Coffey's Hands

3

EXCEPT FOR SHOUTING once at Delacroix, Percy kept his mouth shut once the excitement was over. This was probably the result of shock rather than any effort at tact—Percy Wetmore knew as much about tact as I do about the native tribes of darkest Africa, in my opinion—but it was a damned good thing, just the same. If he’d started in whining about how Brutal had pushed him into the wall or wondering why no one had told him that nasty men like Wild Billy Wharton sometimes turned up on E Block, I think we would have killed him. Then we could have toured the Green Mile in a whole new way. That’s sort of a funny idea, when you consider it. I missed my chance to make like James Cagney in White Heat.

Anyway, when we were sure that Dean was going to keep breathing and that he wasn’t going to pass out on the spot, Harry and Brutal escorted him over to the infirmary. Delacroix, who had been absolutely silent during the scuffle (he had been in prison lots of times, that one, and knew when it was prudent to keep his yap shut and when it was relatively safe to open it again), began bawling loudly down the corridor as Harry and Brutal helped Dean out. Delacroix wanted to know what had happened. You would have thought his constitutional rights had been violated.

“Shut up, you little queer!” Percy yelled back, so furious that the veins stood out on the sides of his neck. I put a hand on his arm and felt it quivering beneath his shirt. Some of this was residual fright, of course (every now and then I had to remind myself that part of Percy’s problem was that he was only twenty-one, not much older than Wharton), but I think most of it was rage. He hated Delacroix. I don’t know just why, but he did.

“Go see if Warden Moores is still here,” I told Percy. “If he is, give him a complete verbal report on what happened. Tell him he’ll have my written report on his desk tomorrow, if I can manage it.”

Percy swelled visibly at this responsibility; for a horrible moment or two, I actually thought he might salute. “Yes, sir. I will.”

“Begin by telling him that the situation in E Block is normal. It’s not a story, and the warden won’t appreciate you dragging it out to heighten the suspense.”

“I won’t.”

“Okay. Off you go.”

He started for the door, then turned back. The one thing you could count on with him was contrariness. I desperately wanted him gone, my groin was on fire, and now he didn’t seem to want to go.

“Are you all right, Paul?” he asked. “Running a fever, maybe? Got a touch of the grippe? Cause there’s sweat all over your face.”

“I might have a touch of something, but mostly I’m fine,” I said. “Go on, Percy, tell the warden.”

He nodded and left—thank Christ for small favors. As soon as the door was closed, I lunged into my office. Leaving the duty desk unmanned was against regulations, but I was beyond caring about that. It was bad—like it had been that morning.

I managed to get into the little toilet cubicle behind the desk and to get my business out of my pants before the urine started to gush, but it was a near thing. I had to put a hand over my mouth to stifle a scream as I began to flow, and grabbed blindly for the lip of the washstand with the other. It wasn’t like my house, where I could fall to my knees and piss a puddle beside the woodpile; if I went to my knees here, the urine would go all over the floor.

I managed to keep my feet and not to scream, but it was a close thing on both counts. It felt like my urine had been filled with tiny slivers of broken glass. The smell coming up from the toilet bowl was swampy and unpleasant, and I could see white stuff—pus, I guess—floating on the surface of the water.

I took the towel off the rack and wiped my face with it. I was sweating, all right; it was pouring off me. I looked into the metal mirror and saw the flushed face of a man running a high fever looking back at me. Hundred and three? Hundred and four? Better not to know, maybe. I put the towel back on its bar, flushed the toilet, and walked slowly back across my office to the cellblock door. I was afraid Bill Dodge or someone else might have come in and seen three prisoners with no attendants, but the place was empty. Wharton still lay unconscious on his bunk, Delacroix had fallen silent, and John Coffey had never made a single noise at all, I suddenly realized. Not a peep. Which was worrisome.

I went down the Mile and glanced into Coffey’s cell, half-expecting to discover he’d committed suicide in one of the two common Death Row ways—either hanging himself with his pants, or gnawing into his wrists. No such thing, it turned out. Coffey merely sat on the end of his bunk with his hands in his lap, the largest man I’d ever seen in my life, looking at me with his strange, wet eyes.

“Cap’n?” he said.

