The cooks in the kitchen were continuing to clear up breakfast, paying no attention to the howling fire alarm at all.
"Say, Mr. Edgecombe," George said. "I believe Brad Dolan been lookin for you. In fact, you just missed him."
Lucky me, I thought. What I said out loud was that I'd probably see Mr. Dolan later. Then I asked if there was any leftover toast lying around from breakfast.
"Sure," Norton said, "but it's stone-cold dead in the market. You runnin late this morning?"
"I am," I agreed, "but I'm hungry."
"Only take a minute to make some fresh and hot," George said, reaching for the bread.
"Nope, cold will be fine," I said, and when he handed me a couple of slices (looking mystified--actually both of them looked mystified), I hurried out the door, feeling like the boy I once was, skipping school to go fishing with a jelly fold-over wrapped in waxed paper slipped into the front of my shirt.
Outside the kitchen door I took a quick, reflexive look around for Dolan, saw nothing to alarm me, and hurried across the croquet course and putting green, gnawing on one of my pieces of toast as I went. I slowed a little as I entered the shelter of the woods, and as I walked down the path, I found my mind turning to the day after Eduard Delacroix's terrible execution.
I had spoken to Hal Moores that morning, and he had told me that Melinda's brain tumor had caused her to lapse into bouts of cursing and foul language . . . what my wife had later labelled (rather tentatively; she wasn't sure it was really the same thing) as Tourette's Syndrome. The quavering in his voice, coupled with the memory of how John Coffey had healed both my urinary infection and the broken back of Delacroix's pet mouse, had finally pushed me over the line that runs between just thinking about a thing and actually doing a thing.
And there was something else. Something that had to do with John Coffey's hands, and my shoe.
So I had called the men I worked with, the men I had trusted my life to over the years--Dean Stanton, Harry Terwilliger, Brutus Howell. They came to lunch at my house on the day after Delacroix's execution, and they at least listened to me when I outlined my plan. Of course, they all knew that Coffey had healed the mouse; Brutal had actually seen it. So when I suggested that another miracle might result if we took John Coffey to Melinda Moores, they didn't outright laugh. It was Dean Stanton who raised the most troubling question: What if John Coffey escaped while we had him out on his field-trip?
"Suppose he killed someone else?" Dean asked. "I'd hate losing my job, and I'd hate going to jail--I got a wife and kids depending on me to put bread in their mouths--but I don't think I'd hate either of those things near as much as having another little dead girl on my conscience."
There was silence, then, all of them looking at me, waiting to see how I'd respond. I knew everything would change if I said what was on the tip of my tongue; we had reached a point beyond which retreat would likely become impossible.
Except retreat, for me, at least, was already impossible. I opened my mouth and said
2
"THAT WON'T HAPPEN."
"How in God's name can you be so sure?" Dean asked.
I didn't answer. I didn't know just how to begin. I had known this would come up, of course I had, but I still didn't know how to start telling them what was in my head and heart. Brutal helped.
"You don't think he did it, do you, Paul?" He looked incredulous. "You think that big lug is innocent."
"I'm positive he's innocent," I said.
"How can you be?"
"There are two things," I said. "One of them is my shoe."
"Your shoe?" Brutal exclaimed. "What has your shoe got to do with whether or not John Coffey killed those two little girls?"
"I took off one of my shoes and gave it to him last night," I said. "After the execution, this was, when things had settled back down a little. I pushed it through the bars, and he picked it up in those big hands of his. I told him to tie it. I had to make sure, you see, because all our problem children normally wear is slippers--a man who really wants to commit suicide can do it with shoelaces, if he's dedicated. That's something all of us know."
They were nodding.
"He put it on his lap and got the ends of the laces crossed over all right, but then he was stuck. He said he was pretty sure someone had showed him how to do it when he was a lad--maybe his father or maybe one of the boyfriends his mother had after the father was gone--but he'd forgot the knack."
"I'm with Brutal--I still don't see what your shoe has to do with whether or not Coffey killed the Detterick twins," Dean said.
