The Green Mile

5

The next day, the same bunch of screws who had eaten lunch in my kitchen after the botched Delacroix execution ate lunch there again. This time there was a fifth at our council of war: my wife. It was Jan who convinced me to tell the others; my first impulse had been not to. Wasn’t it bad enough, I asked her, that we knew?

‘You’re not thinking clear about it,’ she’d answered. ‘Probably because you’re still upset. They already know the worst thing, that John’s on the spot for a crime he didn’t commit. If anything, this makes it a little better.’

I wasn’t so sure, but I deferred to her judgement. I expected an uproar when I told Brutal, Dean, and Harry what I knew (I couldn’t prove it, but I knew, all right), but at first there was only thoughtful silence. Then, taking another of Janice’s biscuits and beginning to put an outrageous amount of butter on it, Dean said: ‘Did John see him, do you think? Did he see Wharton drop the girls, maybe even rape them?’

‘I think if he’d seen that, he would have tried to stop it,’ I said. ‘As for seeing Wharton, maybe as he ran off, I suppose he might have. If he did, he forgot it later.’

‘Sure,’ Dean said. ‘He’s special, but that doesn’t make him bright. He only found out it was Wharton when Wharton reached through the bars of his cell and touched him.’

Brutal was nodding. ‘That’s why John looked so surprised ... so shocked. Remember the way his eyes opened?’

I nodded. ‘He used Percy on Wharton like a gun, that was what Janice said, and it was what I kept thinking about. Why would John Coffey want to kill Wild Bill? Percy, maybe – Percy stamped on Delacroix’s mouse right in front of him, Percy burned Delacroix alive and John knew it – but Wharton? Wharton messed with most of us in one way or another, but he didn’t mess with John at all, so far as I know – hardly passed four dozen words with him the whole time they were on the Mile together, and half of those were that last night. Why would he want to? He was from Purdom County, and as far as white boys from up there are concerned, you don’t even see a Negro unless he happens to step into your road. So why did he do it? What could he’ve seen or felt when Wharton touched him that was so bad that he saved back the poison he took out of Melly’s body?’

‘And half-killed himself doing it, too,’ Brutal said.

‘More like three-quarters. And the Detterick twins were all I could think of that was bad enough to explain what he did. I told myself the idea was nuts, too much of a coincidence, it just couldn’t be. Then I remembered something Curtis Anderson wrote in the first memo I ever got about Wharton – that Wharton was crazy-wild, and that he’d rambled all over the state before the holdup where he killed all those people. Rambled all over the state. That stuck with me. Then there was the way he tried to choke Dean when he came in. That got me thinking about –’

‘The dog,’ Dean said. He was rubbing his neck where Wharton had wrapped the chain. I don’t think he even knew he was doing it. ‘How the dog’s neck was broken.’

‘Anyway, I went on up to Purdom County to check Wharton’s court records – all we had here were the reports on the murders that got him to the Green Mile. The end of his career, in other words. I wanted the beginning.’

‘Lot of trouble?’ Brutal asked.

‘Yeah. Vandalism, petty theft, setting haystack fires, even theft of an explosive – he and a friend swiped a stick of dynamite and set it off down by a creek. He got going early, ten years old, but what I wanted wasn’t there. Then the Sheriff turned up to see who I was and what I was doing, and that was actually lucky. I fibbed, told him that a cell-search had turned up a bunch of pictures in Wharton’s mattress – little girls with no clothes on. I said I’d wanted to see if Wharton had any kind of history as a pederast, because there were a couple of unsolved cases up in Tennessee that I’d heard about. I was careful never to mention the Detterick twins. I don’t think they crossed his mind, either.’

‘Course not,’ Harry said. ‘Why would they have? That case is solved, after all.’

‘I said I guessed there was no sense chasing the idea, since there was nothing in Wharton’s back file. I mean, there was plenty in the file, but none of it about that sort of thing. Then the Sheriff – Catlett, his name is – laughed and said not everything a bad apple like Bill Wharton did was in the court files, and what did it matter, anyway? He was dead, wasn’t he?

‘I said I was doing it just to satisfy my own curiosity, nothing else, and that relaxed him. He took me back to his office, sat me down, gave me a cup of coffee and a sinker, and told me that sixteen months ago, when Wharton was barely eighteen, a man in the western part of the county caught him in the barn with his daughter. It wasn’t rape, exactly; the fellow described it to Catlett as “not much more’n stinkfinger.” Sorry, honey.”

‘That’s all right,’ Janice said. She looked pale, though.

‘How old was the girl?’ Brutal asked.

