The Green Mile(111)

'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 wide 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.

Chapter 31

6

That was my night off. I sat in the living room of our little house, smoking cigarettes, listening to the radio, and watching the dark come up out of the ground to swallow the sky. Television is all right, I've nothing against it, but I don't like how it turns you away from the rest of the world and toward nothing but its own glassy self. In that one way, at least, radio was better.

Janice came in, knelt beside the arm of my chair, and took my hand. For a little while neither of us said anything, just stayed that way, listening to Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge and watching the stars come out. It was all right with me.

'I'm so sorry I called you a coward,' she said. 'I feel worse about that than anything I've ever said to you in our whole marriage.'

'Even the time when we went camping and you called me Old Stinky Sam?' I asked, and then we laughed and had a kiss or two and it was better again between us. She was so beautiful, my Janice, and I still dream of her. Old and tired of living as I am, I'll dream that she walks into my room in this lonely, forgotten place where the hallways all smell of piss and old boiled cabbage, I dream she's young and beautiful with her blue eyes and her fine high br**sts that I couldn't hardly keep my hands off of, and she'll say, Why, honey, I wasn't in that bus crash. You made a mistake, that's all. Even now I dream that, and sometimes when I wake up and know it was a dream, I cry. I, who hardly ever cried at all when I was young.