The Mouse on the Mile 1 page

Stephen King: The Green Mile

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Foreword: A Letter

Dear Constant Reader,

Life is a capricious business. The story which begins in this little book exists in this form because of a

chance remark made by a realtor I have never met. This happened a year ago, on Long Island. Ralph

Vicinanza, a long-time friend and business associate of mine (what he does mostly is to sell foreign

publishing rights for books and stories), had just rented a house there. The realtor remarked that the

house "looked like something out of a story by Charles Dickens."

The remark was still on Ralph's mind when he welcomed his first houseguest, British publisher Malcolm

Edwards. He repeated it to Edwards, and they began chatting about Dickens. Edwards mentioned that

Dickens had published many of his novels in installments, either folded into magazines or by themselves

as chapbooks, (I don't know the origin of this word, meaning a smaller-than-average book, but have

always loved its air of intimacy and friendliness). Some of the novels, Edwards added, were actually

written and revised in the shadow of publication; Charles Dickens was one novelist apparently not afraid

of a deadline.

Dickens's serialized novels were immensely popular; so popular, in fact, that one of them precipitated a

tragedy in Baltimore. A large group of Dickens fans crowded onto a waterfront dock, anticipating the

arrival of an English ship with copies of the final installment of The Old Curiosity Shop on board.

According to the story, several would-be readers were jostled into the water and drowned.

I don't think either Malcolm. or Ralph wanted anyone drowned, but they were curious as to what would

happen if serial publication were tried again today. Neither was immediately aware that it has happened

(there really is nothing new under the sun) on at least two occasions. Tom Wolfe published the first draft

of his novel Bonfire of the Vanities serially in Rolling Stone magazine, and Michael McDowell (The

Amulet, Gilded Needles, The Elementals, and the screenplay Beetlejuice) published a novel called

Blackwater in paperback installments. That novel - a horror story about a Southern family with the

unpleasant familial trait of turning into alligators - was not McDowell's best, but enjoyed good success

for Avon Books, all the same.

The two men further speculated about what might happen if a writer of popular fiction were to try issuing

a novel in chapbook editions today - little paperbacks that might sell for a pound or two in Britain, or

perhaps three dollars in America (where most paperbacks now sell for $6.99 or $7.99). Someone like

Stephen King might make an interesting go of such an experiment, Malcolm said, and from there the

conversation moved on to other topics.

Ralph more or less forgot the idea, but it recurred to him in the fall of 1995, following his return from the

Frankfurt Book Fair, a kind of international trade show where every day is a showdown for foreign

agents like Ralph. He broached the serialization/ chapbook idea to me along with a number of other

matters, most of which were automatic turndowns.

The chapbook idea was not an automatic turndown, though; unlike the interview in the Japanese Playboy

or the all-expenses-paid tour of the Baltic Republics, it struck a bright spark in my imagination. I don't

think that I am a modern Dickens-if such a person exists, it is probably John Irving or Salman Rushdie -

but I have always loved stories told in episodes. It is a format I first encountered in The Saturday Evening

Post, and I liked it because the end of each episode made the reader an almost equal participant with the

writer-you had a whole week to try to figure out the next twist of the snake. Also, one read and

experienced these stories more intensely, it seemed to me, because they were rationed. You couldn't gulp,

even if you wanted to (and if the story was good, you did).

Best of all, in my house we often read them aloud-my brother, David, one night, myself the next, my

mother taking a turn on the third, then back to my brother again. It was a rare chance to enjoy a written

work as we enjoyed the movies we went to and the TV programs (Rawhide, Bonanza. Route 66) that we

watched together; they were a family event . It wasn't until years later that I discovered Dickens's novels

had been enjoyed by families of his day in much the same fashion. only their fireside agonizings over the

fate of Pip and Oliver and David Copperfield went on for years instead of a couple of months (even the

longest of the Post serials rarely ran much more than eight installments).

There was one other thing that I liked about the idea, an appeal that I suspect only the writer of suspense

tales and spooky stories can fully appreciate: in a story which is published m installments, the writer

gains an ascendancy over the reader which he or she cannot otherwise enjoy: simply put. Constant

Reader, you cannot flip ahead and see how matters turn out.