“What’s up, big boy?”

“I need to see you.”

“Ain’t you looking right at me, John Coffey?”

He said nothing to this, only went on studying me with his strange, leaky gaze. I sighed.

“In a second, big boy.”

I looked over at Delacroix, who was standing at the bars of his cell. Mr. Jingles, his pet mouse (Delacroix would tell you he’d trained Mr. Jingles to do tricks, but us folks who worked on the Green Mile were pretty much unanimous in the opinion that Mr. Jingles had trained himself), was jumping restlessly back and forth from one of Del’s outstretched hands to the other, like an acrobat doing leaps from platforms high above the center ring. His eyes were huge, his ears laid back against his sleek brown skull. I hadn’t any doubt that the mouse was reacting to Delacroix’s nerves. As I watched, he ran down Delacroix’s pantsleg and across the cell to where the brightly colored spool lay against one wall. He pushed the spool back to Delacroix’s foot and then looked up at him eagerly, but the little Cajun took no notice of his friend, at least for the time being.

“What happen, boss?” Delacroix asked. “Who been hurt?”

“Everything’s jake,” I said. “Our new boy came in like a lion, but now he’s passed out like a lamb. All’s well that ends well.”

“It ain’t over yet,” Delacroix said, looking up the Mile toward the cell where Wharton was jugged. “L’homme mauvais, c’est vrai!”

“Well,” I said, “don’t let it get you down, Del. Nobody’s going to make you play skiprope with him out in the yard.”

There was a creaking sound from behind me as Coffey got off his bunk. “Boss Edgecombe!” he said again. This time he sounded urgent. “I need to talk to you!”

I turned to him, thinking, all right, no problem, talking was my business. All the time trying not to shiver, because the fever had turned cold, as they sometimes will. Except for my groin, which still felt as if it had been slit open, filled with hot coals, and then sewed back up again.

“So talk, John Coffey,” I said, trying to keep my voice light and calm. For the first time since he’d come onto E Block, Coffey looked as though he was really here, really among us. The almost ceaseless trickle of tears from the corners of his eyes had ceased, at least for the time being, and I knew he was seeing what he was looking at—Mr. Paul Edgecombe, E Block’s bull-goose screw, and not some place he wished he could return to, and take back the terrible thing he’d done.

“No,” he said. “You got to come in here.”

“Now, you know I can’t do that,” I said, still trying for the light tone, “at least not right this minute. I’m on my own here for the time being, and you outweigh me by just about a ton and a half. We’ve had us one hooraw this afternoon, and that’s enough. So we’ll just have us a chat through the bars, if it’s all the same to you, and—”

“Please!” He was holding the bars so tightly that his knuckles were pale and his fingernails were white. His face was long with distress, those strange eyes sharp with some need I could not understand. I remember thinking that maybe I could’ve understood it if I hadn’t been so sick, and knowing that would have given me a way of helping him through the rest of it. When you know what a man needs, you know the man, more often than not. “Please, Boss Edgecombe! You have to come in!”

That’s the nuttiest thing I ever heard, I thought, and then realized something even nuttier: I was going to do it. I had my keys off my belt and I was hunting through them for the ones that opened John Coffey’s cell. He could have picked me up and broken me over his knee like kindling on a day when I was well and feeling fine, and this wasn’t that day. All the same, I was going to do it. On my own, and less than half an hour after a graphic demonstration of where stupidity and laxness could get you when you were dealing with condemned murderers, I was going to open this black giant’s cell, go in, and sit with him. If I was discovered, I might well lose my job even if he didn’t do anything crazy, but I was going to do it, just the same.

Stop, I said to myself, you just stop now, Paul. But I didn’t. I used one key on the top lock, another on the bottom lock, and then I slid the door back on its track.

“You know, boss, that maybe not such a good idear,” Delacroix said in a voice so nervous and prissy it would probably have made me laugh under other circumstances.

“You mind your business and I’ll mind mine,” I said without looking around. My eyes were fixed on John Coffey’s, and fixed so hard they might have been nailed there. It was like being hypnotized. My voice sounded to my own ears like something which had come echoing down a long valley. Hell, maybe I was hypnotized. “You just lie down and take you a rest.”

