'It's going to be a beautiful sunset. Shall we stay out and watch it?'
   'All right,' I said, and we stayed there on the lawn is for quite awhile, arms around each other's waists, first watching the bright colors come up in the sky, then watching them fade to ashes of gray.
   Sainte Marie, M re de Dieu, priez pour nous, pauvres p cheurs, maintenant et l'heure de n tre mort.
   Amen.

13

   1956
   Alabama in the rain.
   Our third grandchild, a beautiful girl named Tessa, was graduating from the University of Florida. We went down on a Greyhound. Sixty-four, I was then, a mere stripling. Jan was fifty-nine, and as beautiful as ever. To me, at least. We were sitting in the seat all the way at the back, and she was fussing at me for not buying her a new camera to record the blessed event. I opened my mouth to tell her we had a day to shop in after we got down there, and she could have a new camera if she wanted one, it would fit the budget all right, and furthermore I thought she was just fussing because she was bored with the ride and didn't like the book she'd brought. A Perry Mason, it was. That's when everything in my memory goes white for a bit, like film that's been left out in the sun.
   Do you remember that accident? I suppose a few folks reading this might, but mostly not. Yet it made front-page headlines from coast to coast when it happened. We were outside Birmingham in a driving rain, Janice complaining about her old camera, and a tire blew. The bus waltzed sideways on the wet pavement and was hit broadside by a truck hauling fertilizer. The truck slammed the bus into a bridge abutment at better than sixty miles an hour, crushed it against the concrete, and broke it in half. Two shiny, rain-streaked pieces spun in two opposite directions, the one with the diesel tank in it exploding and sending a red-black fireball up into the rainy-gray sky. At one moment Janice was complaining about her old Kodak, and at the very next I found myself lying on the far side of the underpass in the rain and staring at a pair of blue nylon panties that had spilled out of someone's suitcase. WEDNESDAY was stitched on them in black thread. There were burst-open suitcases everywhere. And bodies. And parts of bodies. There were seventy-three people on that bus, and only four survived the crash. I was one of them, the only one not seriously hurt.
   I got up and staggered among the burst-open suitcases and shattered people, crying out my wife's name. I kicked aside an alarm clock, I remember that, and I remember seeing a dead boy of about thirteen lying in a strew of glass with P.F. Flyers on his feet and half his face gone. I felt the rain beating on my own face, then I went through the underpass and it was gone for awhile. When I came out on the other side it was there again, hammering my cheeks and forehead. Lying by the shattered cab of the overturned fertilizer truck, I saw Jan. I recognized her by her red dress—it was her second-best. The best she had been saving for the actual graduation, of course.
   She wasn't quite dead. I have often thought it would have been better—for me, if not for her—if she had been killed instantly. It might have made it possible for me to let her go a little sooner, a little more naturally. Or perhaps I'm only kidding myself about that. All I know for sure is that I have never let her go, not really.
   She was trembling all over. One of her shoes had come off and I could see her foot jittering. Her eyes were open but blank, the left one full of blood, and as I fell on my knees next to her in the smoky-smelling rain, all I could think of was that jitter meant she was being electrocuted; she was being electrocuted and I had to hold the roll before it was too late.
   'Help me!' I screamed. 'Help me, someone help me!'
   No one helped, no one even came. The rain pounded down—a hard, soaking rain that flattened
   My still-black hair against my skull—and I held her in my arms and no one came. Her blank eyes looked up at me with a kind of dazed intensity, and blood poured from the back of her crushed head in a freshet. Beside one trembling, mindlessly spasming hand was a piece of chromed steel with the letters GREY on it. Next to that was roughly one quarter of what had once been a businessman in a brown Wool suit.
   'Help me!' I screamed again, and turned toward the underpass, and there I saw John Coffey standing in the shadows, only a shadow himself, a big man with long, dangling arms and a bald head. 'John!' I screamed. 'Oh John, please help me! Please help Janice!'
   Rain ran into my eyes. I blinked it away, and he was gone. I could see the shadows I had mistaken for John... but it hadn't been only shadows. I'm sure of that. He was there. Maybe only as a ghost, but he was there, the rain on his face mixing with the endless flow of his tears.
   She died in my arms, there in the rain beside that fertilizer truck with the smell of burning diesel fuel in my nose. There was no moment of awareness—the eyes clearing, the lips moving in some whispered final declaration of love. There was a kind of shivery clench in the flesh beneath my hands, and then she was gone. I thought of Melinda Moores for the first time in years, then, Melinda sitting up in the bed where all the doctors at Indianola General Hospital had believed she would die; Melinda Moores looking fresh and rested and peering at John Coffey with bright, wondering eyes. Melinda saying I dreamed you were wandering in the dark, and so was I. We found each other.
   I put my wife's poor, mangled head down on the wet pavement of the interstate highway, got to my feet (it was easy; I had a little cut on the side of my left hand, but that was all), and screamed his name into the shadows of the underpass.