I still remember walking into our living room once when I was twelve or so and seeing my mother in her

favorite rocker, peeking at the end of an Agatha Christie paperback while her finger held her actual place

around page 50. I was appalled, and told her so Q was twelve. remember. an age at which boys first

dimly begin to realize that they know everything), suggesting that reading the end of a mystery novel

before you actually get there was on a par with eating the white stuff out of the middle of Oreo cookies

and then throwing the cookies themselves away. She laughed her wonderful unembarrassed laugh and

said perhaps that was so, but sometimes she just couldn't resist the temptation. Giving in to temptation

was a concept I could understand; I had plenty of my own, even at twelve. But here, at last, is an amusing

cure for that temptation. Until the final episode arrives in bookstores, no one is going to know how The

Green Mile turns out ... and that may include me.

Although there was no way he could have known it, Ralph Vicinanza, mentioned the idea of a novel in

installments at what was, for me, the perfect psychological moment. I had been playing with a story idea

on a subject I had always suspected I would get around to sooner or later: the electric chair. "Old Sparky"

has fascinated me ever since my first James Cagney movie, and the first Death Row tales I ever read (in a

book called Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing, written by Warden Lewis E. Lawes) fired the darker

side of my imagination. What, I wondered, would it be like to walk those last forty yards to the electric

chair, knowing you were going to die there? Mat, for that matter, would it be like to be the man who had

to strap the condemned in ... or pull the switch? What would such a job take out of you? Even creepier,

what might it add?

I had tried these basic ideas, always tentatively, on a number of different frameworks over the last twenty

or thirty years. I had written one successful novella set in prison (Rita Hayworth and Shawshank

Redemption), and had sort of come to the conclusion that that was probably it for me, when this take on

the idea came along. There were lots of things I liked about it, but nothing more than the narrator's

essentially decent voice; low-key, honest, perhaps a little wide-eyed, he is a Stephen King narrator if ever

there was one. So I got to work, but in a tentative, stopand-start way. Most of the second chapter was

written during a rain delay at Fenway Park!

When Ralph called, I had filled a notebook with scribbled pages of The Green Mile, and realized I was

building a novel when I should have been spending my time clearing my desk for revisions on a book

already written (Desperation-you'll see it soon, Constant Reader). At the point I had come to on Mile,

there are usually just two choices: put it away (probably never to be picked up again) or cast everything

else aside and chase.

Ralph suggested a possible third alternative, a story that could be written the same way it would be

read-in installments. And I liked the high-wire aspect of it, too: fall down on the job, fail to carry

through, and all at once about a million readers are howling for your blood. No one knows this any better

than me, unless it's my secretary, Juliann Eugley; we get dozens of angry letters each week, demanding

the next book in the Dark Tower cycle (patience, followers of Roland; another year or so and your wait

will end, I promise). One of these contained a Polaroid of a teddy-bear in chains, with a message cut out

of newspaper headlines and magazine covers: RELEASE THE NEXT DARK TOWER BOOK AT ONCE

OR THE BEAR DIES, it said. I put it up in my office to remind myself both of my responsibility and of

how wonderful it is to have people actually care - a little-about the creatures of one's imagination.

In any case, I've decided to publish The Green Mile in a series of small paperbacks, in the

nineteenthcentury manner, and I hope you'll write and tell me (a) if you liked the story, and (b) if you

liked the seldom used but rather amusing delivery system. It has certainly energized the writing of the

story, although at this moment (a rainy evening in October of 1995) it is still far from done, even in

rough draft, and the outcome remains in some doubt. That is part of the excitement of the whole thing,

though-at this point I'm driving through thick fog with the pedal all the way to the metal.

Most of all, I want to say that if you have even half as much fun reading this as I did writing it, we'll both

be well off. Enjoy ... and why not read this aloud, with a friend? If nothing else, it will shorten the time

until the next installment appears on your newsstand or in your local bookstore.

In the meantime, take care, and be good to one another.

Stephen King

The Green Mile

Part One:

The Two Dead Girls

1.

This happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain. And the electric chair was

there, too, of course.

The inmates made jokes about the chair, the way people always make jokes about things that frighten

them but can't be gotten away from. They called it Old Sparky, or the Big Juicy. They made cracks about

the power bill, and how Warden Moores would cook his Thanksgiving dinner that fall, with his wife,

Melinda, too sick to cook.

But for the ones who actually had to sit down in that chair, the humor went out of the situation in a hurry.

I presided over seventy-eight executions during my time at Cold Mountain (that's one figure I've never

been confused about; I'll remember it on my deathbed), and I think that, for most of those men, the truth

of what was happening to them finally hit all the way home when their ankles were being clamped to the

stout oak of "Old Sparky's" legs. The realization came then (you would see it rising in their eyes, a kind

of cold dismay) that their own legs had finished their careers. The blood still ran in them, the muscles

were still strong, but they were finished, all the same; they were never going to walk another country

mile or dance with a girl at a barn-raising. Old Sparky's clients came to a knowledge of their deaths from

the ankles up. There was a black silk bag that went over their heads after they had finished their rambling

and mostly disjointed last remarks. It was supposed to be for them, but I always thought: it was really for

us, to keep us from seeing the awful tide of dismay in their eyes as they realized they were going to die

with their knees bent.