“Christ, this place is crazy,” Delacroix said in a trembling voice. “Mr. Jingles, I just about wish they’d fry me and be done widdit!”

I went into Coffey’s cell. He stepped away as I stepped forward. When he was backed up against his bunk—it hit him in the calves, that’s how tall he was—he sat down on it. He patted the mattress beside him, his eyes never once leaving mine. I sat down there next to him, and he put his arm around my shoulders, as if we were at the movies and I was his girl.

“What do you want, John Coffey?” I asked, still looking into his eyes—those sad, serene eyes.

“Just to help,” he said. He sighed like a man will when he’s faced with a job he doesn’t much want to do, and then he put his hand down in my crotch, on that shelf of bone a foot or so below the navel.

“Hey!” I cried. “Get your goddam hand—”

A jolt slammed through me then, a big painless whack of something. It made me jerk on the cot and bow my back, made me think of Old Toot shouting that he was frying, he was frying, he was a done tom turkey. There was no heat, no feeling of electricity, but for a moment the color seemed to jump out of everything, as if the world had been somehow squeezed and made to sweat. I could see every pore on John Coffey’s face, I could see every bloodshot snap in his haunted eyes, I could see a tiny healing scrape on his chin. I was aware that my fingers were hooked down into claws on thin air, and that my feet were drumming on the floor of Coffey’s cell.

Then it was over. So was my urinary infection. Both the heat and the miserable throbbing pain were gone from my crotch, and the fever was likewise gone from my head. I could still feel the sweat it had drawn out of my skin, and I could smell it, but it was gone, all right.

“What’s going on?” Delacroix called shrilly. His voice still came from far away, but when John Coffey bent forward, breaking eye-contact with me, the little Cajun’s voice suddenly came clear. It was as if someone had pulled wads of cotton or a pair of shooters’ plugs out of my ears. “What’s he doing to you?”

I didn’t answer. Coffey was bent forward over his own lap with his face working and his throat bulging. His eyes were bulging, too. He looked like a man with a chicken bone caught in his throat.

“John!” I said. I clapped him on the back; it was all I could think of to do. “John, what’s wrong?”

He hitched under my hand, then made an unpleasant gagging, retching sound. His mouth opened the way horses sometimes open their mouths to allow the bit—reluctantly, with the lips peeling back from the teeth in a kind of desperate sneer. Then his teeth parted, too, and he exhaled a cloud of tiny black insects that looked like gnats or noseeums. They swirled furiously between his knees, turned white, and disappeared.

Suddenly all the strength went out of my midsection. It was as if the muscles there had turned to water. I slumped back against the stone side of Coffey’s cell. I remember thinking the name of the Savior—Christ, Christ, Christ, over and over, like that—and I remember thinking that the fever had driven me delirious. That was all.

Then I became aware that Delacroix was bawling for help; he was telling the world that John Coffey was killing me, and telling it at the top of his lungs. Coffey was bending over me, all right, but only to make sure I was okay.

“Shut up, Del,” I said, and got on my feet. I waited for the pain to rip into my guts, but it didn’t happen. I was better. Really. There was a moment of dizziness, but that passed even before I was able to reach out and grab the bars of Coffey’s cell door for balance. “I’m totally okeydoke.”

“You get on outta dere,” Delacroix said, sounding like a nervy old woman telling a kid to climb down out of that-ere apple tree. “You ain’t suppose to be in there wit no one else on the block.”

I looked at John Coffey, who sat on the bunk with his huge hands on the tree stumps of his knees. John Coffey looked back at me. He had to tilt his head up a little, but not much.

“What did you do, big boy?” I asked in a low voice. “What did you do to me?”

“Helped,” he said. “I helped it, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, I guess, but how? How did you help it?”

He shook his head—right, left, back to dead center. He didn’t know how he’d helped it (how he’d cured it) and his placid face suggested that he didn’t give a rat’s ass—any more than I’d give a rat’s ass about the mechanics of running when I was leading in the last fifty yards of a Fourth of July Two-Miler. I thought about asking him how he’d known I was sick in the first place, except that would undoubtedly have gotten the same headshake. There’s a phrase I read somewhere and never forgot, something about “an enigma wrapped in a mystery.” That’s what John Coffey was, and I suppose the only reason he could sleep at night was because he didn’t care. Percy called him the ijit, which was cruel but not too far off the mark. Our big boy knew his name, and knew it wasn’t spelled like the drink, and that was just about all he cared to know.

