Coffey on the Mile

8

WHEN JOHN GOT BACK from his shower and the floaters had left, I unlocked his cell, went in, and sat down on the bunk beside him. Brutal was on the desk. He looked up, saw me in there on my own, but said nothing. He just went back to whatever paperwork he was currently mangling, licking away at the tip of his pencil the whole time.

John looked at me with his strange eyes—bloodshot, distant, on the verge of tears… and yet calm, too, as if crying was not such a bad way of life, not once you got used to it. He even smiled a little. He smelled of Ivory soap, I remember, as clean and fresh as a baby after his evening bath.

“Hello, boss,” he said, and then reached out and took both of my hands in both of his. It was done with a perfect unstudied naturalness.

“Hello, John.” There was a little block in my throat, and I tried to swallow it away. “I guess you know that we’re coming down to it now. Another couple of days.”

He said nothing, only sat there holding my hands in his. I think, looking back on it, that something had already begun to happen to me, but I was too fixed—mentally and emotionally—on doing my duty to notice.

“Is there anything special you’d like that night for dinner, John? We can rustle you up most anything. Even bring you a beer, if you want. Just have to put her in a coffee cup, that’s all.”

“Never got the taste,” he said.

“Something special to eat, then?”

His brow creased below that expanse of clean brown skull. Then the lines smoothed out and he smiled. “Meatloaf’d be good.”

“Meatloaf it is. With gravy and mashed.” I felt a tingle like you get in your arm when you’ve slept on it, except this one was all over my body. In my body. “What else to go with it?”

“Dunno, boss. Whatever you got, I guess. Okra, maybe, but I’s not picky.”

“All right,” I said, and thought he would also have Mrs. Janice Edgecombe’s peach cobbler for dessert. “Now, what about a preacher? Someone you could say a little prayer with, night after next? It comforts a man, I’ve seen that many times. I could get in touch with Reverend Schuster, he’s the man who came when Del—”

“Don’t want no preacher,” John said. “You been good to me, boss. You can say a prayer, if you want. That’d be all right. I could get kneebound with you a bit, I guess.”

“Me! John, I couldn’t—”

He pressed down on my hands a little, and that feeling got stronger. “You could,” he said. “Couldn’t you, boss?”

“I suppose so,” I heard myself say. My voice seemed to have developed an echo. “I suppose I could, if it came to that.”

The feeling was strong inside me by then, and it was like before, when he’d cured my waterworks, but it was different, too. And not just because there was nothing wrong with me this time. It was different because this time he didn’t know he was doing it. Suddenly I was terrified, almost choked with a need to get out of there. Lights were going on inside me where there had never been lights before. Not just in my brain; all over my body.

“You and Mr. Howell and the other bosses been good to me,” John Coffey said. “I know you been worryin, but you ought to quit on it now. Because I want to go, boss.”

I tried to speak and couldn’t. He could, though. What he said next was the longest I ever heard him speak.

“I’m rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I’m tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we’s comin from or goin to or why. I’m tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I’m tired of all the times I’ve wanted to help and couldn’t. I’m tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it’s the pain. There’s too much. If I could end it, I would. But I can’t.”

Stop it, I tried to say. Stop it, let go of my hands, I’m going to drown if you don’t. Drown or explode.

“You won’t ’splode,” he said, smiling a little at the idea… but he let go of my hands.

I leaned forward, gasping. Between my knees I could see every crack in the cement floor, every groove, every flash of mica. I looked up at the wall and saw names that had been written there in 1924, 1926, 1931. Those names had been washed away, the men who had written them had also been washed away, in a manner of speaking, but I guess you can never wash anything completely away, not from this dark glass of a world, and now I saw them again, a tangle of names overlying one another, and looking at them was like listening to the dead speak and sing and cry out for mercy. I felt my eyeballs pulsing in their sockets, heard my own heart, felt the windy whoosh of my blood rushing through all the boulevards of my body like letters being mailed to everywhere.

I heard a train-whistle in the distance—the three-fifty to Priceford, I imagine, but I couldn’t be sure, because I’d never heard it before. Not from Cold Mountain, I hadn’t, because the closest it came to the state pen was ten miles east. I couldn’t have heard it from the pen, so you would have said and so, until November of ’32, I would have believed, but I heard it that day.

Somewhere a lightbulb shattered, loud as a bomb.

“What did you do to me?” I whispered. “Oh John, what did you do?”

“I’m sorry, boss,” he said in his calm way. “I wasn’t thinkin. Ain’t much, I reckon. You feel like regular soon.”

I got up and went to the cell door. It felt like walking in a dream. When I got there, he said: “You wonder why they didn’t scream. That’s the only thing you still wonder about, ain’t it? Why those two little girls didn’t scream while they were still there on the porch.”

