Coffey's Hands

4

BEFORE LEAVING that night, I arranged with Brutal to cover for me the next day, should I come in a little late, and when I got up the following morning, I set out for Tefton, down in Trapingus County.

“I’m not sure I like you worrying so much about this fellow Coffey,” my wife said, handing me the lunch she’d put up for me—Janice never believed in roadside hamburger stands; she used to say there was a bellyache waiting in every one. “It’s not like you, Paul.”

“I’m not worried about him,” I said. “I’m curious, that’s all.”

“In my experience, one leads to the other,” Janice said tartly, then gave me a good, hearty kiss on the mouth. “You look better, at least, I’ll say that. For awhile there, you had me nervous. Waterworks all cured up?”

“All cured up,” I said, and off I went, singing songs like “Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine” and “We’re in the Money” to keep myself company.

I went to the offices of the Tefton Intelligencer first, and they told me that Burt Hammersmith, the fellow I was looking for, was most likely over at the county courthouse. At the courthouse they told me that Hammersmith had been there but had left when a burst waterpipe had closed down the main proceedings, which happened to be a rape trial (in the pages of the Intelligencer the crime would be referred to as “assault on a woman,” which was how such things were done in the days before Ricki Lake and Carnie Wilson came on the scene). They guessed he’d probably gone on home. I got some directions out a dirt road so rutted and narrow I just about didn’t dare take my Ford up it, and there I found my man. Hammersmith had written most of the stories on the Coffey trial, and it was from him I found out most of the details about the brief manhunt that had netted Coffey in the first place. The details the Intelligencer considered too gruesome to print is what I mean, of course.

Mrs. Hammersmith was a young woman with a tired, pretty face and hands red from lye soap. She didn’t ask my business, just led me through a small house fragrant with the smell of baking and onto the back porch, where her husband sat with a bottle of pop in his hand and an unopened copy of Liberty magazine on his lap. There was a small, sloping backyard; at the foot of it, two little ones were squabbling and laughing over a swing. From the porch, it was impossible to tell their sexes, but I thought they were boy and girl. Maybe even twins, which cast an interesting sort of light on their father’s part, peripheral as it had been, in the Coffey trial. Nearer at hand, set like an island in the middle of a turd-studded patch of bare, beatup-looking ground, was a doghouse. No sign of Fido; it was another unseasonably hot day, and I guessed he was probably inside, snoozing.

“Burt, yew-all got you a cump’ny,” Mrs. Hammersmith said.

“All right,” he said. He glanced at me, glanced at his wife, then looked back at his kids, which was where his heart obviously lay. He was a thin man—almost painfully thin, as if he had just begun to recover from a serious illness—and his hair had started to recede. His wife touched his shoulder tentatively with one of her red, wash-swollen hands. He didn’t look at it or reach up to touch it, and after a moment she took it back. It occurred to me, fleetingly, that they looked more like brother and sister than husband and wife—he’d gotten the brains, she’d gotten the looks, but neither of them had escaped some underlying resemblance, a heredity that could never be escaped. Later, going home, I realized they didn’t look alike at all; what made them seem to was the aftermath of stress and the lingering of sorrow. It’s strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.

She said, “Yew-all want a cold drink, Mr.—?”

“It’s Edgecombe,” I said. “Paul Edgecombe. And thank you. A cold drink would be wonderful, ma’am.”

She went back inside. I held out my hand to Hammersmith, who gave it a brief shake. His grip was limp and cold. He never took his eyes off the kids down at the bottom of the yard.

“Mr. Hammersmith, I’m E Block superintendent at Cold Mountain State Penitentiary. That’s—”

“I know what it is,” he said, looking at me with a little more interest. “So—the bull-goose screw of the Green Mile is standing on my back porch, just as big as life. What brings you fifty miles to talk to the local rag’s only full-time reporter?”

“John Coffey,” I said.

I think I expected some sort of strong reaction (the kids who could have been twins working at the back of my mind… and perhaps the doghouse, too; the Dettericks had had a dog), but Hammersmith only raised his eyebrows and sipped at his drink. “Coffey’s your problem now, isn’t he?” Hammersmith asked.

“He’s not much of a problem,” I said. “He doesn’t like the dark, and he cries a lot of the time, but neither thing makes much of a problem in our line of work. We see worse.”

“Cries a lot, does he?” Hammersmith asked. “Well, he’s got a lot to cry about, I’d say. Considering what he did. What do you want to know?”

“Anything you can tell me. I’ve read your newspaper stories, so I guess what I want is anything that wasn’t in them.”

