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 up 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 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, Mere de Dieu, priez pour nous, pauvres pecheurs, maintenant et a l'heure de notre 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 int
o 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!"