The Green Mile Read online

  "You did lie," she said. "You lied to Hal."

  Well, that's a wife for you, isn't it? Always poking around for moth-holes in your best suit, and finding one more often than not.

  "I guess, if you want to look at it that way. I didn't tell him anything we both won't be able to live with, though. Hal's in the clear, I think. He wasn't even there, after all. He was home tending his wife until Curtis called him."

  "Did he say how Melinda was?"

  "Not then, there wasn't time, but we spoke again just as Brutal and I were leaving. Melly doesn't remember much, but she's fine. Up and walking. Talking about next year's flower beds."

  My wife sat watching me eat for some little time. Then she asked, "Does Hal know it's a miracle, Paul? Does he understand that?"

  "Yes. We all do, all of us that were there."

  "Part of me wishes I'd been there, too," she said, "but I think most of me is glad I wasn't. If I'd seen the scales fall from Saul's eyes on the road to Damascus, I probably would have died of a heart attack."

  "Naw," I said, tilting my bowl to capture the last spoonful, "probably would have cooked him some soup. This is pretty fine, hon."

  "Good." But she wasn't really thinking about soup or cooking or Saul's conversion on the Damascus road. She was looking out the window toward the ridges, her chin propped on her hand, her eyes as hazy as those ridges look on summer mornings when it's going to be hot. Summer mornings like the one when the Detterick girls had been found, I thought for no reason. I wondered why they hadn't screamed. Their killer had hurt them; there had been blood on the porch, and on the steps. So why hadn't they screamed?

  "You think John Coffey really killed that man Wharton, don't you?" Janice asked, looking back from the window at last. "Not that it was an accident, or anything like that; you think he used Percy Wetmore on Wharton like a gun."

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "I don't know."

  "Tell me again about what happened when you took Coffey off the Mile, would you? Just that part."

  So I did. I told her how the skinny arm shooting out from between the bars and grabbing John's bicep had reminded me of a snake--one of the water moccasins we were all scared of when we were kids swimming in the river--and how Coffey had said Wharton was a bad man. Almost whispering it.

  "And Wharton said . . . ?" My wife was looking out the window again, but she was listening, all right.

  "Wharton said, 'That's right, nigger, bad as you'd want.' "

  "And that's all."

  "Yes. I had a feeling that something was going to happen right then, but nothing did. Brutal took Wharton's hand off John and told him to lie down, which Wharton did. He was out on his feet to start with. Said something about how niggers should have their own electric chair, and that was all. We went about our business."

  "John Coffey called him a bad man."

  "Yep. Said the same thing about Percy once, too. Maybe more than once. I can't remember exactly when, but I know he did."

  "But Wharton never did anything to John Coffey personally, did he? Like he did to Percy, I mean."

  "No. The way their cells were--Wharton up by the duty desk on one side, John down a ways on the other--they could hardly see each other."

  "Tell me again how Coffey looked when Wharton grabbed him."

  "Janice, this isn't getting us anywhere."

  "Maybe it isn't and maybe it is. Tell me again how he looked."

  I sighed. "I guess you'd have to say shocked. He gasped. Like you would if you were sunning at the beach and I snuck up and trickled a little cold water down your back. Or like he'd been slapped."

  "Well, sure," she said. "Being grabbed out of nowhere like that startled him, woke him up for a second."

  "Yes," I said. And then, "No."

  "Well which is it? Yes or no?"

  "No. It wasn't being startled. It was like when he wanted me to come into his cell so he could cure my infection. Or when he wanted me to hand him the mouse. It was being surprised, but not by being touched . . . not exactly, anyway . . . oh, Christ, Jan, I don't know."

  "All right, we'll leave it," she said. "I just can't imagine why John did it, that's all. It's not as if he's violent by nature. Which leads to another question, Paul: how can you execute him if you're right about those girls? How can you possibly put him in the electric chair if someone else--"

  I jerked in my chair. My elbow struck my bowl and knocked it off onto the floor, where it broke. An idea had come to me. It was more intuition than logic at that point, but it had a certain black elegance.

  "Paul?" Janice asked, alarmed. "What's wrong?"

  "I don't know," I said. "I don't know anything for sure, but I'm going to find out if I can."