‘Nine,’ I said.

He winced.

‘The man might’ve taken off after Wharton himself, if he’d had him some big old brothers or cousins to give him a help, but he didn’t. So he went to Catlett, but made it clear he only wanted Wharton warned. No one wants a nasty thing like that right out in public, if it can be helped. Anyway, Sheriff C. had been dealing with Wharton’s antics for quite some time – had him in the reform school up that way for eight months or so when Wharton was fifteen – and he decided enough was enough. He got three deputies, they went out to the Wharton place, set Missus Wharton aside when she started to weep and wail, and then they warned Mr William “Billy the Kid” Wharton what happens to big pimple-faced galoots who go up in the hayloft with girls not even old enough to have heard about their monthly courses, let alone started them. “We warned that little punk good,” Catlett told me. “Warned him until his head was bleedin, his shoulder was dislocated, and his ass was damn near broke.”’

Brutal was laughing in spite of himself. ‘That sounds like Purdom County, all right,’ he said. ‘Like as not.’

‘It was three months later, give or take, that Wharton broke out and started the spree that ended with the holdup,’ I said. ‘That and the murders that got him to us.’

‘So he’d had something to do with an underage girl once,’ Harry said. He took off his glasses, huffed on them, polished them. ‘Way underage. Once isn’t exactly a pattern, is it?’

‘A man doesn’t do a thing like that just once,’ my wife said, then pressed her lips together so tight they almost weren’t there.

Next I told them about my visit to Trapingus County. I’d been a lot more frank with Rob McGee – I’d had no choice, really. To this day I have no idea what sort of story he spun for Mr Detterick, but the McGee who sat down next to me in the diner seemed to have aged seven years.

In mid-May, about a month before the holdup and the murders which finished Wharton’s short career as an outlaw, Klaus Detterick had painted his barn (and, incidentally, Bowser’s doghouse next to it). He hadn’t wanted his son crawling around up on a high scaffolding, and the boy had been in school, anyway, so he had hired a fellow. A nice enough fellow. Very quiet. Three days’ work it had been. No, the fellow hadn’t slept at the house, Detterick wasn’t foolish enough to believe that nice and quiet always meant safe, especially in those days, when there was so much dust-bowl riffraff on the roads. A man with a family had to be careful. In any case, the man hadn’t needed lodging; he told Detterick he had taken a room in town, at Eva Price’s. There was a lady named Eva Price in Tefton, and she did rent rooms, but she hadn’t had a boarder that May who fit the description of Detterick’s hired man, just the usual fellows in checked suits and derby hats, hauling sample cases – drummers, in other words. McGee had been able to tell me that because he stopped at Mrs Price’s and checked on his way back from the Detterick farm – that’s how upset he was.

‘Even so,’ he added, ‘there’s no law against a man sleeping rough in the woods, Mr Edgecombe. I’ve done it a time or two myself.’

The hired man didn’t sleep at the Dettericks’ house, but he took dinner with them twice. He would have met Howie. He would have met the girls, Cora and Kathe. He would have listened to their chatter, some of which might have been about how much they looked forward to the coming summer, because if they were good and the weather was good, Mommy sometimes let them sleep out on the porch, where they could pretend they were pioneer wives crossing the Great Plains in Conestoga wagons.

I can see him sitting there at the table, eating roast chicken and Mrs Detterick’s rye bread, listening, keeping his wolf’s eyes well veiled, nodding, smiling a little, storing it all up.

‘This doesn’t sound like the wildman you told me about when he first came on the Mile, Paul,’ Janice said doubtfully. ‘Not a bit.’

‘You didn’t see him up at Indianola Hospital, ma’am,’ Harry said. ‘Just standin there with his mouth open and his bare butt hangin out the back of his johnny. Lettin us dress him. We thought he was either drugged or foolish. Didn’t we, Dean?’

Dean nodded.

‘The day after he finished the barn and left, a man wearing a bandanna mask robbed Hampey’s Freight Office in Jarvis,’ I told them. ‘Got away with seventy dollars. He also took an 1892 silver dollar the freight agent carried as a lucky piece. That silver dollar was on Wharton when he was captured, and Jarvis is only thirty miles from Tefton.’

‘So this robber ... this wildman ... you think he stopped for three days to help Klaus Detterick paint his barn,’ my wife said. ‘Ate dinner with them and said please pass the peas just like folks.’