   'John! JOHN COFFEY! WHERE ARE YOU, BIG BOY?'
   I walked toward those shadows, kicking aside a teddy-bear with blood on its fur, a pair of steel rimmed eyeglasses with one shattered lens, a severed hand with a garnet ring on the pinky finger. 'You saved Hal's wife, why not my wife? Why not Janice? WHY NOT MY JANICE?'
   No answer; only the smell of burning diesel and burning bodies, only the rain falling ceaselessly out of the gray sky and drumming on the cement while my wife lay dead on the road behind me. No answer then and no answer now. But of course it wasn't only Melly Moores that John Coffey saved in 1932, or Del's mouse, the one that could do that cute trick with the spool and seemed to be looking for Del long before Del showed up... long before John Coffey showed up, either.
   John saved me, too, and years later, standing in the pouring Alabama rain and looking for a man who wasn't there in the shadows of an underpass, standing amid the spilled luggage and the ruined dead, I learned a terrible thing: sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation.
   I felt one or the other pouring through me as we sat together on his bunk—November the eighteenth, nineteen and thirty-two. Pouring out of him and into me, whatever strange force he had in him coming through our joined hands in a way our love and hope and good intentions somehow never can, a feeling that began as a tingle and then turned into something tidal and enormous, a force beyond anything I had ever experienced before or have ever experienced since. Since that day I have never had pneumonia, or the flu, or even a strep throat. I have never had another urinary infection, or so much as an infected cut. I have had colds, but they have been infrequent—six or seven years apart, and although people who don't have colds often are supposed to suffer more serious ones, that has never been the case with me. Once, earlier on in that awful year of 1956, I passed a gallstone. And although I suppose it will sound strange to some reading this in spite of all I have said, part of me relished the pain that came when that gallstone went. It was the only serious pain I'd had since that problem with my waterworks, twenty-four years before. The ills that have taken my friends and same-generation loved ones until there are none of them left—the strokes, the cancers, the heart attacks, the liver diseases, the blood diseases—have all left me untouched, have swerved to avoid me the way a man driving a car swerves to avoid a deer or a raccoon in the road. The one serious accident I was in left me untouched save for a scratch on the hand. In 1932, John Coffey inoculated me with life. Electrocuted me with life, you might say. I will pass on eventually—of course I will, any illusions of immortality I might have had died with Mr. Jingles—but I will have wished for death long before death finds me. Truth to tell, I wish for it already and have ever since Elaine Connelly died. Need I tell you?
   I look back over these pages, leafing through them with my trembling, spotted hands, and I wonder if there is some meaning here, as in those books which are supposed to be uplifting and ennobling. I think back to the sermons of my childhood, booming affirmations in the church of Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty, and I recall how the preachers used to say that God's eye is on the sparrow, that He sees and marks even the least of His creations. When I think of Mr. Jingles, and the tiny scraps of wood we found in that hole in the beam, I think that is so. Yet this same God sacrificed John Coffey, who tried only to do good in his blind way, as savagely as any Old Testament prophet ever sacrificed a defenseless lamb... as Abraham would have sacrificed his own son if actually called upon to do so. I think of John saying that Wharton killed the Detterick twins with their love for each other, and that it happens every day, all over the world. If it happens, God lets it happen, and when we say 'I don't understand,' God replies, 'I don't care.'
   I think of Mr. Jingles dying while my back was turned and my attention usurped by an unkind man whose finest emotion seemed to be a species of vindictive curiosity. I think of Janice, jittering away her last mindless seconds as I knelt with her in the rain.
   Stop it, I tried to tell John that day in his cell. Let go of my hands, I'm going to drown if you don't. Drown or explode.
   'You won't 'splode,' he answered, hearing my thought and smiling at the idea. And the horrible thing is that I didn't. I haven't.
   I have at least one old man's ill: I suffer from insomnia. Late at night I lie in my bed, listening to the dank and hopeless sound of infirm men and women coughing their courses deeper into old age. Sometimes I hear a call-bell, or the squeak of a shoe in the corridor, or Mrs. Javits's little TV tuned to the late news. I lie here, and if the moon is in my window, I watch it. I lie here and think about Brutal, and Dean, and sometimes William Wharton saying That's right, nigger, bad as you'd want. I think of Delacroix saying Watch this Boss Edgecombe, I teach Mr. Jingles a new trick. I think of Elaine, standing in the door of the sunroom and telling Brad Dolan to leave me alone. Sometimes I doze and see that underpass in the rain, with John Coffey standing beneath it in the shadows. It's never just a trick of the eye, in these little dreams; it's always him for sure, my big boy, just standing there and watching. I lie here and wait. I think about Janice, how I lost her, how she ran away red through my fingers in the rain, and I wait. We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long.

