The Green Mile(52)

'I brought you some tea,' Jan said, 'the kind I put up myself. It's a nice sleepy tea. I've left it in the kitchen.'

'Thank you so much, darlin,' Melinda said. Her voice sounded old and rusty

'How you feeling, dear?' my wife asked.

'Better,' Melinda said in her rusty, grating voice. 'Not so's I want to go out to a barn dance, but at least there's no pain today. They give me some pills for the headaches. Sometimes they even work.'

'That's good, isn't it?'

'But I can't grip so well. Something's happened... to my hand.' She raised it, looked at it as if she had never seen it before, then lowered it back into her lap. 'Something's happened... all over me.' She began to cry in a soundless way that made me think of John Coffey. It started to chime in my head again, that thing he'd said: I helped it, didn't I? I helped it, didn't I? Like a rhyme you can't get rid of.

Hal came in then. He collared me, and you can believe me when I say I was glad to be collared. We went into the kitchen, and he poured me half a shot of white whiskey, hot stuff fresh out of some countryman's still. We clinked our glasses together and drank. The shine went down like coal-oil, but the bloom in the belly was heaven. Still, when Moores tipped the mason jar at me, wordlessly asking if I wanted the other half, I shook my head and waved it off. Wild Bill Wharton was out of restraints - for the time being, anyway - and it wouldn't be safe to go near where he was with a booze-clouded head. Not even with bars between us.

'I don't know how long I can take this, Paul,' he said in a low voice. 'There's a girl who comes in mornings to help me with her, but the doctors I say she may lose control of her bowels, and... and... '

He stopped, his throat working, trying hard not to cry in front of me again.

'Go with it as best you can,' I said. I reached out across the table and briefly squeezed his palsied, liverspotted hand. 'Do that day by day and give the rest over to God. There's nothing else you can do, is there?'

'I guess not. But it's hard, Paul. I pray you never have to find out how hard.'

He made an effort to collect himself.

'Now tell me the news. How are you doing with William Wharton? And how are you making out with Percy Wetmore?'

We talked shop for a while, and got through the visit. After, all the way home, with my wife sitting silent, for the most part - wet-eyed and thoughtful - in the passenger seat beside me, Coffey's words ran around in my head like Mr. Jingles running around in Delacroix's cell: I helped it, didn't I?

'It's terrible,' my wife said dully at one point. 'And there's nothing anyone can do to help her.'

I nodded agreement and thought, I helped it, didn't I? But that was crazy, and I tried as best I could to put it out of my mind.

As we turned into our dooryard, she finally spoke a second time - not about her old friend Melinda, but about my urinary infection. She wanted to know if it was really gone. Really gone, I told her.

'That's fine, then,' she said, and kissed me over the eyebrow, in that shivery place of mine. 'Maybe we ought to, you know, get up to a little something. If you have the time and the inclination, that is.'

Having plenty of the latter and just enough of the former, I took her by the hand and led her into the back bedroom and took her clothes off as she stroked the part of me that swelled and throbbed but didn't hurt anymore. And as I moved in her sweetness, slipping through it in that slow way she liked - that we both liked - I thought of John Coffey, saying he'd helped it, he'd helped it, hadn't he? Like a snatch of song that won't leave your mind until it's damned good and ready.

Later, as I drove to the prison, I got to thinking that very soon we would have to start rehearsing for Delacroix's execution. That thought led to how Percy was going to be out front this time, and I felt a shiver of dread. I told myself to just go with it, one execution and we'd very likely be shut of Percy Wetmore for good... but still I felt that shiver, as if the infection I'd been suffering with wasn't gone at all, but had only switched locations, from boiling my groin to freezing my backbone.

Chapter 14

7

'Come on,' Brutal told Delacroix the following evening. 'We're going for a little walk. You and me and Mr. Jingles.'

Delacroix looked at him distrustfully, then reached down into the cigar box for the mouse. He cupped it m the palm of one hand and looked at Brutal with narrowed eyes.

'Whatchoo talking about?' he asked.

'It's a big night for you and Mr. Jingles,' Dean said, as he and Harry joined Brutal. The chain of bruises around Dean's neck had gone an unpleasant yellow color, but at least he could talk again without sounding like a dog barking at a cat. He looked at Brutal. 'Think we ought to put the shackles on him, Brute?'

Brutal appeared to consider. 'Naw,' he said at last. 'He's gonna be good, ain't you, Del? You and the mouse, both. After all, you're gonna be showin off for some high muck-a-mucks tonight.'

Percy and I were standing up by the duty desk, watching this, Percy with his arms folded and a small, contemptuous smile on his lips. After a bit, he took out his horn comb and went to work on his hair with it. John Coffey was watching, too, standing silently at the bars of his cell. Wharton was lying on his bunk, staring up at the ceiling and ignoring the whole show. He was still "being good," although what he called good was what the docs at Briar Ridge called catatonic. And there was one other person there, as well. He was tucked out of sight in my office, but his skinny shadow fell out the door and onto the Green Mile.