As if to emphasize this for me, he shook his head in that deliberate way one more time, then lay down on his bunk with his hands clasped under his left cheek like a pillow and his face to the wall. His legs dangled off the end of the bunk from the shins on down, but that never seemed to bother him. The back of his shirt had pulled up, and I could see the scars that crisscrossed his skin.

I left the cell, turned the locks, then faced Delacroix, who was standing across the way with his hands wrapped around the bars of his cell, looking at me anxiously. Perhaps even fearfully. Mr. Jingles perched on his shoulder with his fine whiskers quivering like filaments. “What dat darkie-man do to you?” Delacroix asked. “Waddit gris-gris? He th’ow some gris-gris on you?” Spoken in that Cajun accent of his, gris-gris rhymed with pee-pee.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Del.”

“Devil you don’t! Lookit you! All change! Even walk different, boss!”

I probably was walking different, at that. There was a beautiful feeling of calm in my groin, a sense of peace so remarkable it was almost ecstasy—anyone who’s suffered bad pain and then recovered will know what I’m talking about.

“Everything’s all right, Del,” I insisted. “John Coffey had a nightmare, that’s all.”

“He a gris-gris man!” Delacroix said vehemently. There was a nestle of sweat-beads on his upper lip. He hadn’t seen much, just enough to scare him half to death. “He a hoodoo man!”

“What makes you say that?”

Delacroix reached up and took the mouse in one hand. He cupped it in his palm and lifted it to his face. From his pocket, Delacroix took out a pink fragment—one of those peppermint candies. He held it out, but at first the mouse ignored it, stretching out its neck toward the man instead, sniffing at his breath the way a person might sniff at a bouquet of flowers. Its little oildrop eyes slitted most of the way closed in an expression that looked like ecstasy. Delacroix kissed its nose, and the mouse allowed its nose to be kissed. Then it took the offered piece of candy and began to munch it. Delacroix looked at it a moment longer, then looked at me. All at once I got it.

“The mouse told you,” I said. “Am I right?”

“Oui.”

“Like he whispered his name to you.”

“Oui, in my ear he whisper it.”

“Lie down, Del,” I said. “Have you a little rest. All that whispering back and forth must wear you out.”

He said something else—accused me of not believing him, I suppose. His voice seemed to be coming from a long way off again. And when I went back up to the duty desk, I hardly seemed to be walking at all—it was more like I was floating, or maybe not even moving, the cells just rolling past me on either side, movie props on hidden wheels.

I started to sit like normal, but halfway into it my knees unlocked and I dropped onto the blue cushion Harry had brought from home the year before and plopped onto the seat of the chair. If the chair hadn’t been there, I reckon I would have plopped straight to the floor without passing Go or collecting two hundred dollars.

I sat there, feeling the nothing in my groin where a forest fire had been blazing not ten minutes before. I helped it, didn’t I? John Coffey had said, and that was true, as far as my body went. My peace of mind was a different story, though. That he hadn’t helped at all.

My eyes fell on the stack of forms under the tin ashtray we kept on the corner of the desk. BLOCK REPORT was printed at the top, and about halfway down was a blank space headed Report All Unusual Occurrences. I would use that space in tonight’s report, telling the story of William Wharton’s colorful and action-packed arrival. But suppose I also told what had happened to me in John Coffey’s cell? I saw myself picking up the pencil—the one whose tip Brutal was always licking—and writing a single word in big capital letters: MIRACLE.

That should have been funny, but instead of smiling, all at once I felt sure that I was going to cry. I put my hands to my face, palms against my mouth to stifle the sobs—I didn’t want to scare Del again just when he was starting to get settled down—but no sobs came. No tears, either. After a few moments I lowered my hands back to the desk and folded them. I didn’t know what I was feeling, and the only clear thought in my head was a wish that no one should come back onto the block until I was a little more in control of myself. I was afraid of what they might see in my face.