So I went over the story of the abduction and murder again--what I'd read that hot day in the prison library with my groin sizzling and Gibbons snoring in the corner, and all that the reporter, Hammersmith, told me later.
"The Dettericks' dog wasn't much of a biter, but it was a world-class barker," I said. "The man who took the girls kept it quiet by feeding it sausages. He crept a little closer every time he gave it one, I imagine, and while the mutt was eating the last one, he reached out, grabbed it by the head, and twisted. Broke its neck.
"Later, when they caught up with Coffey, the deputy in charge of the posse--Rob McGee, his name was--spotted a bulge in the chest pocket of the biballs Coffey was wearing. McGee thought at first it might be a gun. Coffey said it was a lunch, and that's what it turned out to be--a couple of sandwiches and a pickle, wrapped up in newspaper and tied with butcher's string. Coffey couldn't remember who gave it to him, only that it was a woman wearing an apron."
"Sandwiches and a pickle but no sausages," Brutal said.
"No sausages," I agreed.
"Course not," Dean said. "He fed those to the dog."
"Well, that's what the prosecutor said at the trial," I agreed, "but if Coffey opened his lunch and fed the sausages to the dog, how'd he tie the newspaper back up again with that butcher's twine? I don't know when he even would have had the chance, but leave that out of it, for the time being. This man can't even tie a simple granny knot."
There was a long moment of thunderstruck silence, broken at last by Brutus. "Holy shit," he said in a low voice. "How come no one brought that up at the trial?"
"Nobody thought of it," I said, and found myself again thinking of Hammersmith, the reporter--Hammersmith who had been to college in Bowling Green, Hammersmith who liked to think of himself as enlightened, Hammersmith who had told me that mongrel dogs and Negroes were about the same, that either might take a chomp out of you suddenly, and for no reason. Except he kept calling them your Negroes, as if they were still property . . . but not his property. No, not his. Never his. And at that time, the South was full of Hammersmiths. "Nobody was really equipped to think of it, Coffey's own attorney included."
"But you did," Harry said. "Goddam, boys, we're sittin here with Mr. Sherlock Holmes." He sounded simultaneously joshing and awed.
"Oh, put a cork in it," I said. "I wouldn't have thought of it either, if I hadn't put together what he told Deputy McGee that day with what he said after he cured my infection, and what he said after he healed the mouse."
"What?" Dean asked.
"When I went into his cell, it was like I was hypnotized. I didn't feel like I could have stopped doing what he wanted, even if I'd tried."
"I don't like the sound of that," Harry said, and shifted uneasily in his seat.
"I asked him what he wanted, and he said 'Just to help.' I remember that very clearly. And when it was over and I was better, he knew. 'I helped it,' he said. 'I helped it, didn't I?' "
Brutal was nodding. "Just like with the mouse. You said 'You helped it,' and Coffey said it back to you like he was a parrot. 'I helped Del's mouse.' Is that when you knew? It was, wasn't it?"
"Yeah, I guess so. I remembered what he said to McGee when McGee asked him what had happened. It was in every story about the murders, just about. 'I couldn't help it. I tried to take it back, but it was too late.' A man saying a thing like that with two little dead girls in his arms, them w
hite and blonde, him as big as a house, no wonder they got it wrong. They heard what he was saying in a way that would agree with what they were seeing, and what they were seeing was black. They thought he was confessing, that he was saying he'd had a compulsion to take those girls, rape them, and kill them. That he'd come to his senses and tried to stop--"
"But by then it was too late," Brutal murmured.
"Yes. Except what he was really trying to tell them was that he'd found them, tried to heal them--to bring them back--and had no success. They were too far gone in death."
"Paul, do you believe that?" Dean asked. "Do you really, honest-to-God believe that?"
I examined my heart as well as I could one final time, then nodded my head. Not only did I know it now, there was an intuitive part of me that had known something wasn't right with John Coffey's situation from the very beginning, when Percy had come onto the block hauling on Coffey's arm and blaring "Dead man walking!" at the top of his lungs. I had shaken hands with him, hadn't I? I had never shaken the hand of a man coming on the Green Mile before, but I had shaken Coffey's.