He gave me a sharp, dry look. “Like how the little girls looked? Like exactly what he did to them? That the kind of stuff you’re interested in, Mr. Edgecombe?”

“No,” I said, keeping my voice mild. “It’s not the Detterick girls I’m interested in, sir. Poor little mites are dead. But Coffey’s not—not yet—and I’m curious about him.”

“All right,” he said. “Pull up a chair and sit, Mr. Edgecombe. You’ll forgive me if I sounded a little sharp just now, but I get to see plenty of vultures in my line of work. Hell, I’ve been accused of being one of em often enough, myself. I just wanted to make sure of you.”

“And are you?”

“Sure enough, I guess,” he said, sounding almost indifferent. The story he told me is pretty much the one I set down earlier in this account—how Mrs. Detterick found the porch empty, with the screen door pulled off its upper hinge, the blankets cast into one corner, and blood on the steps; how her son and husband had taken after the girls’ abductor; how the posse had caught up to them first and to John Coffey not much later. How Coffey had been sitting on the riverbank and wailing, with the bodies curled in his massive arms like big dolls. The reporter, rack-thin in his open-collared white shirt and gray town pants, spoke in a low, unemotional voice… but his eyes never left his own two children as they squabbled and laughed and took turns with the swing down there in the shade at the foot of the slope. Sometime in the middle of the story, Mrs. Hammersmith came back with a bottle of homemade root beer, cold and strong and delicious. She stood listening for awhile, then interrupted long enough to call down to the kids and tell them to come up directly, she had cookies due out of the oven. “We will, Mamma!” called a little girl’s voice, and the woman went back inside again.

When Hammersmith had finished, he said: “So why do you want to know? I never had me a visit from a Big House screw before, it’s a first.”

“I told you—”

“Curiosity, yep. Folks get curious, I know it, I even thank God for it, I’d be out of a job and might actually have to go to work for a living without it. But fifty miles is a long way to come to satisfy simple curiosity, especially when the last twenty is over bad roads. So why don’t you tell me the truth, Edgecombe? I satisfied yours, so now you satisfy mine.”

Well, I could say, I had this urinary infection, and John Coffey put his hands on me and healed it. The man who raped and murdered those two little girls did that. So I wondered about him, of course—anyone would. I even wondered if maybe Homer Cribus and Deputy Rob McGee didn’t maybe collar the wrong man. In spite of all the evidence against him I wonder that. Because a man who has a power like that in his hands, you don’t usually think of him as the kind of man who rapes and murders children.

No, maybe that wouldn’t do.

“There are two things I’ve wondered about,” I said. “The first is if he ever did anything like that before.”

Hammersmith turned to me, his eyes suddenly sharp and bright with interest, and I saw he was a smart fellow. Maybe even a brilliant fellow, in a quiet way. “Why?” he asked. “What do you know, Edgecombe? What has he said?”

“Nothing. But a man who does this sort of thing once has usually done it before. They get a taste for it.”

“Yes,” he said. “They do. They certainly do.”

“And it occurred to me that it would be easy enough to follow his backtrail and find out. A man his size, and a Negro to boot, can’t be that hard to trace.”

“You’d think so, but you’d be wrong,” he said. “In Coffey’s case, anyhow. I know.”

“You tried?”

“I did, and came up all but empty. There were a couple of railroad fellows who thought they saw him in the Knoxville yards two days before the Detterick girls were killed. No surprise there; he was just across the river from the Great Southern tracks when they collared him, and that’s probably how he came down here from Tennessee. I got a letter from a man who said he’d hired a big bald black man to shift crates for him in the early spring of this year—this was in Kentucky. I sent him a picture of Coffey and he said that was the man. But other than that—” Hammersmith shrugged and shook his head.

“Doesn’t that strike you as a little odd?”

“Strikes me as a lot odd, Mr. Edgecombe. It’s like he dropped out of the sky. And he’s no help; he can’t remember last week once this week comes.”

“No, he can’t,” I said. “How do you explain it?”

“We’re in a Depression,” he said, “that’s how I explain it. People all over the roads. The Okies want to pick peaches in California, the poor whites from up in the brakes want to build cars in Detroit, the black folks from Mississippi want to go up to New England and work in the shoe factories or the textile mills. Everyone—black as well as white—thinks it’s going to be better over the next jump of land. It’s the American damn way. Even a giant like Coffey doesn’t get noticed everywhere he goes… until, that is, he decides to kill a couple of little girls. Little white girls.”

“Do you believe that?” I asked.