Author's Afterword

   I don't think I'd want to do another serial novel (if only because the critics get to kick your ass six times instead of just the once), but I wouldn't have missed the experience for the world. As I write this afterword on the day before Part 2 of The Green Mile is to be published, the serialization experiment is looking like a success, at least in terms of sales. For that, Constant Reader, I want to thank you. And something a bit different wakes us all up a little, maybe—lets us see the old business of storytelling in a new way. That's how it worked for me, anyway.
   I wrote in a hurry because the format demanded that I write in a hurry. That was part of the exhilaration, but it also may have produced a number of anachronisms. The guards and prisoners listen to Allen's Alley on their E Block radio, and I doubt if Fred Allen was actually broadcasting in 1932. The same may hold true for Kay Kyser and his Kollege of Musical Knowledge. This isn't to let me off the hook, but it sometimes seems to me that history which has recently fallen over the horizon is harder to research than the Middle Ages or the time of the Crusades. I was able to determine that Brutal might indeed have called the mouse on the Mile Steamboat Willy—the Disney cartoon had been in existence almost four years by then—but I have a sneaking suspicion that the little pornographic comic book featuring Popeye and Olive Oyl is an artifact out of time. I might clean up some of this stuff when and if I decide to do The Green Mile as a single volume... but maybe I'll leave the goofs. After all, doesn't the great Shakespeare himself include in Julius Caesar the anachronism of a striking clock long before mechanical clocks were invented?
   Doing The Green Mile as a single volume would present its own unique challenges, I have come to realize, partly because the book couldn't be published as it was issued in its installments. Because I took Charles Dickens as my model, I asked several people how Dickens had handled the problem of refreshing his readers, recollections at the beginning of each new episode. I had expected something like the synopses which preceded each installment of my beloved Saturday Evening Post serials, and discovered that Dickens had not been so crude; he built the synopsis into the actual story.
   While I was trying to decide how to do this, my Wife began telling me (she doesn't exactly nag, but sometimes she advocates rather ruthlessly) that I had never really finished the story of Mr. Jingles, the circus mouse. I thought she was right, and began to see that, by making Mr. Jingles a secret of Paul Edgecombe's in his old age, I could create a fairly interesting "front story." (The result is a little bit like the form taken by the film version of Fried Green Tomatoes.) In fact, everything in Paul's front story—the story of his life at the Georgia Pines old folks, home—turned out to my satisfaction. I particularly liked the way that Dolan, the orderly, and Percy Wetmore became entwined in Paul's mind. And that was not something I planned or did on purpose; like the happiest of fictions, it just ambled along and stepped into its place.
   I want to thank Ralph Vicinanza for bringing me the "serial thriller" idea in the first place, and all my friends at Viking Penguin and Signet for getting behind it, even though they were scared to death at the beginning (all writers are crazy, and of course they knew that). I also want to thank Marsha DeFilippo, who transcribed a whole stenographer's notebook full of my cramped handwriting and never complained. Well... rarely complained.
   Most of all, though, I want to thank my wife, Tabitha, who read this story and said she liked it. Writers almost always write with some ideal reader in mind, I think, and my wife is mine. We don't always see eye to eye when it comes to what we each write (hell, we rarely see eye to eye when we're shopping together in the supermarket), but when she says it's good, it usually is. Because she's tough, and if I try to cheat or cut a comer, she always sees it.
   And you, Constant Reader. Thank you, as well, and if you have any ideas about The Green Mile as a single volume, please let me know.
   Stephen King
   April 28, 1996
   New York City

Gunslinger

TO
ED FERMAN
who took a chance on these stories, one by one.