There was no death row at Cold Mountain, only E Block, set apart from the other four and about a

quarter their size, brick instead of wood, with a horrible bare metal roof that glared in the summer sun

like a delirious eyeball. Six cells inside, three on each side of a wide center aisle, each almost twice as

big as the cells in the other four blocks. Singles, too. Great accommodations for a prison (especially in

the thirties), but the inmates would have traded for cells in any of the other four. Believe me, they would

have traded.

There was never a time during my years as block superintendent when all six cells were occupied at one

time-thank God for small favors. Four was the most, mixed black and white (at Cold Mountain, there was

no segregation among the walking dead), and that was a little piece of hell. One was a woman, Beverly

McCall. She was black as the ace of spades and as beautiful as the sin you never had nerve enough to

commit. She put up with six years of her husband beating her, but wouldn't put up with his creeping

around for a single day. On the evening after she found out he was cheating, she stood waiting for the

unfortunate Lester McCall, known to his pals (and, presumably, to his extremely short-term mistress) as

Cutter, at the top of the stairs leading to the apartment over his barber shop. She waited until he got his

overcoat half off, then dropped his cheating guts onto his two-tone shoes. Used one of Cutter's own

razors to do it. Two nights before she was due to sit in Old Sparky, she called me to her cell and said she

had been visited by her African spirit-father in a dream. He told her to discard her slave-name and to die

under her free name, Matuomi. That was her request, that her death warrant should be read under the

name of Beverly Matuomi. I guess her spirit-father didn't give her any first name, or one she could make

out, anyhow. I said yes, okay, fine. One thing those years serving as the bull-goose screw taught me was

never to refuse the condemned unless I absolutely had to. In the case of Beverly Matuomi, it made no

difference anyway. The governor called the next day around three in the afternoon, commuting her

sentence to life in the Grassy Valley Penal Facility for Women-all penal and no penis, we used to say

back then. I was glad to see Bev's round ass going left instead of right when she got to the duty desk, let

me tell you.

Thirty-five years or so later - had to be at least thirty-five - I saw that name on the obituary page of the

paper, under a picture of a skinny-faced black lady with a cloud of white hair and glasses with

rhinestones at the corners. It was Beverly. She'd spent the last ten years of her life a free woman, the

obituary said, and had rescued the small-town library of Raines Falls pretty much single-handed. She had

also taught Sunday school and had been much loved in that little backwater. LIBRARIAN DIES OF

HEART FAILURE, the headline said, and below that, in smaller type, almost as an afterthought: Served

Over Two Decades in Prison for Murder. Only the eyes, wide and blazing behind the glasses with the

rhinestones at the corners, were the same. They were the eyes of a woman who even at seventy-whatever

would not hesitate to pluck a safety razor from its blue jar of disinfectant, if the urge seemed pressing.

You know murderers, even if they finish up as old lady librarians in dozey little towns. At least you do if

you've spent as much time minding murderers as I did. There was only one time I ever had a question

about the nature of my job. That, I reckon, is why I'm writing this.

The wide corridor up the center of E Block was floored with linoleum the color of tired old limes, and so

what was called the Last Mile at other prisons was called the Green Mile at Cold Mountain. It ran, I

guess, sixty long paces from south to north, bottom to top. At the bottom was the restraint room. At the

top end was a T-junction. A left turn meant life-if you called what went on in the sunbaked exercise yard

life, and many did; many lived it for years, with no apparent ill effects. Thieves and arsonists and sex

criminals, all talking their talk and walking their walk and making their little deals.

A right turn, though - that was different. First you went into my office (where the carpet was also green,

a thing I kept meaning to change and not getting around to), and crossed in front of my desk, which was

flanked by the American flag on the left and the state flag on the right. On the far side were two doors.

One led into the small W.C. that I and the Block E guards (sometimes even Warden Moores) used; the

other opened on a kind of storage shed. This was where you ended up when you walked the Green Mile.

