The Green Mile

7

Two days later, on the eighteenth, Bill Dodge, Hank Bitterman, and someone else – I don’t remember who, some floater – took John Coffey over to D Block for his shower, and we rehearsed his execution while he was gone. We didn’t let Toot-Toot stand in for John; all of us knew, even without talking about it, that it would have been an obscenity.

I did it.

‘John Coffey,’ Brutal said in a not-quite-steady voice as I sat clamped into Old Sparky, ‘you have been condemned to die in the electric chair, sentence passed by a jury of your peers ...’

John Coffey’s peers? What a joke. So far as I knew, there was no one like him on the planet. Then I thought of what John had said while he stood looking at Sparky from the foot of the stairs leading down from my office: They’re still in there. I hear them screaming.

‘Get me out of it,’ I said hoarsely. ‘Undo these clamps and let me up.’

They did it, but for a moment I felt frozen there, as if Old Sparky did not want to let me go.

As we walked back to the block, Brutal spoke to me in a low voice, so not even Dean and Harry, who were setting up the last of the chairs behind us, would overhear. ‘I done a few things in my life that I’m not proud of, but this is the first time I ever felt really actually in danger of hell.’

I looked at him to make sure he wasn’t joking. I didn’t think he was. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean we’re fixing to kill a gift of God,’ he said. ‘One that never did ary harm to us, or to anyone else. What am I going to say if I end up standing in front of God the Father Almighty and He asks me to explain why I did it? That it was my job? My job?’