He gave me a bland look from his too-thin face. “Sometimes I do,” he said.

His wife leaned out of the kitchen window like an engineer from the cab of a locomotive and called, “Kids! Cookies are ready!” She turned to me. “Would you like an oatmeal-raisin cookie, Mr. Edgecombe?”

“I’m sure they’re delicious, ma’am, but I’ll take a pass this time.”

“All right,” she said, and drew her head back inside.

“Have you seen the scars on him?” Hammersmith asked abruptly. He was still watching his kids, who couldn’t quite bring themselves to abandon the pleasures of the swing—not even for oatmeal-raisin cookies.

“Yes.” But I was surprised he had.

He saw my reaction and laughed. “The defense attorney’s one big victory was getting Coffey to take off his shirt and show those scars to the jury. The prosecutor, George Peterson, objected like hell, but the judge allowed it. Old George could have saved his breath—juries around these parts don’t buy all that psychology crap about how people who’ve been mistreated just can’t help themselves. They believe people can help themselves. It’s a point of view I have a lot of sympathy for… but those scars were pretty ghastly, just the same. Notice anything about them, Edgecombe?”

I had seen the man naked in the shower, and I’d noticed, all right; I knew just what he was talking about. “They’re all broken up. Latticed, almost.”

“You know what that means?”

“Somebody whopped the living hell out of him when he was a kid,” I said. “Before he grew.”

“But they didn’t manage to whop the devil out of him, did they, Edgecombe? Should have spared the rod and just drowned him in the river like a stray kitten, don’t you think?”

I suppose it would have been politic to simply agree and get out of there, but I couldn’t. I’d seen him. And I’d felt him, as well. Felt the touch of his hands.

“He’s… strange,” I said. “But there doesn’t seem to be any real violence in him. I know how he was found, and it’s hard to jibe that with what I see, day in and day out, on the block. I know violent men, Mr. Hammersmith.” It was Wharton I was thinking about, of course, Wharton strangling Dean Stanton with his wrist-chain and bellowing Whoooee, boys! Ain’t this a party, now?

He was looking at me closely now, and smiling a little, incredulous smile that I didn’t care for very much. “You didn’t come up here to get an idea about whether or not he might have killed some other little girls somewhere else,” he said. “You came up here to see if I think he did it at all. That’s it, isn’t it? ’Fess up, Edgecombe.”

I swallowed the last of my cold drink, put the bottle down on the little table, and said: “Well? Do you?”

“Kids!” he called down the hill, leaning forward a little in his chair to do it. “Y’all come on up here now n get your cookies!” Then he leaned back in his chair again and looked at me. That little smile—the one I didn’t much care for—had reappeared.

“Tell you something,” he said. “You want to listen close, too, because this might just be something you need to know.”

“I’m listening.”

“We had us a dog named Sir Galahad,” he said, and cocked a thumb at the doghouse. “A good dog. No particular breed, but gentle. Calm. Ready to lick your hand or fetch a stick. There are plenty of mongrel dogs like him, wouldn’t you say?”

I shrugged, nodded.

“In many ways, a good mongrel dog is like your negro,” he said. “You get to know it, and often you grow to love it. It is of no particular use, but you keep it around because you think it loves you. If you’re lucky, Mr. Edgecombe, you never have to find out any different. Cynthia and I, we were not lucky.” He sighed—a long and somehow skeletal sound, like the wind rummaging through fallen leaves. He pointed toward the doghouse again, and I wondered how I had missed its general air of abandonment earlier, or the fact that many of the turds had grown whitish and powdery at their tops.

“I used to clean up after him,” Hammersmith said, “and keep the roof of his house repaired against the rain. In that way also Sir Galahad was like your Southern negro, who will not do those things for himself. Now I don’t touch it, I haven’t been near it since the accident… if you can call it an accident. I went over there with my rifle and shot him, but I haven’t been over there since. I can’t bring myself to. I suppose I will, in time. I’ll clean up his messes and tear down his house.”

Here came the kids, and all at once I didn’t want them to come; all at once that was the last thing on earth I wanted. The little girl was all right, but the boy—

They pounded up the steps, looked at me, giggled, then went on toward the kitchen door.

“Caleb,” Hammersmith said. “Come here. Just for a second.”

The little girl—surely his twin, they had to be of an age—went on into the kitchen. The little boy came to his father, looking down at his feet. He knew he was ugly. He was only four, I guess, but four is old enough to know that you’re ugly. His father put two fingers under the boy’s chin and tried to raise his face. At first the boy resisted, but when his father said “Please, son,” in tones of sweetness and calmness and love, he did as he was asked.

