by Stephen King
'What happened here, John Coffey?' McGee asked in his low, earnest voice. 'You want to tell me that?'
And Coffey said to McGee and the others almost exactly the same thing he said to me; they were also the last words the prosecutor said to the jury at Coffey's trial. 'I couldn't help it,' John Coffey said, holding the murdered, violated girls naked in his arms. The tears began to pour down his cheeks again. 'I tried to take it back, but it was too late!'
'Boy, you are under arrest for murder,' McGee said, and then he spit in John Coffey's face.
The jury was out forty-five minutes. Just about time enough to eat a little lunch of their own. I wonder they had any stomach for it.
5
I think you know I didn't find all that out during one hot October afternoon in the soon-to-be-defunct prison library, from one set of old newspapers stacked in a pair of Pomona orange crates, but I learned enough to make it hard for me to sleep that night. When my wife got up at two in the morning and found me sitting in the kitchen, drinking buttermilk and smoking home-rolled Bugler, she asked me what was wrong and I lied to her for one of the few times in the long course of our marriage. I said I'd had another run-in with Percy Wetmore. I had, of course, but that wasn't the reason she'd found me sitting up late. I was usually able to leave Percy at the office.
'Well, forget that rotten apple and come on back to bed,' she said. 'I've got something that'll help you sleep, and you can have all you want.'
'That sounds good, but I think we'd better not,' I said. 'I've got a little something wrong with my waterworks, and wouldn't want to pass it on to you.'
She raised an eyebrow. 'Waterworks, huh,' she said. 'I guess you must have taken up with the wrong streetcorner girl the last time you were in Baton Rouge.' I've never been in Baton Rouge and never so much as touched a streetcorner girl, and we both knew it.
'It's just a plain old urinary infection,' I said. 'My mother used to say boys got them from taking a leak when the north wind was blowing.'
'Your mother also used to stay in all day if she spilled the salt,' my wife said. 'Dr Sadler — '
'No, sir,' I said, raising my hand. 'He'll want me to take sulfa, and I'll be throwing up in every comer of my office by the end of the week. It'll run its course, but in the meantime, I guess we best stay out of the playground.'
She kissed my forehead right over my left eyebrow, which always gives me the prickles . . . as Janice well knew. 'Poor baby. As if that awful Percy Wetmore wasn't enough. Come to bed soon.'
I did, but before I did, I stepped out onto the back porch to empty out (and checked the wind direction with a wet thumb before I did — what our parents tell us when we are small seldom goes ignored, no matter how foolish it may be). Peeing outdoors is one joy of country living the poets never quite got around to, but it was no joy that night; the water coming out of me burned like a line of lit coal-oil. Yet I thought it had been a little worse that afternoon, and knew it had been worse the two or three days before. I had hopes that maybe I had started to mend. Never was a hope more ill-founded. No one had told me that sometimes a bug that gets up inside there, where it's warm and wet, can take a day or two off to rest before coming on strong again. I would have been surprised to know it. I would have been even more surprised to know that, in another fifteen or twenty years, there would be pills you could take that would smack that sort of infection out of your system in record time . . . and while those pills might make you feel a little sick at your stomach or loose in your bowels, they almost never made you vomit the way Dr. Sadler's sulfa pills did. Back in '32, there wasn't much you could do but wait, and try to ignore that feeling that someone had spilled coal-oil inside your works and then touched a match to it.
I finished my butt, went into the bedroom, and finally got to sleep. I dreamed of girls with shy smiles and blood in their hair.
6
The next morning there was a pink memo slip on my desk, asking me to stop by the warden's office as soon as I could. I knew what that was about — there were unwritten but very important rules to the game, and I had stopped playing by them for awhile yesterday — and so I put it off as long as possible. Like going to the doctor about my waterworks problem, I suppose. I've always thought this "get-it-over-with" business was overrated.