‘The scariest thing about men like him is how unpredictable they are,’ Brutal said. ‘He might’ve been planning to kill the Dettericks and rifle their house, then changed his mind because a cloud came over the sun at the wrong time, or something like. Maybe he just wanted to cool off a little. But most likely he already had his eye on those two girls and was planning to come back. Do you think, Paul?’

I nodded. Of course I thought it. ‘And then there’s the name he gave Detterick.’

‘What name?’ Jan asked.

‘Will Bonney.’

‘Bonney? I don’t –’

‘It was Billy the Kid’s real name.’

‘Oh.’ Then her eyes widened. ‘Oh! So you can get John Coffey off! Thank God! All you have to do is show Mr Detterick a picture of William Wharton ... his mug-shot should do ...’

Brutal and I exchanged an uncomfortable look. Dean was looking a bit hopeful, but Harry was staring down at his hands, as if all at once fabulously interested in his fingernails.

‘What’s wrong?’ Janice asked. ‘Why are you looking at each other that way? Surely this man McGee will have to –’

‘Rob McGee struck me as a good man, and I think he’s a hell of a law officer,’ I said, ‘but he swings no weight in Trapingus County. The power there is Sheriff Cribus, and the day he reopens the Detterick case on the basis of what I was able to find out would be the day it snows in hell.’

‘But ... if Wharton was there ... if Detterick can identify a picture of him and they know he was there ...’

‘Him being there in May doesn’t mean he came back and killed those girls in June,’ Brutal said. He spoke in a low, gentle voice, the way you speak when you’re telling someone there’s been a death in the family. ‘On one hand you’ve got this fellow who helped Klaus Detterick paint a barn and then went away. Turns out he was committing crimes all over the place, but there’s nothing against him for the three days in May he was around Tefton. On the other hand, you’ve got this big Negro, this huge Negro, that you found on the riverbank, holding two little dead girls, both of them naked, in his arms.’

He shook his head.

‘Paul’s right, Jan. McGee may have his doubts, but McGee doesn’t matter. Cribus is the only one who can reopen the case, and Cribus doesn’t want to mess with what he thinks of as a happy ending – “it was a nigger,” thinks he, “and not one of our’n in any case. Beautiful, I’ll go up there to Cold Mountain, have me a steak and a draft beer at Ma’s, then watch him fry, and there’s an end to it.”’

Janice listened to all this with a mounting expression of horror on her face, then turned to me. ‘But McGee believes it, doesn’t he, Paul? I could see it on your face. Deputy McGee knows he arrested the wrong man. Won’t he stand up to the Sheriff?’

‘All he can do by standing up to him is lose his job,’ I said. ‘Yes, I think that in his heart he knows it was Wharton. But what he says to himself is that, if he keeps his mouth shut and plays the game until Cribus either retires or eats himself to death, he gets the job. And things will be different then. That’s what he tells himself to get to sleep, I imagine. And he’s probably not so much different than Homer about one thing. He’ll tell himself, “After all, it’s only a Negro. It’s not like they’re going to burn a white man for it.”’

‘Then you’ll have to go to them,’ Janice said, and my heart turned cold at the decisive, no-doubt-about-it tone of her voice. ‘Go and tell them what you found out.’

‘And how should we tell them we found it out, Jan?’ Brutal asked her in that same low voice. ‘Should we tell them about how Wharton grabbed John while we were taking him out of the prison to work a miracle on the Warden’s wife?’

‘No ... of course not, but ...’ She saw how thin the ice was in that direction and skated in another one. ‘Lie, then,’ she said. She looked defiantly at Brutal, then turned that look on me. It was hot enough to smoke a hole in newspaper, you’d have said.

‘Lie,’ I repeated. ‘Lie about what?’

‘About what got you going, first up to Purdom County and then down to Trapingus. Go down there to that fat old Sheriff Cribus and say that Wharton told you he raped and murdered the Detterick girls. That he confessed.’ She switched her hot gaze to Brutal for a moment. ‘You can back him up, Brutus. You can say you were there when he confessed, you heard it, too. Why, Percy probably heard it as well, and that was probably what set him off. He shot Wharton because he couldn’t stand thinking of what Wharton had done to those children. It snapped his mind. Just ... What? What now, in the name of God?’

It wasn’t just me and Brutal; Harry and Dean were looking at her, too, with a kind of horror.

‘We never reported anything like that, ma’am,’ Harry said. He spoke as if talking to a child. ‘The first thing people’d ask is why we didn’t. We’re supposed to report anything our cell-babies say about prior crimes. Theirs or anyone else’s.’