  4

  THE AFTERMATH of the shooting was a three-ring circus, with the governor in one ring, the prison in another, and poor brain-blasted Percy Wetmore in the third. And the ringmaster? Well, the various gentlemen of the press took turns at that job. They weren't as bad then as they are now--they didn't allow themselves to be as bad--but even back then before Geraldo and Mike Wallace and the rest of them, they could gallop along pretty good when they really got the bit in their teeth. That was what happened this time, and while the show lasted, it was a good one.

  But even the liveliest circus, the one with the scariest freaks, funniest clowns, and wildest animals, has to leave town eventually. This one left after the Board of Enquiry, which sounds pretty special and fearsome, but actually turned out to be pretty tame and perfunctory. Under other circumstances, the governor undoubtedly would have demanded someone's head on a platter, but not this time. His nephew by marriage--his wife's own blood kin--had gone crackers and killed a man. Had killed a killer--there was that, at least, and thank God for it--but Percy had still shot the man as he lay sleeping in his cell, which was not quite sporting. When you added in the fact that the young man in question remained just as mad as a March hare, you could understand why the governor only wanted it to go away, and as soon as possible.

  Our trip to Warden Moores's house in Harry Terwilliger's truck never came out. The fact that Percy had been straitjacketed and locked in the restraint room during the time we were away never came out. The fact that William Wharton had been doped to the gills when Percy shot him never came out, either. Why would it? The authorities had no reason to suspect anything in Wharton's system but half a dozen slugs. The coroner removed those, the mortician put him in a pine box, and that was the end of the man with Billy the Kid tattooed on his left forearm. Good riddance to bad rubbish, you might say.

  All in all, the uproar lasted about two weeks. During that time I didn't dare fart sideways, let alone take a day off to investigate the idea I'd gotten at my kitchen table on the morning after all the upheavals. I knew for sure that the circus had left town when I got to work on a day just shy of the middle of November--the twelfth, I think, but don't hold me to that. That was the day I found the piece of paper I'd been dreading on the middle of my desk: the DOE on John Coffey. Curtis Anderson had signed it instead of Hal Moores, but of course it was just as legal either way, and of course it had needed to go through Hal in order to get to me. I could imagine Hal sitting at his desk in Administration with that piece of paper in his hand, sitting there and thinking of his wife, who had become something of a nine days' wonder to the doctors at Indianola General Hospital. She'd had her own DOE papers handed to her by those doctors, but John Coffey had torn them up. Now, however, it was Coffey's turn to walk the Green Mile, and who among us could stop it? Who among us would stop it?

  The date on the death warrant was November 20th. Three days after I got it--the fifteenth, I think--I had Janice call me in sick. A cup of coffee later I was driving north in my badly sprung but otherwise reliable Ford. Janice had kissed me on my way and wished me good luck; I'd thanked her but no longer had any clear idea what good luck would be--finding what I was looking for or not finding it. All I knew for sure is that I didn't feel much like singing as I drove
. Not that day.

  By three that afternoon I was well up in the ridge country. I got to the Purdom County Courthouse just before it closed, looked at some records, then had a visit from the Sheriff, who had been informed by the county clerk that a stranger was poking in amongst the local skeletons. Sheriff Catlett wanted to know what I thought I was doing. I told him. Catlett thought it over and then told me something interesting. He said he'd deny he'd ever said a word if I spread it around, and it wasn't conclusive anyway, but it was something, all right. It was sure something. I thought about it all the way home, and that night there was a lot of thinking and precious little sleeping on my side of the bed.

  The next day I got up while the sun was still just a rumor in the east and drove downstate to Trapingus County. I skirted around Homer Cribus, that great bag of guts and waters, speaking to Deputy Sheriff Rob McGee instead. McGee didn't want to hear what I was telling him. Most vehemently didn't want to hear it. At one point I was pretty sure he was going to punch me in the mouth so he could stop hearing it, but in the end he agreed to go out and ask Klaus Detterick a couple of questions. Mostly, I think, so he could be sure I wouldn't. "He's only thirty-nine, but he looks like an old man these days," McGee said, "and he don't need a smartass prison guard who thinks he's a detective to stir him up just when some of the sorrow has started to settle. You stay right here in town. I don't want you within hailing distance of the Detterick farm, but I want to be able to find you when I'm done talking to Klaus. If you start feeling restless, have a piece of pie down there in the diner. It'll weight you down." I ended up having two pieces, and it was kind of heavy.

