The Green Mile(94)

'Who are you?' she asked in a clear, reasonable voice. 'And why have you so many scars on your hands and arms? Who hurt you so badly?'

'I don't hardly remember where they all come from, ma'am,' John Coffey said in a humble voice, and sat down beside her on her bed.

Melinda smiled as well as she could - the sneering right side of her mouth trembled, but wouldn't quite come up. She touched a white scar, curved like a scimitar, on the back of his left hand. 'What a blessing that is! Do you understand why?'

'Reckon if you don't know who hurt you or dog you down, it don't keep you up nights,' John Coffey said in his almost-Southern voice.

She laughed at that, the sound as pure as silver in the bad-smelling sickroom. Hal was beside me now, breathing rapidly but not trying to interfere. When Melly laughed, his rapid breathing paused for a moment, indrawn, and one of his big hands gripped my shoulder. He gripped it hard enough to leave a bruise - I saw it the next day - but right then I hardly felt it.

'What's your name?' she asked.

'John Coffey, ma'am.'

'Coffey like the drink.'

'Yes, ma'am, only spelled different.'

She lay back against her pillows, propped up but not quite sitting up, looking at him. He sat beside her, looking back, and the light from the lamp circled them like they were actors on a stage - the hulking black man in the prison overall and the small dying white woman. She stared into John's eyes with shining fascination.

'Ma'am?'

'Yes, John Coffey?' The words barely breathed, barely slipping to us on the bad-smelling, air. I felt the muscles bunching on my arms and legs and back. Somewhere, far away, I could feel the warden clutching my arm, and to the side of my vision I could see Harry and Brutal with their arms around each other, like little kids lost in the night. Something was going to happen. Something big. We each felt it in our own way.

John Coffey bent closer to her. The springs of the bed creaked, the bedclothes rustled, and the coldly smiling moon looked in through an upper pane of the bedroom window. Coffey's bloodshot eyes searched her upturned haggard face.

'I see it,' he said. Speaking not to her - I don't think so, anyway - but to himself. 'I see it, and I can help. Hold still... hold right still... '

Closer he bent, and closer still. For a moment his huge face stopped less than two inches from hers. He raised one hand off to the side, fingers splayed, as if telling something to wait... just wait... and then he lowered his face again. His broad, smooth lips pressed against hers and forced them open. For a moment I could see one of her eyes, staring up past Coffey, filling with an expression of what seemed to be surprise. Then his smooth bald head moved, and that was gone, too.

There was a soft whistling sound as he inhaled the air which lay deep within her lungs. That was all for a second or two, and then the floor moved under us and the whole house moved around us. It wasn't my imagination; they all felt it, they all remarked on it later. It was a kind of rippling thump. There was a crash as something very heavy fell over in the parlor - the grandfather clock, it turned out to be. Hal Moores tried to have it repaired, but it never kept time for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch again.

Closer by there was a crack followed by a tinkle as the pane of glass through which the moon had been peeking broke. A picture on the wall - a clipper ship cruising one of the seven seas - fell off its hook and crashed to the floor; the glass over its front shattered.

I smelled something hot and saw smoke rising from the bottom of the white counterpane which covered her. A portion was turning black, down by the jittering lump that was her right foot. Feeling like a man in a dream, I shook free of Moores's hand and stepped to the night-table. There was a glass of water there, surrounded by three or four bottles of pills which had fallen over during the shake. I picked up the water and dumped it on the place that was smoking. There was a hiss.

John Coffey went on kissing her in that deep and intimate way, inhaling and inhaling, one hand still held out, the other on the bed, propping up his immense weight. The fingers were splayed; the hand looked to me like a brown starfish.

Suddenly, her back arched. One of her own hands flailed out in the air, the fingers clenching and unclenching in a series of spasms. Her feet drummed against the bed. Then something screamed. Again, that's not just me; the other men heard it, as well. To Brutal it sounded like a wolf or coyote with its leg caught in a trap. To me it sounded like an eagle, the way you'd sometimes hear them on still mornings back then, cruising down through the misty cuts with their wings stiffly spread.

Outside, the wind gusted hard enough to give the house a second shake - and that was strange, you know, because until then there had been no wind to speak of at all.

John Coffey pulled away from her, and I saw that her face had smoothed out. The right side of her mouth no longer drooped. Her eyes had regained their normal shape, and she looked ten years younger. He regarded her raptly for a moment or two, and then he began to cough. He turned his head so as not to cough in her face, lost his balance (which wasn't hard; big as he was, he'd been sitting with his butt halfway off the side of the bed to start with), and went down onto the floor. There was enough of him to give the house a third shake. He landed on his knees and hung his head over, coughing like a man in the last stages of TB.

I thought, Now the bugs. He's going to cough them out, and what a lot there'll be this time.