It was a small door - I had to duck my head when I went through, and John Coffey actually had to sit and

scoot. You came out on a little landing, then went down three cement steps to a board floor. It was a

miserable room without heat and with a metal roof, just like the one on the block to which it was an

adjunct. It was cold enough in there to see your breath during the winter, and stifling in the summer. At

the execution of Elmer Manfred - in July or August of '30, that one was, I believe-we had nine witnesses

pass out.

On the left side of the storage shed - again - there was life. Tools (all locked down in frames

criss-crossed with chains, as if they were carbine rifles instead of spades and pickaxes), dry goods, sacks

of seeds for spring planting in the prison gardens, boxes of toilet paper, pallets cross-loaded with blanks

for the prison plate-shop... even bags of lime for marking out the baseball diamond and the football

gridiron - the cons played in what was known as The Pasture, and fall afternoons were greatly looked

forward to at Cold Mountain.

On the right - once again - death. Old Sparky his ownself, sitting up on a plank platform at the southeast

corner of the store room, stout oak legs, broad oak arms that had absorbed the terrorized sweat of scores

of men in the last few minutes of their lives, and the metal cap, usually hung jauntily on the back of the

chair, like some robot kid's beanie in a Buck Rogers comic-strip. A cord ran from it and through a

gasket-circled hole in the cinderblock wall behind the chair. Off to one side was a galvanized tin bucket.

If you looked inside it, you would see a circle of sponge, cut just right to fit the metal cap. Before

executions, it was soaked in brine to better conduct the charge of direct-current electricity that ran

through the wire, through the sponge, and into the condemned man's brain.

2.

1932 was the year of John Coffey. The details would be in the papers, still there for anyone who cared

enough to look them out - someone with more energy than one very old man whittling away the end of

his life in a Georgia nursing home. That was

a hot fall, I remember that; very hot, indeed. October almost like August, and the warden's wife, Melinda,

up in the hospital at Indianola for a spell. It was the fall I had the worst urinary infection of my life, not

bad enough to put me in the hospital myself, but almost bad enough for me to wish I was dead every time

I took a leak. It was the fall of Delacroix, the little half-bald Frenchman with the mouse, the one that

came in the summer and did that cute trick with the spool. Mostly, though, it was the fall that John

Coffey came to E Block, sentenced to death for the rape-murder of the Detterick twins.

There were four or five guards on the block each shift, but a lot of them were floaters. Dean Stanton,

Harry Terwilliger, and Brutus Howell (the men called him "Brutal," but it was a joke, he wouldn't hurt a

fly unless he had to, in spite of his size) are all dead now, and so is Percy Wetmore, who really was

brutal ... not to mention stupid. Percy had no business on E Block, where an ugly nature was useless and

sometimes dangerous, but he was related to the governor by marriage, and so he stayed.

It was Percy Wetmore who ushered Coffey onto the block, with the supposedly traditional cry of "Dead

man walking! Dead man walking here!"

It was still as hot as the hinges of hell, October or not. The door to the exercise yard opened, letting in a

flood of brilliant light and the biggest man I've ever seen, except for some of the basketball fellows they

have on the TV down in the "Resource Room" of this home for wayward droolers I've finished up in. He

wore chains on his arms and across his water-barrel of a chest; he wore legirons on his ankles and

shuffled a chain between them that sounded like cascading coins as it ran along the lime - colored

corridor between the cells. Percy Wetmore was on one side of him, skinny little Harry Terwilliger was on

the other, and they looked like children walking along with a captured bear. Even Brutus Howell looked

like a kid next to Coffey, and Brutal was over six feet tall and broad as well, a football tackle who had

gone on to play at LSU until he flunked out and came back home to the ridges.

John Coffey was black, like most of the men who came to stay for awhile in E Block before dying in Old

Sparky's lap, and he stood six feet, eight inches tall. He wasn't all willowy like the TV basketball fellows,

though - he was broad in the shoulders and deep through the chest, laced over with muscle in every

direction. They'd put him in the biggest denims they could find in Stores, and still the cuffs of the pants

rode halfway up on his bunched and scarred calves. The shirt was open to below his chest, and the

sleeves stopped somewhere on his forearms. He was holding his cap in one huge hand, which was just as

well; perched on his bald mahogany ball of a head, it would have looked like the kind of cap an

organgrinder's monkey wears, only blue instead of red. He looked like he could have snapped the chains

that held him as easily as you might snap the ribbons on a Christmas present, but when you looked in his

face, you knew he wasn't going to do anything like that. It wasn't dull-although that was what Percy

thought, it wasn't long before Percy was calling him the ijit - but lost. He kept looking around as if to

make out where he was. Maybe even who he was. My first thought was that he looked like a black

Samson ... only after Delilah had shaved him smooth as her faithless little hand and taken all the fun out

of him.