"Jesus," Dean said. "Good Jesus Christ."
"Your shoe's one thing," Harry said. "What's the other?"
"Not long before the posse found Coffey and the girls, the men came out of the woods near the south bank of the Trapingus River. They found a patch of flattened-down grass there, a lot of blood, and the rest of Cora Detterick's nightie. The dogs got confused for a bit. Most wanted to go southeast, downstream along the bank. But two of them--the coon-dogs--wanted to go upstream. Bobo Marchant was running the dogs, and when he gave the coonies a sniff of the nightgown, they turned with the others."
"The coonies got mixed up, didn't they?" Brutal asked. A strange, sickened little smile was playing around the corners of his mouth. "They ain't built to be trackers, strictly speaking, and they got mixed up on what their job was."
"Yes."
"I don't get it," Dean said.
"The coonies forgot whatever it was Bobo ran under their noses to get them started," Brutal said. "By the time they came out on the riverbank, the coonies were tracking the killer, not the girls. That wasn't a problem as long as the killer and the girls were together, but . . ."
The light was dawning in Dean's eyes. Harry had already gotten it.
"When you think about it," I said, "you wonder how anybody, even a jury wanting to pin the crime on a wandering black fellow, could have believed John Coffey was their man for even a minute. Just the idea of keeping the dog quiet with food until he could snap its neck would have been beyond Coffey.
"He was never any closer to the Detterick farm than the south bank of the Trapingus, that's what I think. Six or more miles away. He was just mooning along, maybe meaning to go down to the railroad tracks and catch a freight to somewhere else--when they come off the trestle, they're going slow enough to hop--when he heard a commotion to the north."
"The killer?" Brutal asked.
"The killer. He might have raped them already, or maybe the rape was what Coffey heard. In any case, that bloody patch in the grass was where the killer finished the business; dashed their heads together, dropped them, and then hightailed it."
"Hightailed it northwest," Brutal said. "The direction the coon-dogs wanted to go."
"Right. John Coffey comes through a stand of alders that grows a little way southeast of the spot where the girls were left, probably curious about all the noise, and he finds their bodies. One of them might still have been alive; I suppose it's possible both of them were, although not for much longer. John Coffey wouldn't have known if they were dead, that's for sure. All he knows is that he's got a healing power in his hands, and he tried to use it on Cora and Kathe Detterick. When it didn't work, he broke down, crying and hysterical. Which is how they found him."
"Why didn't he stay there, where he found them?" Brutal asked. "Why take them south along the riverbank? Any idea?"
"I bet he did stay put, at first," I said. "At the trial, they kept talking about a big trampled area, all the grass squashed flat. And John Coffey's a big man."
"John Coffey's a fucking giant," Harry said, pitching his voice very low so my wife wouldn't hear him cuss if she happened to be listening.
"Maybe he panicked when he saw that what he was doing wasn't working. Or maybe he got the idea that the killer was still there, in the woods upstream, watching him. Coffey's big, you know, but not real brave. Harry, remember him asking if we left a light on in the block after bedtime?"
"Yeah. I remember thinking how funny that was, what with the size of him." Harry looked shaken and thoughtful.
"Well, if he didn't kill the little girls, who did?" Dean asked.
I shook my head. "Someone else. Someone white would be my best guess. The prosecutor made a big deal about how it would have taken a strong man to kill a dog as big as the one the Dettericks kept, but--"
"That's crap," Brutus rumbled. "A strong twelve-year-old girl could break a big dog's neck, if she took the dog by surprise and knew where to grab. If Coffey didn't do it, it could have been damned near anyone . . . any man, that is. We'll probably never know."
I said, "Unless he does it again."
"We wouldn't know even then, if he did it down Texas or over in California," Harry said.
Brutal leaned back, screwed his fists into his eyes like a tired child, then dropped them into his lap again. "This is a nightmare," he said. "We've got a man who may be innocent--who probably is innocent--and he's going to walk the Green Mile just as sure as God made tall trees and little fishes. What are we supposed to do about it? If we start in with that healing-fingers shit, everyone is going to laugh their asses off, and he'll end up in the Fry-O-Lator just the same."
