The Green Mile(118)

John Coffey's last tears.

11

I was all right until I got home. It was dawn by then, and birds singing. I parked my flivver, I got out, I walked up the back steps, and then the second greatest grief I have ever known washed over me. It was thinking of how he'd been afraid of the dark that did it. I remembered the first time we'd met, how he'd asked if we left a light on at night, and my legs gave out on me. I sat on my steps and hung my head over my knees and cried. It didn't feel like that weeping was just for John, either, but for all of us.

Janice came out and sat down beside me. She put an arm over my shoulders.

'You didn't hurt him any more than you could help, did you?'

I shook my head no.

'And he wanted to go.'

I nodded.

'Come in the house,' she said, helping me up. It made me think of the way John had helped me up after we'd prayed together. 'Come in and have coffee.'

I did. The first morning passed, and the first afternoon, then the first shift back at work. Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again. That's all I know, except that this happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain.

And the electric chair, of course.

Chapter 33

12

A round quarter past two in the afternoon, my friend Elaine Connelly came to me where I sat in the sunroom, with the last pages of my story squared up neatly in front of me. Her face was very pale, and there were shiny places under her eyes. I think she had been crying.

Me, I'd been looking. Just that. Looking out the window and over the hills to the east, my right hand throbbing at the end of its wrist. But it was a peaceful throb, somehow. I felt empty, husked out. A feeling that was terrible and wonderful at the same time.

It was hard to meet Elaine's eyes - I was afraid of the hate and contempt I might see there - but they were all right. Sad and wondering, but all right. No hate, no contempt, and no disbelief.

'Do you want the rest of the story?' I asked. I tapped the little pile of script with my aching hand.

'It's here, but I'll understand if you'd just as soon not - '

'It isn't a question of what I want,' she said. 'I have to know how it came out, although I guess there is no doubt that you executed him. The intervention of Providence-with-a-capital-P is greatly overrated in the lives of ordinary humans, I think. But before I take those pages... Paul... '

She stopped, as if unsure how to go on. I waited. Sometimes you can't help people. Sometimes it's better not even to try.

'Paul, you speak in here as though you had two grown children in 1932 - not just one, but two. If you didn't get married to your Janice when you were twelve and she was eleven, something like that - '

I smiled a little. 'We were young when we married - a lot of hill-people are, my own mother was - but not that young.'

'Then how old are you? I've always assumed you were in your early eighties, my age, possibly even a little younger, but according to this... '

'I was forty the year John walked the Green Mile,' I said. 'I was born in 1892. That makes me a hundred and four, unless my reckoning's out.'

She stared at me, speechless.

I held out the rest of the manuscript, remembering again how John had touched me, there in his cell. You won't 'splode, he'd said, smiling a bit at the very idea, and I hadn't... but something had happened to me, all the same. Something lasting.

'Read the rest of it,' I said. 'What answers I have are in there.'

'All right,' she almost whispered. 'I'm a little afraid to, I can't lie about that, but... all right. Where will you be?'

I stood up, stretched, listened to my spine crackle in my back. One thing that I knew for sure was that I was sick to death of the sunroom. 'Out on the croquet course. There's still something I want to show you, and it's in that direction.'

'Is it... scary?' In her timid look I saw the little girl she had been back when men wore straw boaters in the summer and raccoon coats in the winter.

'No,' I said, smiling. 'Not scary.'

'All right.' She took the pages. 'I'm going to take these down to my room. I'll see you out on the croquet course around... ' She riffled the manuscript, estimating. 'Four? Is that all right?'

'Perfect,' I said, thinking of the too-curious Brad Dolan. He would be gone by then.

She reached out, gave my arm a little squeeze, and left the room. I stood where I was for a moment, looking down at the table, taking in the fact that it was bare again except for the breakfast tray Elaine had brought me that morning, my scattered papers at last gone. I somehow couldn't believe I was done... and as you can see, since all this was written after I recorded John Coffey's execution and gave the last batch of pages to Elaine, I was not. And even then, part of me knew why.

Alabama.

I filched the last piece of cold toast off the tray, went downstairs, and out onto the croquet course. There I sat in the sun, watching half a dozen pairs and one slow but cheerful foursome pass by waving their mallets, thinking my old man's thoughts and letting the sun warm my old man's bones.

Around two-forty-five, the three-to-eleven shift started to trickle in from the parking lot, and at three, the day-shift folks left. Most were in groups, but Brad Dolan, I saw, was walking alone. That was sort of a happy sight; maybe the world hasn't gone entirely to hell, after all. One of his joke-books was sticking out of his back pocket. The path to the parking lot goes by the croquet course, so he saw me there, but he didn't give me either a wave or a scowl. That was fine by me. He got into his old Chevrolet with the bumper sticker reading I HAVE SEEN GOD AND HIS NAME IS NEWT. Then he was gone to wherever he goes when he isn't here, laying a thin trail of discount motor oil behind.