"Dead man walking!" Percy trumpeted, hauling on that bear of a man's wristcuff, as if he really believed

he could move him if Coffey decided he didn't want to move anymore on his own. Harry didn't say

anything, but he looked embarrassed. "Dead man---!'

'That'll be enough of that," I said. I was in what was going to be Coffey's cell, sitting on his bunk. I'd

known he was coming, of course, was there to welcome him and take charge of him, but had no idea of

the man's pure size until I saw him. Percy gave me a look that said we all knew I was an asshole (except

for the big dummy, of course, who only knew how to rape and murder little girls), but he didn't say

anything.

The three of them stopped outside the cell door, which was standing open on its track. I nodded to Harry,

who said: "Are you sure you want to be in there with him, boss?" I didn't often hear Harry Terwilliger

sound nervous - he'd been right there by my side during the riots of six or seven years before and had

never wavered, even when the rumors that some of them had guns began to circulate - but he sounded

nervous then.

"Am I going to have any trouble with you, big boy?" I asked, sitting there on the bunk and trying not to

look or sound as miserable as I felt-that urinary infection I mentioned earlier wasn't as bad as it

eventually got, but it was no day at the beach, let me tell you.

Coffey shook his head slowly - once to the left, once to the right, then back to dead center. Once his eyes

found me, they never left me.

Harry had a clipboard with Coffey's forms on it in one hand. "Give it to him," I said to Harry "Put it in

his hand."

Harry did. The big mutt took it like a sleepwalker.

"Now bring it to me, big boy," I said, and Coffey did, his chains jingling and rattling. He had to duck his

head just to enter the cell.

I looked up and down mostly to register his height as a fact and not an optical illusion. It was real: six

feet, eight inches. His weight was given as two-eighty, but I think that was only an estimate; he had to

have been three hundred and twenty, maybe as much as three hundred and fifty pounds. Under the space

for scars and identifying marks, one word had been blocked out in the laborious printing of Magnusson,

the old trusty in Registration: Numerous.

I looked up. Coffey had shuffled a bit to one side and I could see Harry standing across the corridor in

front of Delacroix's cell - he was our only other prisoner in E Block when Coffey came in. Del was a

slight, balding man with the worried face of an accountant who knows his embezzlement will soon be

discovered. His tame mouse was sitting on his shoulder.

Percy Wetmore was leaning in the doorway of the cell which had just become John Coffey's. He had

taken his hickory baton out of the custom-made holster he carried it in, and was tapping it against one

palm the way a man does when he has a toy he wants to use. And all at once I couldn't stand to have him

there. Maybe it was the unseasonable heat, maybe it was the urinary infection heating up my groin and

making the itch of my flannel underwear all but unbearable, maybe it was knowing that the state had sent

me a black man next door to an idiot to execute, and Percy clearly wanted to hand-tool him a little first.

Probably it was all those things. Whatever it was, I stopped caring about his political connections for a

little while.

"Percy." I said. "They're moving house over in the infirmary."

"Bill Dodge is in charge of that detail-"

"I know he is," I said. "Go and help him."

'That isn't my job," Percy said. "This big lugoon is my job." "Lugoon" was Percy's joke name for the big

ones - a combination of lug and goon. He resented the big ones. He wasn't skinny, like Harry Terwilliger,

but he was short. A banty-rooster sort of guy, the kind that likes to pick fights, especially when the odds

are all their way. And vain about his hair. Could hardly keep his hands off it.

"Then your job is done," I said. "Get over to the infirmary."

His lower lip pooched out. Bill Dodge and his men were moving boxes and stacks of sheets, even the

beds; the whole infirmary was going to a new frame building over on the west side of the prison. Hot

work, heavy lifting. Percy Wetmore wanted no part of either.

"They got all the men they need," he said.

"Then get over there and straw-boss," I said, raising my voice. I saw Harry wince and paid no attention.

If the governor ordered Warden Moores to fire me for ruffling the wrong set of feathers, who was Hal

Moores going to put in my place? Percy? It was a joke. "I really don't care what you do, Percy, as long as

you get out of here for awhile!'

For a moment I thought he was going to stick and there'd be real trouble, with Coffey standing there the

whole time like the world's biggest stopped clock. Then Percy rammed his billy back into its hand-tooled

holster-foolish damned vanitorious thing - and went stalking up the corridor. I don't remember which

guard was sitting at the duty desk that day-one of the floaters, I guess - but Percy must not have liked the

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