The Green Mile

7

It was twenty-five miles to Hal Moores’s house on Chimney Ridge, and in Harry Terwilliger’s slow and rattly farm truck, the trip took over an hour. It was an eerie ride, and although it seems to me now that every moment of it is still etched in my memory – every turn, every bump, every dip, the scary times (two of them) when trucks passed us going the other way – I don’t think I could come even close to describing how I felt, sitting back there with John Coffey, both of us bundled up like Indians in the old blankets Harry had been thoughtful enough to bring along.

It was, most of all, a sense of lostness – the deep and terrible ache a child feels when he realizes he has gone wrong somewhere, all the landmarks are strange, and he no longer knows how to find his way home. I was out in the night with a prisoner – not just any prisoner, but one who had been tried and convicted for the murder of two little girls, and sentenced to die for the crime. My belief that he was innocent wouldn’t matter if we were caught; we would go to jail ourselves, and probably Dean Stanton would, too. I had thrown over a life of work and belief because of one bad execution and because I believed the overgrown lummox sitting beside me might be able to cure a woman’s inoperable brain tumor. Yet watching John watch the stars, I realized with dismay that I no longer did believe that, if I ever really had; my urinary infection seemed faraway and unimportant now, as such harsh and painful things always do once they are past (if a woman could really remember how bad it hurt to have her first baby, my mother once said, she’d never have a second). As for Mr Jingles, wasn’t it possible, even likely, that we had been wrong about how badly Percy had hurt him? Or that John – who really did have some kind of hypnotic power, there was no doubt of that much, at least – had somehow fooled us into thinking we’d seen something we hadn’t seen at all? Then there was the matter of Hal Moores. On the day I’d surprised him in his office, I’d encountered a palsied, weepy old man. But I didn’t think that was the truest side of the warden. I thought the real Warden Moores was the man who’d once broken the wrist of a skatehound who tried to stab him; the man who had pointed out to me with cynical accuracy that Delacroix’s nuts were going to cook no matter who was out front on the execution team. Did I think that Hal Moores would stand meekly aside and let us bring a convicted child-murderer into his house to lay hands on his wife?

My doubt grew like a sickness as we rode along. I simply did not understand why I had done the things I had, or why I’d persuaded the others to go along with me on this crazy night journey, and I did not believe we had a chance of getting away with it – not a hound’s chance of heaven, as the oldtimers used to say. Yet I made no effort to cry it off, either, which I might have been able to do; things wouldn’t pass irrevocably out of our hands until we showed up at Moores’s house. Something – I think it might have been no more than the waves of exhilaration coming off the giant sitting next to me – kept me from hammering on top of the cab and yelling at Harry to turn around and go back to the prison while there was still time.

Such was my frame of mind as we passed off the highway and onto County 5, and from County 5 onto Chimney Ridge Road. Some fifteen minutes after that, I saw the shape of a roof blotting out the stars and knew we had arrived.

Harry shifted down from second to low (I think he only made it all the way into top gear once during the whole trip). The engine lugged, sending a shudder through the whole truck, as if it, too, dreaded what now lay directly ahead of us.

Harry swung into Moores’s gravelled driveway and parked the grumbling truck behind the warden’s sensible black Buick. Ahead and slightly to our right was a neat-as-a-pin house in the style which I believe is called Cape Cod. That sort of house should have looked out of place in our ridge country, perhaps, but it didn’t. The moon had come up, its grin a little fatter this morning, and by its light I could see that the yard, always so beautifully kept, now looked uncared for. It was just leaves, mostly, that hadn’t been raked away. Under normal circumstances that would have been Melly’s job, but Melly hadn’t been up to any leaf-raking this fall, and she would never see the leaves fall again. That was the truth of the matter, and I had been mad to think this vacant-eyed idiot could change it.

Maybe it still wasn’t too late to save ourselves, though. I made as if to get up, the blanket I’d been wearing slipping off my shoulders. I would lean over, tap on the driver’s-side window, tell Harry to get the hell out before –

John Coffey grabbed my forearm in one of his hamhock fists, pulling me back down as effortlessly as I might have done to a toddler. ‘Look, boss,’ he said, pointing. ‘Someone’s up.’

I followed the direction of his finger and felt a sinking – not just of the belly, but of the heart. There was a spark of light in one of the back windows. The room where Melinda now spent her days and nights, most likely; she would be no more capable of using the stairs than she would of going out to rake the leaves which had fallen during the recent storm.

They’d heard the truck, of course – Harry Terwilliger’s goddam Farmall, its engine bellowing and farting down the length of an exhaust pipe unencumbered by anything so frivolous as a muffler. Hell, the Mooreses probably weren’t sleeping that well these nights, anyway.

A light closer to the front of the house went on (the kitchen), then the living-room overhead, then the one in the front hall, then the one over the stoop. I watched these forward-marching lights the way a man standing against a cement wall and smoking his last cigarette might watch the lockstep approach of the firing squad. Yet I did not entirely acknowledge to myself even then that it was too late until the uneven chop of the Farmall’s engine faded into silence, and the doors creaked, and the gravel crunched as Harry and Brutal got out.

