The Green Mile(13)

"Getting the talk started" was at the center of our job, really. I didn't know it then, but looking back from the vantage point of this strange old age (I think all old ages seem strange to the folk who must endure them), I understand that it was, and why I didn't see it then - it was too big, as central to our work as our respiration was to our lives. It wasn't important that the floaters be good at "getting the talk started," but it was vital for me and Harry and Brutal and Dean... and it was one reason why Percy Wetmore was such a disaster. The inmates hated him, the guards hated him... everyone hated him, presumably, except for his political connections, Percy himself, and maybe (but only maybe) his mother. He was like a dose of white arsenic sprinkled into a wedding cake, and I think I knew he spelled disaster the start. He was an accident waiting to happen. As for the rest of us, we would have scoffed at the idea that we functioned most usefully not as the guards of the condemned but as their psychiatrists part of me still wants to scoff at that idea today - but we knew about getting the talk started... and without the talk, men facing Old Sparky had a nasty habit of going insane.

I made a note at the bottom of Brutal's report to talk to John Coffey - to try, at least - and then passed on to a note from Curtis Anderson, the warden's chief assistant. It said that he, Anderson, expected a DOE order for Edward Delacrois (Anderson's misspelling; the man's name was actually Eduard Delacroix) very soon. DOE stood for date of execution, and according to the note, Curtis had been told on good authority that the little Frenchman would take the walk shortly before Halloween - October 27th was his best guess, and Curtis Anderson's guesses were very informed. But before then we could expect a new resident, name of William Wharton. "He's what you like to call "a problem child," " Curtis had written in his backslanting and somehow prissy script. "Crazy-wild and proud of it. Has rambled all over the state for the last year or so, and has hit the big time at last. Killed three people in a holdup, one a pregnant woman, killed a fourth in the getaway. State Patrolman. All he missed was a nun and a blind man." I smiled a little at that. "Wharton is 19 years old, has Billy the Kid tattooed on upper l. forearm. You will have to slap his nose a time or two, I guarantee you that, but be careful when you do it. This man just doesn't care." He had underlined this last sentiment twice, then finished: "Also, he may be a hang-arounder. He's working appeals, and there's the fact that he is a minor."

A crazy kid, working appeals, apt to be around for awhile. Oh, that all sounded just fine. Suddenly the day seemed hotter than ever, and I could no longer put off seeing Warden Moores.

I worked for three wardens during my years as a Cold Mountain guard; Hal Moores was the last and best of them. In a walk. Honest, straightforward, lacking even Curtis Anderson's rudimentary wit, but equipped with just enough political savvy to keep his job during those grim years... and enough integrity to keep from getting seduced by the game. He would not rise any higher, but that seemed all right with him. He was fifty-eight or - nine back then, with a deeply lined bloodhound face that Bobo Marchant probably would have felt right at home with. He had white hair and his hands shook with some sort of palsy, but he was strong. The year before, when a prisoner had rushed him in the exercise yard with a shank whittled out of a crate-slat, Moores had stood his ground, grabbed the skatehound's wrist, and had twisted it so hard that the snapping bones had sounded like dry twigs burning in a hot fire. The skatehound, all his grievances forgotten, had gone down on his knees in the dirt and begun screaming for his mother. 'I'm not her,' Moores said in his cultured Southern voice, 'But if I was, I'd raise up my skirts and piss on you from the loins that gave you birth.'

When I came into his office, he started to get up and I waved him back down. I took the seat across the desk from him, and began by asking about his wife... except in our part of the world, that's not how you do it. 'How's that pretty gal of yours' is what I asked, as if Melinda had seen only seventeen summers instead of sixty-two or - three. My concern was genuine he was a woman I could have loved and married myself, if the lines of our lives had coincided - but I didn't mind diverting him a little from his main business, either.

He sighed deeply. 'Not so well, Paul. Not so well at all.'

'More headaches?'

'Only one this week, but it was the worst yet - put her flat on her back for most of the day before yesterday. And now she's developed this weakness in her right hand - ' He raised his own liverspotted right hand. We both watched it tremble above his blotter for a moment or two, and then he lowered it again. I could tell he would have given just about anything not to be telling me what he was telling me, and I would have given just about anything not to be hearing it. Melinda's headaches had started in the spring, and all that summer her doctor had been saying they were 'nervous-tension migraines,' perhaps caused by the stress of Hal's coming retirement. Except that neither of them could wait for his retirement, and my own wife had told me that migraine is not a disease of the old but the young; by the time its sufferers reached Melinda Moores's age, they were usually getting better, not worse. And now this weakness of the hand. It didn't sound like nervous tension to me; it sounded like a damned stroke.

'Dr. Haverstrom wants her to go in hospital up to Indianola,' Moores said. 'Have some tests. Head X-rays, he means. Who knows what else. She is scared to death.' He paused, then added, 'Truth to tell, so am I.'