The Green Mile(46)

She said, 'Yew-all want a cold drink, Mr - ?'

'It's Edgecombe,' I said. 'Paul Edgecombe. And thank you. A cold drink would be wonderful, ma'am.'

She went back inside. I held out my hand to Hammersmith, who gave it a brief shake. His grip was limp and cold. He never took his eyes off the kids down at the bottom of the yard.

'Mr. Hammersmith, I'm E Block superintendent at Cold Mountain State Prison. That's - '

'I know what it is,' he said, looking at me with a little more interest. 'So - the bull-goose screw of the Green Mile is standing on my back porch, just as big as life. What brings you fifty miles to talk to the local rag's only full-time reporter?'

'John Coffey,' I said.

I think I expected some sort of strong reaction (the kids who could have been twins working at the back of my mind... and perhaps the doghouse, too; the Dettericks had had a dog), but Hammersmith only raised his eyebrows and sipped at his drink. 'Coffey's your problem now, isn't he?' Hammersmith asked.

'He's not much of a problem,' I said. 'He doesn't like the dark, and he cries a lot of the time, but neither thing makes much of a problem in our line of work. We see worse.'

'Cries a lot, does he?' Hammersmith asked. 'Well, he's got a lot to cry about, I'd say. Considering what he did. What do you want to know?'

'Anything you can tell me. I've read your newspaper stories, so I guess what I want is anything that wasn't in them.'

He gave me a sharp, dry look. 'Like how the little girls looked? Like exactly what he did to them? That the kind of stuff you're interested in, Mr. Edgecombe?'

'No,' I said, keeping my voice mild. 'It's not the Detterick girls I'm interested in, sir. Poor little mites are dead. But Coffey's not - not yet - and I'm curious about him.'

'All right,' he said. 'Pull up a chair and sit, Mr. Edgecombe. You'll forgive me if I sounded a little sharp just now, but I get to see plenty of vultures in my line of work. Hell, I've been accused of being one of em often enough, myself. I just wanted to make sure of you.'

'And are you?'

'Sure enough, I guess,' he said, sounding almost indifferent. The story he told me is pretty much the one I set down earlier in this account - how Mrs. Detterick found the porch empty, with the screen door pulled off its upper hinge, the blankets cast into one corner, and blood on the steps; how her son and husband had taken after the girls' abductor; how the posse had caught up to them first and to John Coffey not much later. How Coffey had been sitting on the riverbank and wailing, with the bodies curled in his massive arms like big dolls. The reporter, rack-thin in his open-collared white shirt and gray town pants, spoke in a low, unemotional voice... but his eyes never left his own two children as they squabbled and laughed and took turns with the swing down there in the shade at the foot of the slope. Sometime in the middle of the story, Mrs. Hammersmith came back with a bottle of homemade root beer, cold and strong and delicious. She stood listening for awhile, then interrupted long enough to call down to the kids and tell them to come up directly, she had cookies due out of the oven. 'We will, Mamma!' called a little girl's voice, and the woman went back inside again.

When Hammersmith had finished, he said: 'So why do you want to know? I never had me a visit from a Big House screw before, it's a first.'

'I told you - '

'Curiosity, yep. Folks get curious, I know it, I even thank God for it, I'd be out of a job and might actually have to go to work for a living without it. But fifty miles is a long way to come to satisfy simple curiosity, especially when the last twenty is over bad roads. So why don't you tell me the truth, Edgecombe? I satisfied yours, so now you satisfy mine.'

Well, I could say, I had this urinary infection, and John Coffey put his hands on me and healed it. The man who raped and murdered those two little girls did that. So I wondered about him, of course - anyone would. I even wondered if maybe Homer Cribus and Deputy Rob McGee didn't maybe collar the wrong man. In spite of all the evidence against him I wonder that. Because a man who has a power like that in his hands, you don't usually think of him as the kind of man who rapes and murders children.

No, maybe that wouldn't do.

'There are two things I've wondered about,' I said. 'The first is if he ever did anything like that before.'

Hammersmith turned to me, his eyes suddenly sharp and bright with interest, and I saw he was a smart fellow. Maybe even a brilliant fellow, in a quiet way. 'Why?' he asked. 'What do you know, Edgecombe? What has he said?'

'Nothing. But a man who does this sort of thing once has usually done it before. They get a taste for it.'

'Yes,' he said. 'They do. They certainly do.'

'And it occurred to me that it would be easy enough to follow his backtrail and find out. A man his size, and a Negro to boot, can't be that hard to trace.'

'You'd think so, but you'd be wrong,' he said. 'In Coffey's case, anyhow. I know.'

'You tried?'

'I did, and came up all but empty. There were a couple of railroad fellows who thought they saw him in the Knoxville yards two days before the Detterick girls were killed. No surprise there; he was just across the river from the Great Southern tracks when they collared him, and that's probably how he came down here from Tennessee. I got a letter from a man who said he'd hired a big bald black man to shift crates for him in the early spring of this year - this as in Kentucky. I sent him a picture of Coffey and he said that was the man. But other than that - ' Hammersmith shrugged and shook his head.