  When McGee came into the diner and sat down at the counter next to me, I tried to read his face and failed. "Well?" I asked.

  "Come on home with me, we'll talk there," he said. "This place is a mite too public for my taste."

  We had our conference on Rob McGee's front porch. Both of us were bundled up and chilly, but Mrs. McGee didn't allow smoking anywhere in her house. She was a woman ahead of her time. McGee talked awhile. He did it like a man who doesn't in the least enjoy what he's hearing out of his own mouth.

  "It proves nothing, you know that, don't you?" he asked when he was pretty well done. His tone was belligerent, and he poked his home-rolled cigarette at me in an aggressive way as he spoke, but his face was sick. Not all proof is what you see and hear in a court of law, and we both knew it. I have an idea that was the only time in his life when Deputy McGee wished he was as country-dumb as his boss.

  "I know," I said.

  "And if you're thinking of getting him a new trial on the basis of this one thing, you better think again, senor. John Coffey is a Negro, and in Trapingus County we're awful particular about giving new trials to Negroes."

  "I know that, too."

  "So what are you going to do?"

  I pitched my cigarette over the porch rail and into the street. Then I stood up. It was going to be a long, cold ride back home, and the sooner I got going the sooner the trip would be done. "That I wish I did know, Deputy McGee," I said, "but I don't. The only thing I know tonight for a fact is that second piece of pie was a mistake."

  "I'll tell you something, smart guy," he said, still speaking in that tone of hollow belligerence. "I don't think you should have opened Pandora's Box in the first place."

  "It wasn't me opened it," I said, and then drove home.

  I got there late--after midnight--but my wife was waiting up for me. I'd suspected she would be, but it still did my heart good to see her, and to have her put her arms around my neck and her body nice and firm against mine. "Hello, stranger," she said, and then touched me down below. "Nothing wrong with this fellow now, is there? He's just as healthy as can be."

  "Yes, ma'am," I said, and lifted her up in my arms. I took her into the bedroom and we made love as sweet as sugar, and as I came to my climax, that delicious feeling of going out and letting go, I thought of John Coffey's endlessly weeping eyes. And of Melinda Moores saying I dreamed you were wandering in the dark, and so was I.

  Still lying on top of my wife, with her arms around my neck and our thighs together, I began to weep myself.

  "Paul!" she said, shocked and afraid. I don't think she'd seen me in tears more than half a dozen times before in the entire course of our marriage. I have never been, in the ordinary course of things, a crying man. "Paul, what is it?"

  "I know everything there is to know," I said through my tears. "I know too goddam much, if you want to know the truth. I'm supposed to electrocute John Coffey in less than a week's time, but it was William Wharton who killed the Detterick girls. It was Wild Bill."

  5

  THE NEXT DAY, the same bunch of screws who had eaten lunch in my kitchen after the botched Delacroix execution ate lunch there again. This time there was a fifth at our council of war: my wife. It was Jan who convinced me to tell the others; my first impulse had been not to. Wasn't it bad enough, I asked her, that we knew?

  "You're not thinking clear about it," she'd answered. "Probably because you're still upset. They already know the worst thing, that John's on the spot for a crime he didn't commit. If anything, this makes it a little better."

  I wasn't so sure, but I deferred to her judgement. I expected an uproar when I told Brutal, Dean, and Harry what I knew (I couldn't prove it, but I knew, all right), but at first there was only thoughtful silence. Then, taking another of Janice's biscuits and beginning to put an outrageous amount of butter on it, Dean said: "Did John see him, do you think? Did he see Wharton drop the girls, maybe even rape them?"

  "I think if he'd seen that, he would have tried to stop it," I said. "As for seeing Wharton, maybe as he ran off, I suppose he might have. If he did, he forgot it later."

  "Sure," Dean said. "He's special, but that doesn't make him bright. He only found out it was Wharton when Wharton reached through the bars of his cell and touched him."