I drew a Block Report form toward me. I would wait until I had settled down a bit more to write about how my latest problem child had almost strangled Dean Stanton, but I could fill out the rest of the boilerplate foolishness in the meantime. I thought my handwriting might look funny—trembly—but it came out about the same as always.

About five minutes after I started, I put the pencil down and went into the W.C. adjacent to my office to take a leak. I didn’t need to go very bad, but I could manage enough to test what had happened to me, I thought. As I stood there, waiting for my water to flow, I became sure that it would hurt just the way it had that morning, as if I were passing tiny shards of broken glass; what he’d done to me would turn out to be only hypnosis, after all, and that might be a relief in spite of the pain.

Except there was no pain, and what went into the bowl was clear, with no sign of pus. I buttoned my fly, pulled the chain that flushed the commode, went back to the duty desk, and sat down again.

I knew what had happened; I suppose I knew even when I was trying to tell myself I’d been hypnotized. I’d experienced a healing, an authentic Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty. As a boy who’d grown up going to whatever Baptist or Pentecostal church my mother and her sisters happened to be in favor of during any given month, I had heard plenty of Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty miracle stories. I didn’t believe all of them, but there were plenty of people I did believe. One of these was a man named Roy Delfines, who lived with his family about two miles down the road from us when I was six or so. Delfines had chopped his son’s little finger off with a hatchet, an accident which had occurred when the boy unexpectedly moved his hand on a log he’d been holding on the backyard chopping block for his dad. Roy Delfines said he had practically worn out the carpet with his knees that fall and winter, and in the spring the boy’s finger had grown back. Even the nail had grown back. I believed Roy Delfines when he testified at Thursday-night rejoicing. There was a naked, uncomplicated honesty in what he said as he stood there talking with his hands jammed deep into the pockets of his biballs that was impossible not to believe. “It itch him some when thet finger started coming, kep him awake nights,” Roy Delfines said, “but he knowed it was the Lord’s itch and let it be.” Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty.

Roy Delfines’s story was only one of many; I grew up in a tradition of miracles and healings. I grew up believing in gris-gris, as well (only, up in the hills we said it to rhyme with kiss-kiss): stump-water for warts, moss under your pillow to ease the heartache of lost love, and, of course, what we used to call haints—but I did not believe John Coffey was a gris-gris man. I had looked into his eyes. More important, I had felt his touch. Being touched by him was like being touched by some strange and wonderful doctor.

I helped it, didn’t I?

That kept chiming in my head, like a snatch of song you can’t get rid of, or words you’d speak to set a spell.

I helped it, didn’t I?

Except he hadn’t. God had. John Coffey’s use of “I” could be chalked up to ignorance rather than pride, but I knew—believed, at least—what I had learned about healing in those churches of Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty, piney-woods amen corners much beloved by my twenty-two-year-old mother and my aunts: that healing is never about the healed or the healer, but about God’s will. For one to rejoice at the sick made well is normal, quite the expected thing, but the person healed has an obligation to then ask why—to meditate on God’s will, and the extraordinary lengths to which God has gone to realize His will.

What did God want of me, in this case? What did He want badly enough to put healing power in the hands of a child-murderer? To be on the block, instead of at home, sick as a dog, shivering in bed with the stink of sulfa running out of my pores? Perhaps; I was maybe supposed to be here instead of home in case Wild Bill Wharton decided to kick up more dickens, or to make sure Percy Wetmore didn’t get up to some foolish and potentially destructive piece of fuckery. All right, then. So be it. I would keep my eyes open… and my mouth shut, especially about miracle cures.

No one was apt to question my looking and sounding better; I’d been telling the world I was getting better, and until that very day I’d honestly believed it. I had even told Warden Moores that I was on the mend. Delacroix had seen something, but I thought he would keep his mouth shut, too (probably afraid John Coffey would throw a spell on him if he didn’t). As for Coffey himself, he’d probably already forgotten it. He was nothing but a conduit, after all, and there isn’t a culvert in the world that remembers the water that flowed through it once the rain has stopped. So I resolved to keep my mouth completely shut on the subject, with never an idea of how soon I’d be telling the story, or who I’d be telling it to.

But I was curious about my big boy, and there’s no sense not admitting it. After what had happened to me there in his cell, I was more curious than ever.