A huge, circular scar ran out of his hair, down his forehead, through one dead and indifferently cocked eye, and to the corner of his mouth, which had been disfigured into the knowing leer of a gambler or perhaps a whoremaster. One cheek was smooth and pretty; the other was bunched up like the stump of a tree. I guessed there had been a hole in it, but that, at least, had healed.

“He has the one eye,” Hammersmith said, caressing the boy’s bunched cheek with a lover’s kind fingers. “I suppose he’s lucky not to be blind. We get down on our knees and thank God for that much, at least. Eh, Caleb?”

“Yes, sir,” the boy said shyly—the boy who would be beaten mercilessly on the play-yard by laughing, jeering bullies for all his miserable years of education, the boy who would never be asked to play Spin the Bottle or Post Office and would probably never sleep with a woman not bought and paid for once he was grown to manhood’s times and needs, the boy who would always stand outside the warm and lighted circle of his peers, the boy who would look at himself in his mirror for the next fifty or sixty or seventy years of his life and think ugly, ugly, ugly.

“Go on in and get your cookies,” his father said, and kissed his son’s sneering mouth.

“Yes, sir,” Caleb said, and dashed inside.

Hammersmith took a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped at his eyes with it—they were dry, but I suppose he’d gotten used to them being wet.

“The dog was here when they were born,” he said. “I brought him in the house to smell them when Cynthia brought them home from the hospital, and Sir Galahad licked their hands. Their little hands.” He nodded, as if confirming this to himself. “He played with them; used to lick Arden’s face until she giggled. Caleb used to pull his ears, and when he was first learning to walk, he’d sometimes go around the yard, holding to Galahad’s tail. The dog never so much as growled at him. Either of them.”

Now the tears were coming; he wiped at them automatically, as a man does when he’s had lots of practice.

“There was no reason,” he said. “Caleb didn’t hurt him, yell at him, anything. I know. I was there. If I hadn’t have been, the boy would almost certainly have been killed. What happened, Mr. Edgecombe, was nothing. The boy just got his face set the right way in front of the dog’s face, and it came into Sir Galahad’s mind—whatever serves a dog for a mind—to lunge and bite. To kill, if he could. The boy was there in front of him and the dog bit. And that’s what happened with Coffey. He was there, he saw them on the porch, he took them, he raped them, he killed them. You say there should be some hint that he did something like it before, and I know what you mean, but maybe he didn’t do it before. My dog never bit before; just that once. Maybe, if Coffey was let go, he’d never do it again. Maybe my dog never would have bit again. But I didn’t concern myself with that, you know. I went out with my rifle and grabbed his collar and blew his head off.”

He was breathing hard.

“I’m as enlightened as the next man, Mr. Edgecombe, went to college in Bowling Green, took history as well as journalism, some philosophy, too. I like to think of myself as enlightened. I don’t suppose folks up North would, but I like to think of myself as enlightened. I’d not bring slavery back for all the tea in China. I think we have to be humane and generous in our efforts to solve the race problem. But we have to remember that your negro will bite if he gets the chance, just like a mongrel dog will bite if he gets the chance and it crosses his mind to do so. You want to know if he did it, your weepy Mr. Coffey with the scars all over him?”

I nodded.

“Oh, yes,” Hammersmith said. “He did it. Don’t you doubt it, and don’t you turn your back on him. You might get away with it once or a hundred times… even a thousand… but in the end—” He raised a hand before my eyes and snapped the fingers together rapidly against the thumb, turning the hand into a biting mouth. “You understand?”

I nodded again.

“He raped them, he killed them, and afterward he was sorry… but those little girls stayed raped, those little girls stayed dead. But you’ll fix him, won’t you, Edgecombe? In a few weeks you’ll fix him so he never does anything like that again.” He got up, went to the porch rail, and looked vaguely at the doghouse, standing at the center of its beaten patch, in the middle of those aging turds. “Perhaps you’ll excuse me,” he said. “Since I don’t have to spend the afternoon in court, I thought I might visit with my family for a little bit. A man’s children are only young once.”

“You go ahead,” I said. My lips felt numb and distant. “And thank you for your time.”

“Don’t mention it,” he said.

I drove directly from Hammersmith’s house to the prison. It was a long drive, and this time I wasn’t able to shorten it by singing songs. It felt like all the songs had gone out of me, at least for awhile. I kept seeing that poor little boy’s disfigured face. And Hammersmith’s hand, the fingers going up and down against the thumb in a biting motion.