"Let's worry about that later," I said, because I didn't have the slightest idea how to answer him. "The question right now is what we do--or don't do--about Melly. I'd say step back and take a few days to think it over, but I believe every day we wait raises the chances that he won't be able to help her."
"Remember him holding his hands out for the mouse?" Brutal asked. " 'Give im to me while there's still time,' he said. While there's still time."
"I remember."
Brutal considered, then nodded. "I'm in. I feel bad about Del, too, but mostly I think I just want to see what happens when he touches her. Probably nothing will, but maybe . . ."
"I doubt like hell we even get the big dummy off the block," Harry said, then sighed and nodded. "But who gives a shit? Count me in."
"Me, too," Dean said. "Who stays on the block, Paul? Do we draw straws for it?"
"No, sir," I said. "No straws. You stay."
"Just like that? The hell you say!" Dean replied, hurt and angry. He whipped off his spectacles and began to polish them furiously on his shirt. "What kind of a bum deal is that?"
"The kind you get if you're young enough to have kids still in school," Brutal said. "Harry and me's bachelors. Paul's married, but his kids are grown and off on their own, at least. This is a mucho crazy stunt we're planning here; I think we're almost sure to get caught." He gazed at me soberly. "One thing you didn't mention, Paul, is that if we do manage to get him out of the slam and then Coffey's healing fingers don't work, Hal Moores is apt to turn us in himself." He gave me a chance to reply to this, maybe to rebut it, but I couldn't and so I kept my mouth shut. Brutal turned back to Dean and went on. "Don't get me wrong, you're apt to lose your job, too, but at least you'd have a chance to get clear of prison if the heat really came down. Percy's going to think it was a prank; if you're on the duty desk, you can say you thought the same thing and we never told you any different."
"I still don't like it," Dean said, but it was clear he'd go along with it, like it or not. The thought of his kiddies had convinced him. "And it's to be tonight? You're sure?"
"If we're going to do it, it had better be tonight," Harry said. "If I get a chance to think about it, I'll most likely lose my nerve."
"Let me be the one to go by the
infirmary," Dean said. "I can do that much at least, can't I?"
"As long as you can do what needs doing without getting caught," Brutal said.
Dean looked offended, and I clapped him on the shoulder. "As soon after you clock in as you can . . . all right?"
"You bet."
My wife popped her head through the door as if I'd given her a cue to do so. "Who's for more iced tea?" she asked brightly. "What about you, Brutus?"
"No, thanks," he said. "What I'd like is a good hard knock of whiskey, but under the circumstances, that might not be a good idea."
Janice looked at me; smiling mouth, worried eyes. "What are you getting these boys into, Paul?" But before I could even think of framing a reply, she raised her hand and said, "Never mind, I don't want to know."
3
LATER, LONG AFTER the others were gone and while I was dressing for work, she took me by the arm, swung me around, and looked into my eyes with fierce intensity.
"Melinda?" she asked.
I nodded.
"Can you do something for her, Paul? Really do something for her, or is it all wishful dreaming brought on by what you saw last night?"
I thought of Coffey's eyes, of Coffey's hands, and of the hypnotized way I'd gone to him when he'd wanted me. I thought of him holding out his hands for Mr. Jingles's broken, dying body. While there's still time, he had said. And the black swirling things that turned white and disappeared.
"I think we might be the only chance she has left," I said at last.
"Then take it," she said, buttoning the front of my new fall coat. It had been in the closet since my birthday at the beginning of September, but this was only the third or fourth time I'd actually worn it. "Take it."
And she practically pushed me out the door.
4
I CLOCKED IN that night--in many ways the strangest night of my entire life--at twenty past six. I thought I could still smell the faint, lingering odor of burned flesh on the air. It had to be an illusion--the doors to the outside, both on the block and in the storage room, had been open most of the day, and the previous two shifts had spent hours scrubbing in there--but that didn't change what my nose was telling me, and I didn't think I could have eaten any dinner even if I hadn't been scared almost to death about the evening which lay ahead.