  Brutal was nodding. "That's why John looked so surprised . . . so shocked. Remember the way his eyes opened?"

  I nodded. "He used Percy on Wharton like a gun, that was what Janice said, and it was what I kept thinking about. Why would John Coffey want to kill Wild Bill? Percy, maybe--Percy stamped on Delacroix's mouse right in front of him, Percy burned Delacroix alive and John knew it--but Wharton? Wharton messed with most of us in one way or another, but he didn't mess with John at all, so far as I know--hardly passed four dozen words with him the whole time they were on the Mile together, and half of those were that last night. Why would he want to? He was from Purdom County, and as far as white boys from up there are concerned, you don't even see a Negro unless he happens to step into your road. So why did he do it? What could he've seen or felt when Wharton touched him that was so bad that he saved back the poison he took out of Melly's body?"

  "And half-killed himself doing it, too," Brutal said.

  "More like three-quarters. And the Detterick twins were all I could think of that was bad enough to explain what he did. I told myself the idea was nuts, too much of a coincidence, it just couldn't be. Then I remembered something Curtis Anderson wrote in the first memo I ever got about Wharton--that Wharton was crazy-wild, and that he'd rambled all over the state before the holdup where he killed all those people. Rambled all over the state. That stuck with me. Then there was the way he tried to choke Dean when he came in. That got me thinking about--"

  "The dog," Dean said. He was rubbing his neck where Wharton had wrapped the chain. I don't think he even knew he was doing it. "How the dog's neck was broken."

  "Anyway, I went on up to Purdom County to check Wharton's court records--all we had here were the reports on the murders that got him to the Green Mile. The end of his career, in other words. I wanted the beginning."

  "Lot of trouble?" Brutal asked.

  "Yeah. Vandalism, petty theft, setting haystack fires, even theft of an explosive--he and a friend swiped a stick of dynamite and set it off down by a creek. He got going early, ten years old, but what I wanted wasn't th
ere. Then the Sheriff turned up to see who I was and what I was doing, and that was actually lucky. I fibbed, told him that a cell-search had turned up a bunch of pictures in Wharton's mattress--little girls with no clothes on. I said I'd wanted to see if Wharton had any kind of history as a pederast, because there were a couple of unsolved cases up in Tennessee that I'd heard about. I was careful never to mention the Detterick twins. I don't think they crossed his mind, either."

  "Course not," Harry said. "Why would they have? That case is solved, after all."

  "I said I guessed there was no sense chasing the idea, since there was nothing in Wharton's back file. I mean, there was plenty in the file, but none of it about that sort of thing. Then the Sheriff--Catlett, his name is--laughed and said not everything a bad apple like Bill Wharton did was in the court files, and what did it matter, anyway? He was dead, wasn't he?

  "I said I was doing it just to satisfy my own curiosity, nothing else, and that relaxed him. He took me back to his office, sat me down, gave me a cup of coffee and a sinker, and told me that sixteen months ago, when Wharton was barely eighteen, a man in the western part of the county caught him in the barn with his daughter. It wasn't rape, exactly; the fellow described it to Catlett as 'not much more'n stinkfinger.' Sorry, honey."

  "That's all right," Janice said. She looked pale, though.

  "How old was the girl?" Brutal asked.

  "Nine," I said.

  He winced.

  "The man might've taken off after Wharton himself, if he'd had him some big old brothers or cousins to give him a help, but he didn't. So he went to Catlett, but made it clear he only wanted Wharton warned. No one wants a nasty thing like that right out in public, if it can be helped. Anyway, Sheriff C. had been dealing with Wharton's antics for quite some time--had him in the reform school up that way for eight months or so when Wharton was fifteen--and he decided enough was enough. He got three deputies, they went out to the Wharton place, set Missus Wharton aside when she started to weep and wail, and then they warned Mr. William 'Billy the Kid' Wharton what happens to big pimple-faced galoots who go up in the hayloft with girls not even old enough to have heard about their monthly courses, let alone started them. 'We warned that little punk good,' Catlett told me. 'Warned him until his head was bleedin, his shoulder was dislocated, and his ass was damn near broke.' "