The Green Mile(113)

'I suppose so,' I heard myself say. My voice seemed to have developed an echo. 'I suppose I could, if it came to that.'

The feeling was strong inside me by then, and it was like before, when he'd cured my waterworks, but it was different, too. And not just because there was nothing wrong with me this time. It was different because this time he didn't know he was doing it. Suddenly I was terrified, almost choked with a need to get out of there. Lights were going on inside me where there had never been lights before. Not just in my brain; all over my body.

'You and Mr. Howell and the other bosses been good to me,' John Coffey said. 'I know you been worryin, but you ought to quit on it now. Because I want to go, boss.'

I tried to speak and couldn't. He could, though. What he said next was the longest I ever heard him speak.

'I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin from or goin to or why. I'm tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would. But I cain't.'

Stop it, I tried to say. Stop it, let go of my hands, I'm going to drown if you don't. Drown or explode.

'You won't 'splode,' he said, smiling a little at the idea... but he let go of my hands.

I leaned forward, gasping. Between my knees I could see every crack in the cement floor, every groove, every flash of mica. I looked up at the wall and saw names that had been written there in 1924, 1926, 1931. Those names had been washed away, the men who had written them had also been washed away, in a manner of speaking, but I guess you can never wash anything completely away, not from this dark glass of a world, and now I saw them again, a tangle of names overlying one another, and looking at them was like listening to the dead speak and sing and cry out for mercy. I felt my eyeballs pulsing in their sockets, heard my own heart, felt the windy whoosh of my blood rushing through all the boulevards of my body like letters being mailed to everywhere.

I heard a train-whistle in the distance - the three-fifty to Priceford, I imagine, but I couldn't be sure, because I'd never heard it before. Not from Cold Mountain, I hadn't, because the closest it came to the state pen was ten miles east. I couldn't have heard it from the pen, so you would have said and so, until November of '32, I would have believed, but I heard it that day.

Somewhere a lightbulb shattered, loud as a bomb.

'What did you do to me?' I whispered. 'Oh John, what did you do?'

'I'm sorry, boss,' he said in his calm way. 'I wasn't thinkin. Ain't much, I reckon. You feel like regular soon.'

I got up and went to the cell door. It felt like walking in a dream. When I got there, he said: 'You wonder why they didn't scream. That's the only thing you still wonder about, ain't it? Why those two little girls didn't scream while they were still there on the porch.'

I turned and looked at him. I could see every red snap in his eyes, I could see every pore on his face... and I could feel his hurt, the pain that he took in from other people like a sponge takes in water. I could see the darkness he had spoken of, too. It lay in all the spaces of the world as he saw it, and in that moment I felt both pity for him and great relief. Yes, it was a terrible thing we'd be doing, nothing would ever change that... and yet we would be doing him a favor.

'I seen it when that bad fella, he done grab me,' John said. 'That's when I knowed it was him done it. I seen him that day, I was in the trees and I seen him drop them down and run away, but - '

'You forgot,' I said.

'That's right, boss. Until he touch me, I forgot.'

'Why didn't they scream, John? He hurt them enough to make them bleed, their parents were right upstairs, so why didn't they scream?'

John looked at me from his haunted eyes. 'He say to the one, 'If you make noise, it's your sister I kill, not you,' He say that same to the other. You see?'

'Yes,' I whispered, and I could see it. The Detterick porch in the dark. Wharton leaning over them like a ghoul. One of them had maybe started to cry out, so Wharton had hit her and she had bled from the nose. That's where most of it had come from.

'He kill them with they love,' John said. 'They love for each other. You see how it was?'

I nodded, incapable of speech.

He smiled. The tears were flowing again, but he smiled. 'That's how it is every day,' he said, 'all over the worl'.' Then he lay down and turned his face to the wall.

I stepped out into the Mile, locked his cell, and walked up to the duty desk. I still felt like a man in a dream. I realized I could hear Brutal's thoughts - a very faint whisper, how to spell some word, receive, I think it was. He was thinking i before e, except after c, is that how the dadratted thing goes? Then he looked up, started to smile, and stopped when he got a good look at me. 'Paul?' he asked. 'Are you all right?'

'Yes.' Then I told him what John had told me - not all of it, and certainly not about what his touch had done to me (I never told anyone that part, not even Janice; Elaine Connelly will be the first to know of it - if, that is, she wants to read these last pages after reading all the rest of them), but I repeated what John had said about wanting to go. That seemed to relieve Brutal - a bit, anyway - but I sensed (heard?) him wondering if I hadn't made it up, just to set his mind at ease. Then I felt him deciding to believe it, simply because it would make things a little easier for him when the time came.