The Green Mile (51 page)

“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 worl'
.

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.

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.

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.