John was up, pulling me with him. In the dim light, his face looked lively and eager. Why not? I remember thinking. Why shouldn’t he look eager? He’s a fool.

Brutal and Harry were standing shoulder to shoulder at the foot of the truck, like kids in a thunderstorm, and I saw that both of them looked as scared, confused, and uneasy as I felt. That made me feel even worse.

John got down. For him it was more of a step than a jump. I followed, stiff-legged and miserable. I would have sprawled on the cold gravel if he hadn’t caught me by the arm.

‘This is a mistake,’ Brutal said in a hissy little voice. His eyes were very wide and very frightened. ‘Christ Almighty, Paul, what were we thinking?’

‘Too late now,’ I said. I pushed one of Coffey’s hips, and he went obediently enough to stand beside Harry. Then I grabbed Brutal’s elbow like this was a date we were on and got the two of us walking toward the stoop where that light was now burning. ‘Let me do the talking. Understand?’

‘Yeah,’ Brutal said. ‘Right now that’s just about the only thing I do understand.’

I looked back over my shoulder. ‘Harry, stay by the truck with him until I call for you. I don’t want Moores to see him until I’m ready.’ Except I was never going to be ready. I knew that now.

Brutal and I had just reached the foot of the steps when the front door was hauled open hard enough to flap the brass knocker against its plate. There stood Hal Moores in blue pajama pants and a strap-style tee-shirt, his iron-gray hair standing up in tufts and twists. He was a man who had made a thousand enemies over the course of his career, and he knew it. Clasped in his right hand, the abnormally long barrel not quite pointing at the floor, was the pistol which had always been mounted over the mantel. It was the sort of gun known as a Ned Buntline Special, it had been his grandfather’s, and right then (I saw this with a further sinking in my gut) it was fully cocked.

‘Who the hell goes there at two-thirty in the goddam morning?’ he asked. I heard no fear at all in his voice. And – for the time being, at least – his shakes had stopped. The hand holding the gun was as steady as a stone. ‘Answer me, or –’ The barrel of the gun began to rise.

‘Stop it, Warden!’ Brutal raised his hands, palms out, toward the man with the gun. I have never heard his voice sound the way it did then; it was as if the shakes turned out of Moores’s hands had somehow found their way into Brutus Howell’s throat. ‘It’s us! It’s Paul and me and ... it’s us!’

He took the first step up, so that the light over the stoop could fall fully on his face. I joined him. Hal Moores looked back and forth between us, his angry determination giving way to bewilderment. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘Not only is it the shank of the morning, you boys have the duty. I know you do, I’ve got the roster pinned up in my workshop. So what in the name of ... oh, Jesus. It’s not a lockdown, is it? Or a riot?’ He looked between us, and his gaze sharpened. ‘Who else is down by that truck?’

Let me do the talking. So I had instructed Brutal, but now the time to talk was here and I couldn’t even open my mouth. On my way into work that afternoon I had carefully planned out what I was going to say when we got here, and had thought that it didn’t sound too crazy. Not normal – nothing about it was normal – but maybe close enough to normal to get us through the door and give us a chance. Give John a chance. But now all my carefully rehearsed words were lost in a roaring confusion. Thoughts and images – Del burning, the mouse dying, Toot jerking in Old Sparky’s lap and screaming that he was a done tom turkey – whirled inside my head like sand caught in a dust-devil. I believe there is good in the world, all of it flowing in one way or another from a loving God. But I believe there’s another force as well, one every bit as real as the God I have prayed to my whole life, and that it works, consciously to bring all our decent impulses to ruin. Not Satan, I don’t mean Satan (although I believe he is real, too), but a kind of demon of discord, a prankish and stupid thing that laughs with glee when an old man sets himself on fire trying to light his pipe or when a much-loved baby puts its first Christmas toy in its mouth and chokes to death on it. I’ve had a lot of years to think on this, all the way from Cold Mountain to Georgia Pines, and I believe that force was actively at work among us on that morning, swirling everywhere like a fog, trying to keep John Coffey away from Melinda Moores.

‘Warden ... Hal ... I ...’ Nothing I tried made any sense.

He raised the pistol again, pointing it between Brutal and me, not listening. His bloodshot eyes had gotten very wide. And here came Harry Terwilliger, being more or less pulled along by our big boy, who was wearing his wide and daffily charming smile.

‘Coffey,’ Moores breathed. ‘John Coffey.’ He pulled in breath and yelled in a voice that was reedy but strong: ‘Halt! Halt right there, or I shoot!’

From somewhere behind him, a weak and wavery female voice called: ‘Hal? What are you doing out there? Who are you talking to, you fucking cocksucker?’