Anyway, I didn't hurry to Warden Moores's office. I stripped off my wool uniform coat instead, hung it over the back of my chair, and turned on the fan in the corner — it was another hot one. Then I sat down and went over Brutus Howell's night-sheet. There was nothing there to get alarmed about. Delacroix had wept briefly after turning in — he did most nights, and more for himself than for the folks he had roasted alive, I am quite sure — and then had take Mr. Jingles, the mouse, out of the cigar box he slept in. That had calmed Del, and he had slept like a baby the rest of the night. Mr. Jingles had most likely spent it on Delacroix's stomach, with his tail curled over his paws, eyes unblinking. It was as if God had decided Delacroix needed a guardian angel, but had decreed in His wisdom that only a mouse would do for a rat like our homicidal friend from Louisiana. Not all that was in Brutal's report, of course, but I had done enough night watches myself to fill in the stuff between the lines. There was a brief note about Coffey: "Laid awake, mostly quiet, may have cried some. I tried to get some talk started, but after a few grunted replies from Coffey, gave up. Paul or Harry may have better luck."
"Getting the talk started" was at the center of our job, really. I didn't know it then, but looking back from the vantage point of this strange old age (I think all old ages seem strange to the folk who must endure them), I understand that it was, and why I didn't see it then — it was too big, as central to our work as our respiration was to our lives. It wasn't important that the floaters be good at "getting the talk started," but it was vital for me and Harry and Brutal and Dean . . . and it was one reason why Percy Wetmore was such a disaster. The inmates hated him, the guards hated him . . . everyone hated him, presumably, except for his political connections, Percy himself, and maybe (but only maybe) his mother. He was like a dose of white arsenic sprinkled into a wedding cake, and I think I knew he spelled disaster the start. He was an accident waiting to happen. As for the rest of us, we would have scoffed at the idea that we functioned most usefully not as the guards of the condemned but as their psychiatrists part of me still wants to scoff at that idea today — but we knew about getting the talk started . . . and without the talk, men facing Old Sparky had a nasty habit of going insane.
I made a note at the bottom of Brutal's report to talk to John Coffey — to try, at least — and then passed on to a note from Curtis Anderson, the warden's chief assistant. It said that he, Anderson, expected a DOE order for Edward Delacrois (Anderson's misspelling; the man's name was actually Eduard Delacroix) very soon. DOE stood for date of execution, and according to the note, Curtis had been told on good authority that the little Frenchman would take the walk shortly before Halloween — October 27th was his best guess, and Curtis Anderson's guesses were very informed. But before then we could expect a new resident, name of William Wharton. "He's what you like to call "a problem child," " Curtis had written in his backslanting and somehow prissy script. "Crazy-wild and proud of it. Has rambled all over the state for the last year or so, and has hit the big time at last. Killed three people in a holdup, one a pregnant woman, killed a fourth in the getaway. State Patrolman. All he missed was a nun and a blind man." I smiled a little at that. "Wharton is 19 years old, has Billy the Kid tattooed on upper l. forearm. You will have to slap his nose a time or two, I guarantee you that, but be careful when you do it. This man just doesn't care." He had underlined this last sentiment twice, then finished: "Also, he may be a hang-arounder. He's working appeals, and there's the fact that he is a minor."
A crazy kid, working appeals, apt to be around for awhile. Oh, that all sounded just fine. Suddenly the day seemed hotter than ever, and I could no longer put off seeing Warden Moores.
I worked for three wardens during my
years as a Cold Mountain guard; Hal Moores was the last and best of them. In a walk. Honest, straightforward, lacking even Curtis Anderson's rudimentary wit, but equipped with just enough political savvy to keep his job during those grim years . . . and enough integrity to keep from getting seduced by the game. He would not rise any higher, but that seemed all right with him. He was fifty-eight or -nine back then, with a deeply lined bloodhound face that Bobo Marchant probably would have felt right at home with. He had white hair and his hands shook with some sort of palsy, but he was strong. The year before, when a prisoner had rushed him in the exercise yard with a shank whittled out of a crate-slat, Moores had stood his ground, grabbed the skatehound's wrist, and had twisted it so hard that the snapping bones had sounded like dry twigs burning in a hot fire. The skatehound, all his grievances forgotten, had gone down on his knees in the dirt and begun screaming for his mother. 'I'm not her,' Moores said in his cultured Southern voice, 'But if I was, I'd raise up my skirts and piss on you from the loins that gave you birth.'
