Coffey on the Mile

3

I TOLD ALL THIS to Jan at around eleven o’clock that morning—the next morning, I almost wrote, but of course it was the same day. The longest one of my whole life, without a doubt. I told it pretty much as I have here, finishing with how William Wharton had ended up lying dead on his bunk, riddled with lead from Percy’s sidearm.

No, that’s not right. What I actually finished with was the stuff that came out of Percy, the bugs or the whatever-it-was. That was a hard thing to tell, even to your wife, but I told it.

As I talked, she brought me black coffee by the half-cup—at first my hands were shaking too badly to pick up a whole one without spilling it. By the time I finished, the shaking had eased some, and I felt that I could even take some food—an egg, maybe, or some soup.

“The thing that saved us was that we didn’t really have to lie, any of us.”

“Just leave a few things out,” she said, and nodded. “Little things, mostly, like how you took a condemned murderer out of prison, and how he cured a dying woman, and how he drove that Percy Wetmore crazy by—what?—spitting a pureed brain tumor down his throat?”

“I don’t know, Jan,” I said. “I only know that if you keep talking like that, you’ll end up either eating that soup yourself, or feeding it to the dog.”

“I’m sorry. But I’m right, aren’t I?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Except we got away with the—” The what? You couldn’t call it an escape, and furlough wasn’t right, either. “—the field trip. Not even Percy can tell them about that, if he ever comes back.”

“If he comes back,” she echoed. “How likely is that?”

I shook my head to indicate I had no idea. But I did, actually; I didn’t think he was going to come back, not in 1932, not in ’42 or ’52, either. In that I was right. Percy Wetmore stayed at Briar Ridge until it burned flat in 1944. Seventeen inmates were killed in that fire, but Percy wasn’t one of them. Still silent and blank in every regard—the word I learned to describe that state is catatonic—he was led out by one of the guards long before the fire reached his wing. He went on to another institution—I don’t remember the name and guess it doesn’t matter, anyway—and died in 1965. So far as I know, the last time he ever spoke was when he told us we could clock him out at quitting time… unless we wanted to explain why he had left early.

The irony was that we never had to explain much of anything. Percy had gone crazy and shot William Wharton to death. That was what we told, and so far as it went, every word was true. When Anderson asked Brutal how Percy had seemed before the shooting and Brutal answered with one word—“Quiet”—I had a terrible moment when I felt that I might burst out laughing. Because that was true, too, Percy had been quiet, for most of his shift he’d had a swatch of friction-tape across his mouth and the best he’d been able to come up with was mmmph, mmmph, mmmph.

Curtis kept Percy there until eight o’clock, Percy as silent as a cigar-store Indian but a lot more eerie. By then Hal Moores had arrived, looking grim but competent, ready to climb back into the saddle. Curtis Anderson let him do just that, and with a sigh of relief the rest of us could almost hear. The bewildered, frightened old man was gone; it was the Warden who strode up to Percy, grabbed him by the shoulders with his big hands, and shook him hard.

“Son!” he shouted into Percy’s blank face—a face that was already starting to soften like wax, I thought. “Son! Do you hear me? Talk to me if you hear me! I want to know what happened!”

Nothing from Percy, of course. Anderson wanted to get the Warden aside, discuss how they were going to handle it—it was a political hot potato if there had ever been one—but Moores put him off, at least for the time being, and drew me down the Mile. John Coffey was lying on his bunk with his face to the wall, legs dangling outrageously, as they always did. He appeared to be sleeping and probably was… but he wasn’t always what he appeared, as we had found out.

“Did what happened at my house have anything to do with what happened here when you got back?” Moores asked in a low voice. “I’ll cover you as much as I can, even if it means my job, but I have to know.”

I shook my head. When I spoke, I also kept my voice low-pitched. There were now almost a dozen screws milling around at the head of the aisle. Another was photographing Wharton in his cell. Curtis Anderson had turned to watch that, and for the time being, only Brutal was watching us. “No, sir. We got John back into his cell just like you see, then let Percy out of the restraint room, where we’d stashed him for safekeeping. I thought he’d be hot under the collar, but he wasn’t. Just asked for his sidearm and baton. He didn’t say anything else, just walked off up the corridor. Then, when he got to Wharton’s cell, he pulled his gun and started shooting.”

“Do you think being in the restraint room… did something to his mind?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you put him in the straitjacket?”

“No, sir. There was no need.”

“He was quiet? Didn’t struggle?”

“No struggle.”

“Even when he saw you meant to put him in the restraint room, he was quiet and didn’t struggle.”

“That’s right.” I felt an urge to embroider on this—to give Percy at least a line or two—and conquered it. Simpler would be better, and I knew it. “There was no fuss. He just went over into one of the far corners and sat down.”

“Didn’t speak of Wharton then?”

“No, sir.”

“Didn’t speak of Coffey, either?”

I shook my head.

“Could Percy have been laying for Wharton? Did he have something against the man?”

“That might be,” I said, lowering my voice even more. “Percy was careless about where he walked, Hal. One time Wharton reached out, grabbed him up against the bars, and messed him over some.” I paused. “Felt him up, you could say.”

“No worse than that? Just… ‘messed him over’… and that was all?”

“Yes, but it was pretty bad for Percy, just the same. Wharton said something about how he’d rather screw Percy than Percy’s sister.”

“Um.” Moores kept looking sideways at John Coffey, as if he needed constant reassurance that Coffey was a real person, actually in the world. “It doesn’t explain what’s happened to him, but it goes a good piece toward explaining why it was Wharton he turned on and not Coffey or one of you men. And speaking of your men, Paul, will they all tell the same story?”

“Yes, sir,” I told him. “And they will,” I said to Jan, starting in on the soup she brought to the table. “I’ll see to it.”

“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.”