‘Not that we would’ve believed him,’ Brutal put in. ‘A man like Wild Bill Wharton lies about anything, Jan. Crimes he’s committed, bigshots he’s known, women he’s gone to bed with, touchdowns he scored in high school, even the damn weather.’

‘But ... but ...’ Her face was agonized. I went to put my arm around her and she pushed it violently away. ‘But he was there! He painted their goddamned barn! HE ATE DINNER WITH THEM!’

‘All the more reason why he might take credit for the crime,’ Brutal said. ‘After all, what harm? Why not boast? You can’t fry a man twice, after all.’

‘Let me see if I’ve got this right. We here at this table know that not only did John Coffey not kill those girls, he was trying to save their lives. Deputy McGee doesn’t know all that, of course, but he does have a pretty good idea that the man condemned to die for the murders didn’t do them. And still ... still ... you can’t get him a new trial. Can’t even reopen the case.’

‘Yessum,’ Dean said. He was polishing his glasses furiously. ‘That’s about the size of it.’

She sat with her head lowered, thinking. Brutal started to say something and I raised a hand, shushing him. I didn’t believe Janice could think of a way to get John out of the killing box he was in, but I didn’t believe it was impossible, either. She was a fearsomely smart lady, my wife. Fearsomely determined, as well. That’s a combination that sometimes turns mountains into valleys.

‘All right,’ she said at last. ‘Then you’ve got to get him out on your own.’

‘Ma’am?’ Harry looked flabbergasted. Frightened, too.

‘You can do it. You did it once, didn’t you? You can do it again. Only this time you won’t bring him back.’

‘Would you want to be the one to explain to my kids why their daddy is in prison, Missus Edgecombe?’ Dean asked. ‘Charged with helping a murderer escape jail?’

‘There won’t be any of that, Dean; we’ll work out a plan. Make it look like a real escape.’

‘Make sure it’s a plan that could be worked out by a fellow who can’t even remember how to tie his own shoes, then,’ Harry said. ‘They’ll have to believe that.’

She looked at him uncertainly.

‘It wouldn’t do any good,’ Brutal said. ‘Even if we could think of a way, it wouldn’t do any good.’

‘Why not?’ She sounded as if she might be going to cry. ‘Just why the damn hell not?’

‘Because he’s a six-foot-eight-inch baldheaded black man with barely enough brains to feed himself,’ I said. ‘How long do you think it would be before he was recaptured? Two hours? Six?’

‘He got along without attracting much attention before,’ she said. A tear trickled down her cheek. She slapped it away with the heel of her hand.

That much was true. I had written letters to some friends and relatives of mine farther down south, asking if they’d seen anything in the papers about a man fitting John Coffey’s description. Anything at all. Janice had done the same. We had come up with just one possible sighting so far, in the town of Muscle Shoals, Alabama. A twister had struck a church there during choir practice – in 1929, this had been – and a large black man had hauled two fellows out of the rubble. Both had looked dead to onlookers at first, but as it turned out, neither had been even seriously hurt. It was like a miracle, one of the witnesses was quoted as saying. The black man, a drifter who had been hired by the church pastor to do a day’s worth of chores, had disappeared in the excitement.

‘You’re right, he got along,’ Brutal said. ‘But you have to remember that he did most of his getting along before he was convicted of raping and murdering two little girls.’

She sat without answering. She sat that way for almost a full minute, and then she did something which shocked me as badly as my sudden flow of tears must have shocked her. She reached out and shoved everything off the table with one sweep of her arm – plates, glasses, cups, silverware, the bowl of collards, the bowl of squash, the platter with the carved ham on it, the milk, the pitcher of cold tea. All off the table and onto the floor, ker-smash.

‘Holy shit!’ Dean cried, rocking back from the table so hard he damned near went over on his back.

Janice ignored him. It was Brutal and me she was looking at, mostly me. ‘Do you mean to kill him, you cowards?’ she asked. ‘Do you mean to kill the man who saved Melinda Moores’s life, who tried to save those little girls’ lives? Well, at least there will be one less black man in the world, won’t there? You can console yourselves with that. One less nigger.’

She got up, looked at her chair, and kicked it into the wall. It rebounded and fell into the spilled squash. I took her wrist and she yanked it free.

‘Don’t touch me,’ she said. ‘Next week this time you’ll be a murderer, no better than that man Wharton, so don’t touch me.’

She went out onto the back stoop, put her apron up to her face, and began to sob into it. The four of us looked at each other. After a little bit I got on my feet and set about cleaning up the mess. Brutal joined me first, then Harry and Dean. When the place looked more or less shipshape again, they left. None of us said a word the whole time. There was really nothing left to say.