When I came into his office, he started to get up and I waved him back down. I took the seat across the desk from him, and began by asking about his wife . . . except in our part of the world, that's not how you do it. 'How's that pretty gal of yours' is what I asked, as if Melinda had seen only seventeen summers instead of sixty-two or -three. My concern was genuine he was a woman I could have loved and married myself, if the lines of our lives had coincided — but I didn't mind diverting him a little from his main business, either.
He sighed deeply. 'Not so well, Paul. Not so well at all.'
'More headaches?'
'Only one this week, but it was the worst yet — put her flat on her back for most of the day before yesterday. And now she's developed this weakness in her right hand — ' He raised his own liverspotted right hand. We both watched it tremble above his blotter for a moment or two, and then he lowered it again. I could tell he would have given just about anything not to be telling me what he was telling me, and I would have given just about anything not to be hearing it. Melinda's headaches had started in the spring, and all that summer her doctor had been saying they were 'nervous-tension migraines,' perhaps caused by the stress of Hal's coming retirement. Except that neither of them could wait for his retirement, and my own wife had told me that migraine is not a disease of the old but the young; by the time its sufferers reached Melinda Moores's age, they were usually getting better, not worse. And now this weakness of the hand. It didn't sound like nervous tension to me; it sounded like a damned stroke.
'Dr. Haverstrom wants her to go in hospital up to Indianola,' Moores said. 'Have some tests. Head X-rays, he means. Who knows what else. She is scared to death.' He paused, then added, 'Truth to tell, so am I.'
'Yeah, but you see she does it,' I said. 'Don't wait. If it turns out to be something they can see with an X-ray, it may turn out to be something they can fix.'
'Yes,' he agreed, and then, for just a moment — the only one during that part of our interview, as I recall — our eyes met and locked. There was the sort of nakedly perfect understanding between us that needs no words. It could be a stroke, yes. It could also be a cancer growing in her brain, and if it was that, the chances that the doctors at Indianola could do anything about it were slim going on none. This was '32, remember, when even something as relatively simple as a urinary infection was either sulfa and stink or suffer and wait.
'I thank you for your concern, Paul. Now let's talk about Percy Wetmore.'
I groaned and covered my eyes.
'I had a call from the state capital this morning,' the warden said evenly. 'It was quite an angry call, as I'm sure you can imagine. Paul, the governor is so married he's almost not there, if you take my meaning. And his wife has a brother who has one child. That child is Percy Wetmore. Percy called his dad last night, and Percy's dad called Percy's aunt. Do I have to trace the rest of this out for you?'
'No,' I said. 'Percy squealed. Just like the schoolroom sissy telling teacher he saw Jack and Jill smooching in the cloakroom.'
'Yep,' Moores agreed, 'that's about the size of it.'
'You know what happened between Percy and Delacroix when Delacroix came in?' I asked. 'Percy and his damned hickory billy-club?'
'Yes, but — '
'And you know how he runs it along the bars sometimes, just for the pure hell of it. He's mean, and he's stupid, and I don't know how much longer I can take him. That's the truth.'
We'd known each other five years. That can be a long time for men who get on well, especially when part of the job is trading life for death. What I'm saying is that he understood what I meant. Not that I would quit; not with the Depression walking around outside the prison walls like a dangerous criminal, one that couldn't be caged as our charges were. Better men than me were out on the roads or riding the rods. I was lucky and knew it — children grown and the mortgage, that two-hundred-pound block of marble, had been off my chest for the last two years. But a man's got to eat, and his wife has to eat, too. Also, we were used to sending our daughter and son-in-law twenty bucks whenever we could afford it (and sometimes when we couldn't, if Jane's letters sounded particularly desperate). He was an out-of-work high-school teacher, and if that didn't qualify for desperate back in those days, then the word had no meaning. So no, you didn't walk off a steady paycheck job like mine . . . not in cold blood, that was. But my blood wasn't cold that fall. The temperatures outside were unseasonable, and the infection crawling around inside me had turned the thermostat up even more. And when a man's in that kind of situation, why, sometimes his fist flies out pretty much of its own accord. And if you slug a connected man like Percy Wetmore once, you might as well just go right on slugging, because there's no going back.