He turned in that direction for just a moment, his face confused and despairing. Just a moment, as I say, but it should have been long enough for me to snatch the long-barrelled gun out of his hand. Except I couldn’t lift my own hands. They might have had weights tied to them. My head seemed full of static, like a radio trying to broadcast during an electrical storm. The only emotions I remember feeling were fright and a kind of dull embarrassment for Hal.

Harry and John Coffey reached the foot of the steps. Moores turned away from the sound of his wife’s voice and raised the gun again. He said later that yes, he fully intended to shoot Coffey; he suspected we were all prisoners, and that the brains behind whatever was happening were back by the truck, lurking in the shadows. He didn’t understand why we should have been brought to his house, but revenge seemed the most likely possibility.

Before he could shoot, Harry Terwilliger stepped up ahead of Coffey and then moved in front of him, shielding most of his body. Coffey didn’t make him do it; Harry did it on his own.

‘No, Warden Moores!’ he said. ‘It’s all right! No one’s armed, no one’s going to get hurt, we’re here to help!’

‘Help?’ Moores’s tangled, tufted eyebrows drew together. His eyes blazed. I couldn’t take my eyes off the cocked hammer of the Buntline. ‘Help what? Help who?’

As if in answer, the old woman’s voice rose again, querulous and certain and utterly lost: ‘Come in here and poke my mudhole, you son of a bitch! Bring your asshole friends, too! Let them all have a turn!’

I looked at Brutal, shaken to my soul. I’d understood that she swore – that the tumor was somehow making her swear – but this was more than swearing. A lot more.

‘What are you doing here?’ Moores asked us again. A lot of the determination had gone out of his voice – his wife’s wavering cries had done that. ‘I don’t understand. Is it a prison break, or ...’

John set Harry aside – just picked him up and moved him over – and then climbed to the stoop. He stood between Brutal and me, so big he almost pushed us off either side and into Melly’s holly bushes. Moores’s eyes turned up to follow him, the way a person’s eyes do when he’s trying to see the top of a tall tree. And suddenly the world fell back into place for me. That spirit of discord, which had jumbled my thoughts like powerful fingers sifting through sand or grains of rice, was gone. I thought I also understood why Harry had been able to act when Brutal and I could only stand, hopeless and indecisive, in front of our boss. Harry had been with John ... and whatever spirit it is that opposes that other, demonic one, it was in John Coffey that night. And, when John stepped forward to face Warden Moores, it was that other spirit – something white, that’s how I think of it, as something white – which took control of the situation. The other thing didn’t leave, but I could see it drawing back like a shadow in a sudden strong light.

‘I want to help,’ John Coffey said. Moores looked up at him, eyes fascinated, mouth hanging open. When Coffey plucked the Buntline Special from his hand and passed it to me, I don’t think Hal even knew it was gone. I carefully lowered the hammer. Later, when I checked the cylinder, I would find it had been empty all along. Sometimes I wonder if Hal knew that. Meanwhile, John was still murmuring. ‘I came to help her. Just to help. That’s all I want.’

‘Hal!’ she cried from the back bedroom. Her voice sounded a little stronger now, but it also sounded afraid, as if the thing which had so confused and unmanned us had now retreated to her. ‘Make them go away, whoever they are! We don’t need no salesmen in the middle of the night! No Electrolux! No Hoover! No French knickers with come in the crotch! Get them out! Tell them to take a flying fuck at a rolling d ... d ...’ Something broke – it could have been a waterglass – and then she began to sob.

‘Just to help,’ John Coffey said in a voice so low it was hardly more than a whisper. He ignored the woman’s sobbing and profanity equally. ‘Just to help, boss, that’s all.’

‘You can’t,’ Moores said. ‘No one can.’ It was a tone I’d heard before, and after a moment I realized it was how I’d sounded myself when I’d gone into Coffey’s cell the night he cured my urinary infection. Hypnotized. You mind your business and I’ll mind mine was what I’d told Delacroix ... except it had been Coffey who’d been minding my business, just as he was minding Hal Moores’s now.

‘We think he can,’ Brutal said. ‘And we didn’t risk our jobs – plus a stretch in the can ourselves, maybe – just to get here and turn around and go back without giving it the old college try.’

Only I had been ready to do just that three minutes before. Brutal, too.

John Coffey took the play out of our hands. He pushed into the entry and past Moores, who raised a single strengthless hand to stop him (it trailed across Coffey’s hip and fell off; I’m sure the big man never even felt it), and then shuffled down the hall toward the living room, the kitchen beyond it, and the back bedroom beyond that, where that shrill unrecognizable voice raised itself again: ‘You stay out of here! Whoever you are, just stay out! I’m not dressed, my tits are out and my bitchbox is taking the breeze!’

John paid no attention, just went stolidly along, head bent so he wouldn’t smash any of the light fixtures, his round brown skull gleaming, his hands swinging at his sides. After a moment we followed him, me first, Brutal and Hal side by side, and Harry bringing up the rear. I understood one thing perfectly well: it was all out of our hands now, and in John’s.