Stephen King
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
The Way Station
The Oracle And The Mountains
The Slow Mutants
The Gunslinger And The Darkman
Afterword
Stephen King
The Gunslinger

I

   The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
   The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what might have been parsecs in all directions. White; blinding; waterless; without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway and coaches had followed it. The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied.
   The gunslinger walked stolidly, not hurrying, not loafing. A hide waterbag was slung around his middle like a bloated sausage. It was almost full. He had progressed through the khef over many years, and had reached the fifth level. At the seventh or eighth, he would not have been thirsty; he could have watched own body dehydrate with clinical, detached attention, watering its crevices and dark inner hollows only when his logic told him it must be done. He was not seventh or eighth. He was fifth. So he was thirsty, although he had no particular urge to drink. In a vague way, all this pleased him. It was romantic.
   Below the waterbag were his guns, finely weighted to his hand. The two belts crisscrossed above his crotch. The holsters were oiled too deeply for even this Philistine sun to crack. The stocks of the guns were sandalwood, yellow and finely grained. The holsters were tied down with raw hide cord, and they swung heavily against his hips. The brass casings of the cartridges looped into the gun belts twinkled and flashed and heliographed in the sun. The leather made subtle creaking noises. The guns themselves made no noise. They had spilled blood. There was no need to make noise in the sterility of the desert
   His clothes were the no-color of rain or dust. His shirt was open at the throat, with a rawhide thong dangling loosely in hand-punched eyelets. His pants were seam-stretched dungarees.
   He breasted a gently rising dune (although there was no sand here; the desert was hardpan, and even the harsh winds that blew when dark came raised only an aggravating harsh dust like scouring powder) and saw the kicked remains of a tiny campfire on the lee side, the side which the sun would quit earliest. Small signs like this, once more affirming the man in black’s essential humanity, never failed to please him. His lips stretched in the pitted, flaked remains of his face. He squatted.
   He had burned the devil-grass, of course. It was the only thing out here that would burn. It burned with a greasy, flat light, and it burned slow. Border dwellers had told him that devils lived even in the flames. They burned it but would not look into the light. They said the devils hypnotized, beckoned, would eventually draw the one who looked into the fires. And the next man foolish enough to look into the fire might see you.
   The burned grass was crisscrossed in the now-familiar ideographic pattern, and crumbled to gray senselessness before the gunslinger’s prodding hand. There was nothing
   in the remains but a charred scrap of bacon, which he ate thoughtfully. It had always been this way. The gunslinger had followed the man in black across the desert for two months now, across the endless, screamingly monotonous purgatorial wastes, and had yet to find spoor other than the hygienic sterile ideographs of the man in black’s camp fires. He had not found a can, a bottle, or a waterbag (the gunslinger had left four of those behind, like dead snake-skins).
   – Perhaps the campfires are a message, spelled out letter by letter. Take a powder. Or, the end draweth nigh. Or maybe even, Eat at Joe’s. It didn’t matter. He had no understanding of the ideograms, if they were ideograms. And the remains were as cold as all the others. He knew he was closer, but did not know how he knew. That didn’t matter either. He stood up, brushing his hands.
   No other trace; the wind, razor-sharp, had of course filed away even what scant tracks the hardpan held. He had never even been able to find his quarry’s droppings. Nothing. Only these cold campfires along the ancient highway and the relentless range-finder in his own head.
   He sat down and allowed himself a short pull from the waterbag. He scanned the desert, looked up at the sun, which was now sliding down the far quadrant of the sky. He got up, removed his gloves from his belt, and began to pull devil-grass for his own fire, which he laid over the ashes the man in black had left. He found the irony, like the romance of his thirst, bitterly appealing.
   He did not use the flint and steel until the remains of the day were only the fugitive heat in the ground beneath him and a sardonic orange line on the monochrome western horizon. He watched the south patiently, toward the mountains, not hoping or expecting to see the thin straight line of smoke from a new campfire, but merely watching because that was a part of it. There was nothing. He was
   close, but only relatively so. Not close enough to see smoke at dusk.
   He struck his spark to the dry, shredded grass and lay down upwind, letting the dreamsmoke blow out toward the waste. The wind, except for occasional gyrating dust devils, was constant.
   Above, the stars were unwinking, also constant. Suns and worlds by the million. Dizzying constellations, cold fire in every primary hue. As he watched, the sky washed from violet to ebony. A meteor etched a brief, spectacular arc and winked out. The fire threw strange shadows as the devil-grass burned its slow way down into new patterns —not ideograms but a straightforward crisscross vaguely frightening in its own no-nonsense surety. He had laid his fuel in a pattern that was not artful but only workable. It spoke of blacks and whites. It spoke of a man who might straighten bad pictures in strange hotel rooms. The fire burned its steady, slow flame, and phantoms danced in its incandescent core. The gunslinger did not see. He slept. The two patterns, art and craft, were welded together. The wind moaned. Every now and then a perverse downdraft would make the smoke whirl and eddy toward him, and sporadic whiffs of the smoke touched him. They built dreams in the same way that a small irritant may build a pearl in an oyster. Occasionally the gunslinger moaned with the wind. The stars were as indifferent to this as they were to wars, crucifixions, resurrections. This also would have pleased him.