'Stick with it,' Moores said quietly. 'That's what I called you in here to say. I have it on good authority — the person who called me this morning, in fact — that Percy has an application in at Briar, and that his application will be accepted.'
'Briar,' I said. That was Briar Ridge, one of two state-run hospitals. 'What's this kid doing? Touring state facilities?'
'It's an administration job. Better pay, and papers to push instead of hospital beds in the heat of the day.' He gave me a slanted grin. 'You know, Paul, you might be shed of him already if you hadn't put him in the switch-room with Van Hay when The Chief walked.'
For a moment what he said seemed so peculiar I didn't have a clue what he was getting at. Maybe I didn't want to have a clue.
'Where else would I put him?' I asked. 'Christ, he hardly knows what he's doing on the block! To make him part of the active execution team — ' I didn't finish. Couldn't finish. The potential for screw-ups seemed endless.
'Nevertheless, you'd do well to put him out for Delacroix. If you want to get rid of him, that is.'
I looked at him with my jaw hung. At last I was able to get it up where it belonged so I could talk. 'What are you saying? That he wants to experience one right up close where he can smell the guy's nuts cooking?'
Moores shrugged. His eyes, so soft when he had been speaking about his wife, now looked flinty. 'Delacroix's nuts are going to cook whether Wetmore's on the team or not,' he said. 'Correct?'
'Yes, but he could screw up. In fact, Hal, he's almost bound to screw up. And in front of thirty or so witnesses . . . reporters all the way up from Louisiana . . . '
'You and Brutus Howell will make sure he doesn't,' Moores said. 'And if he does anyway, it goes on his record, and it'll still be there long after his statehouse connections are gone. You understand?'
I did. It made me feel sick and scared, but I did.
'He may want to stay for Coffey, but if we're lucky, he'll get all he needs from Delacroix. You just make sure you put him out for that one.'
I had planned to stick Percy in the switch-room again, then down in the tunnel, riding shotgun on the gurney that would take Delacroix to the meatwagon parked across the road from the prison, but I tossed all those plans back over my
shoulder without so much as a second look. I nodded. I had the sense to know it was a gamble I was taking, but I didn't care. If it would get rid of Percy Wetmore, I'd tweak the devil's nose. He could take part in his execution, clamp on the cap, and then look through the grille and tell Van Hay to roll on two; he could watch the little Frenchman ride the lightning that he, Percy Wetmore, had let out of the bottle. Let him have his nasty little thrill, if that's what state-sanctioned murder was to him. Let him go on to Briar Ridge, where he would have his own office and a fan to cool it. And if his uncle by marriage was voted out of office in the next election and he had to find out what work was like in the tough old sunbaked world where not all the bad guys were locked behind bars and sometimes you got your own head whipped, so much the better.
'All right,' I said, standing up. 'I'll put him out front for Delacroix. And in the meantime, I'll keep the peace.'
'Good,' he said, and stood up himself. 'By the way, how's that problem of yours?' He pointed delicately in the direction of my groin.
'Seems a little better.'
'Well, that's fine.' He saw me to the door. 'What about Coffey, by the way? Is he going to be a problem?'
'I don't think so,' I said. 'So far he's been as quiet as a dead rooster. He's strange — strange eyes — but quiet. We'll keep tabs on him, though. Don't worry about that.'
'You know what he did, of course.'
'Sure.'
He was seeing me through to the outer office by then, where old Miss Hannah sat bashing away at her Underwood as she had ever since the last ice age had ended, it seemed. I was happy to go. All in all, I felt as if I'd gotten off easy. And it was nice to know there was a chance of surviving Percy, after all.