I turned and looked at him. I could see every red snap in his eyes, I could see every pore on his face… and I could feel his hurt, the pain that he took in from other people like a sponge takes in water. I could see the darkness he had spoken of, too. It lay in all the spaces of the world as he saw it, and in that moment I felt both pity for him and great relief. Yes, it was a terrible thing we’d be doing, nothing would ever change that… and yet we would be doing him a favor.

“I seen it when that bad fella, he done grab me,” John said. “That’s when I knowed it was him done it. I seen him that day, I was in the trees and I seen him drop them down and run away, but—”

“You forgot,” I said.

“That’s right, boss. Until he touch me, I forgot.”

“Why didn’t they scream, John? He hurt them enough to make them bleed, their parents were right upstairs, so why didn’t they scream?”

John looked at me from his haunted eyes. “He say to the one, ‘If you make noise, it’s your sister I kill, not you.’ He say that same to the other. You see?”

“Yes,” I whispered, and I could see it. The Detterick porch in the dark. Wharton leaning over them like a ghoul. One of them had maybe started to cry out, so Wharton had hit her and she had bled from the nose. That’s where most of it had come from.

“He kill them with they love,” John said. “They love for each other. You see how it was?”

I nodded, incapable of speech.

He smiled. The tears were flowing again, but he smiled. “That’s how it is every day,” he said, “all over the worl’.” Then he lay down and turned his face to the wall.

I stepped out into the Mile, locked his cell, and walked up to the duty desk. I still felt like a man in a dream. I realized I could hear Brutal’s thoughts—a very faint whisper, how to spell some word, receive, I think it was. He was thinking i before e, except after c, is that how the dadratted thing goes? Then he looked up, started to smile, and stopped when he got a good look at me. “Paul?” he asked. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” Then I told him what John had told me—not all of it, and certainly not about what his touch had done to me (I never told anyone that part, not even Janice; Elaine Connelly will be the first to know of it—if, that is, she wants to read these last pages after reading all the rest of them), but I repeated what John had said about wanting to go. That seemed to relieve Brutal—a bit, anyway—but I sensed (heard?) him wondering if I hadn’t made it up, just to set his mind at ease. Then I felt him deciding to believe it, simply because it would make things a little easier for him when the time came.

“Paul, is that infection of yours coming back?” he asked. “You look all flushed.”

“No, I think I’m okay,” I said. I wasn’t, but I felt sure by then that John was right and I was going to be. I could feel that tingle starting to subside.

“All the same, it might not hurt you to go on in your office there and lie down a bit.”

Lying down was the last thing I felt like right then—the idea seemed so ridiculous that I almost laughed. What I felt like doing was maybe building myself a little house, then shingling it, and plowing a garden in back, and planting it. All before suppertime.

That’s how it is, I thought. Every day. All over the world. That darkness. All over the world.

“I’m going to take a turn over to Admin instead. Got a few things to check over there.”

“If you say so.”

I went to the door and opened it, then looked back. “You’ve got it right,” I said: “r-e-c-e-i-v-e; i before e, except after c. Most of the time, anyway; I guess there’s exceptions to all the rules.”

I went out, not needing to look back at him to know he was staring with his mouth open.

I kept moving for the rest of that shift, unable to sit down for more than five minutes at a stretch before jumping up again. I went over to Admin, and then I tromped back and forth across the empty exercise yard until the guards in the towers must have thought I was crazy. But by the time my shift was over, I was starting to calm down again, and that rustle of thoughts in my head—like a stirring of leaves, it was—had pretty much quieted down.

Still, halfway home that morning, it came back strong. The way my urinary infection had. I had to park my Ford by the side of the road, get out, and sprint nearly half a mile, head down, arms pumping, breath tearing in and out of my throat as warm as something that you’ve carried in your armpit. Then, at last, I began to feel really normal. I trotted halfway back to where the Ford was parked and walked the rest of the way, my breath steaming in the chilly air. When I got home, I told Janice that John Coffey had said he was ready, that he wanted to go. She nodded, looking relieved. Was she really? I couldn’t say. Six hours before, even three, I would have known, but by then I didn’t. And that was good. John had kept saying that he was tired, and now I could understand why. It would have tired anyone out, what he had. Would have made anyone long for rest and for quiet.

When Janice asked me why I looked so flushed and smelled so sweaty, I told her I had stopped the car on my way home and gone running for awhile, running hard. I told her that much—as I may have said (there’s too many pages here now for me to want to look back through and make sure), lying wasn’t much a part of our marriage—but I didn’t tell her why.

And she didn’t ask.