The Green Mile(117)

'John Coffey, you have been condemned to die in the electric chair, sentence passed by a jury of your peers and imposed by a judge of good standing in this state. God save the people of this state. Do you have anything to say before sentence is carried out?'

John wet his lips again, then spoke clearly. Six words. 'I'm sorry for what I am.'

'You ought to be!' the mother of the two dead girls screamed. 'Oh you monster, you ought to be! YOU DAMN WELL OUGHT TO BE!'

John's eyes turned to me. I saw no resignation in them, no hope of heaven, no dawning peace. How I would love to tell you that I did. How I would love to tell myself that. What I saw was fear, misery, incompletion, and incomprehension. They were the eyes of a trapped and terrified animal. I thought of what he'd said about how Wharton had gotten Cora and Kathe Detterick off the porch without rousing the house: He kill them with they love. That's how it is every day. All over the world.

Brutal took the new mask from its brass hook on the back of the chair, but as soon as John saw it and understood what it was, his eyes widened in horror. He looked at me, and now I could see huge droplets of sweat standing out on the curve of his naked skull. As big as robin's eggs, they looked.

'Please, boss, don't put that thing over my face,' he said in a moaning little whisper. 'Please don't put me in the dark, don't make me go into the dark, I's afraid of the dark.'

Brutal was looking at me, eyebrows raised, frozen in place, the mask in his hands. His eyes said it was my call, he'd go either way. I thought as fast as I could and as well as I could - hard to do, with my head pounding the way it was. The mask was tradition, not law. It was, in fact, to spare the witnesses. And suddenly I decided that they did not need to be spared, not this once. John, after all, hadn't done a damned thing in his life to warrant dying under a mask. They didn't know that, but we did, and I decided I was going to grant this last request. As for Marjorie Detterick, she'd probably send me a thank-you note.

'All right, John,' I murmured.

Brutal put the mask back. From behind us, Homer Cribus called out indignantly in his deep-dish cracker voice: 'Say, boy! Put that-air mask on him! Think we want to watch his eyes pop?'

'Be quiet, sir,' I said without turning. 'This is an execution, and you're not in charge of it.'

'Any more than you were in charge of catching him, you tub of guts,' Harry whispered. Harry died in 1982, close to the age of eighty. An old man. Not in my league, of course, but few are. It was intestinal cancer of some kind.

Brutal bent over and plucked the disk of sponge out of its bucket. He pressed a finger into it and licked the tip, but he hardly had to; I could see the ugly brown thing dripping. He tucked it into the cap, then put the cap on John 's head. For the first time I saw that Brutal was pale, too - pasty white, on the verge of passing out. I thought of him saying that he felt, for the first time in his life, that he was in danger of hell, because we were fixing to kill a gift of God. I felt a sudden strong need to retch. I controlled it, but only with an effort. Water from the sponge was dripping down the sides of John 's face.

Dean Stanton ran the strap - let out to its maximum length on this occasion - across John 's chest and gave it to me. We had taken such pains to try and protect Dean on the night of our trip, because of his kids, never knowing that he had less than four months to live. After John Coffey, he requested and received a transfer away from Old Sparky, over to C Block, and there a prisoner stabbed him in the throat with a shank and let out his life's blood on the dirty board floor. I never knew why. I don't think anyone ever knew why. Old Sparky seems such a thing of perversity when I look back on those days, such a deadly bit of folly. Fragile as blown glass, we are, even under the best of conditions. To kill each other with gas and electricity, and in cold blood? The folly. The horror.

Brutal checked the strap, then stood back. I waited for him to speak, but he didn't. As he crossed his hands behind his back and stood at parade rest, I knew that he wouldn't. Perhaps couldn't. I didn't think I could, either, but then I looked at John 's terrified, weeping eyes and knew I had to. Even if it damned me forever, I had to.

'Roll on two,' I said in a dusty, cracking voice I hardly recognized as my own.

The cap hummed. Eight large fingers and two large thumbs rose from the ends of the chair's broad oak arms and splayed tensely in ten different directions, their tips jittering. His big knees made caged pistoning motions, but the clamps on his ankles held. Overhead, three of the hanging lights blew out - Pow! Pow! Pow! Marjorie Detterick screamed at the sound and fainted in her husband's arms. She died in Memphis, eighteen years later. Harry sent me the obit. It was a trolley-car accident.

John surged forward against the chest-strap. For a moment his eyes met mine. They were aware; I was the last thing he saw as we tilted him off the edge of the world. Then he fell against the seatback, the cap coming askew on his head a little, smoke - a sort of charry mist - drifting out from beneath it. But on the whole, you know, it was quick. I doubt if it was painless, the way the chair's supporters always claim (it's not an idea even the most rabid of them ever seems to want to investigate personally), but it was quick. The hands were limp again, the formerly bluish-white moons at the base of the fingernails now a deep eggplant hue, a tendril of smoke rising off cheeks still wet with salt water from the sponge... and his tears.