The Mouse on the Mile 10 page

"I need to see you."

"Ain't you looking right at me, John Coffey?"

He said nothing to this, only went on studying me with his strange, leaky gaze. I sighed.

"In a second, big boy."

I looked over at Delacroix, who was standing at the bars of his cell. Mr. Jingles, his pet mouse (Delacroix

would tell you he'd trained Mr. Jingles to do tricks, but us folks who worked on the Green Mile were

pretty much unanimous in the opinion that Mr. Jingles had trained himself), was jumping restlessly back

and forth from one of Del's outstretched hands to the other, like an acrobat doing leaps from platforms

high above the center ring. His eyes were huge, his ears laid back against his sleek brown skull. I hadn't

any doubt that the mouse was reacting to Delacroix's nerves. As I watched, he ran down Delacroix's

pants leg and across the cell to where the brightly colored spool lay against one wall. He pushed the

spool back to Delacroix's foot and then looked up at him eagerly, but the little Cajun took no notice of his

friend, at least for the time being.

"What happen, boss?" Delacroix asked. "Who been hurt?"

"Everything's jake," I said. "Our new boy came in like a lion, but now he's passed out like a lamb. All's

well that ends well."

"It ain't over yet," Delacroix said, looking up the Mile toward the cell where Wharton was jugged.

"L'homme mauvais, c'est"

"Well," I said, "don't let it get you down, Del. Nobody's going to make you play skiprope with him out in

the yard."

There was a creaking sound from behind me as Coffey got off his bunk. "Boss Edgecombe!" he said

again. This time he sounded urgent. "I need to talk to you!"

I turned to him, thinking, all right, no problem, talking was my business. All the time trying not to shiver,

because the fever had turned cold, as they sometimes will. Except for my groin, which still felt as if it

had been slit open, filled with hot coals, and then sewed back up again.

"So talk, John Coffey," I said, trying to keep my voice light and calm. For the first time since he'd come

onto E Block, Coffey looked as though he was really here, really among us. The almost ceaseless trickle

of tears from the corners of his eyes had ceased, at least for the time being, and I knew he was seeing

what he was looking at - Mr. Paul Edgecombe, E Block's bull-goose screw, and not some place he

wished he could return to, and take back the terrible thing he'd done.

"No," he said. "You got to come in here."

"Now, you know I can't do that," I said, still trying for the light tone, "at least not right this minute. I'm

on my own here for the time being, and you outweigh me by just about a ton and a half. We've had us

one hooraw this afternoon, and that's enough. So we'll just have us a chat through the bars, if it's all the

same to you, and - "

"Please!" He was holding the bars so tightly that his knuckles were pale and his fingernails were white.

His face was long with distress, those strange eyes sharp with some need I could not understand. I

remember thinking that maybe I could've understood it if I hadn't been so sick, and knowing that would

have given me a way of helping him through the rest of it. When you know what a man needs, you know

the man, more often than not. "Please, Boss Edgecombe! You have to come in!"

That's the nuttiest thing I ever heard, I thought, and then realized something even nuttier: I was going to

do it. I had my keys off my belt and I was hunting through them for the ones that opened John Coffey's

cell. He could have picked me up and broken me over his knee like kindling on a day when I was well

and feeling fine, and this wasn't that day. All the same, I was going to do it. On my own, and less than

half an hour after a graphic demonstration of where stupidity and laxness could get you when you were

dealing with condemned murderers, I was going to open this black giant's cell, go in, and sit with him. If

I was discovered, I might well lose my job even if he didn't do anything crazy, but I was going to do it,

just the same.

Stop, I said to myself, you just stop now, Paul. But I didn't. I used one key on the top lock, another on the

bottom lock, and then I slid the door back on its track.

"You know, boss, that maybe not such a good idear," Delacroix said in a voice so nervous and prissy it

would probably have made me laugh under other circumstances.

"You mind your business and I'll mind mine," I said without looking around. My eyes were fixed on John

Coffey's, and fixed so hard they might have been nailed there. It was like being hypnotized. My voice

sounded to my own ears like something which had come echoing down a long valley. Hell, maybe I was

hypnotized. "You just lie down and take you a rest."

"Christ, this place is crazy," Delacroix said in a trembling voice. "Mr. Jingles, I just about wish they'd fry

me and be done widdit!"

I went into Coffey's cell. He stepped away as I stepped forward. When he was backed up against his

bunk - it hit him in the calves, that's how tall he was - he sat down on it. He patted the mattress beside

him, his eyes never once leaving mine. I sat down there next to him, and he put his arm around my

shoulders, as if we were at the movies and I was his girl.

"What do you want, John Coffey?" I asked, still looking into his eyes - those sad, serene eyes.

"Just to help," he said. He sighed like a man will when he's faced with a job he doesn't much want to do,

and then he put his hand down in my crotch, on that shelf of bone a foot or so below the navel.

"Hey!" I cried. "Get your goddam hand---"

A jolt slammed through me then, a big painless whack of something. It made me jerk on the cot and bow

my back, made me think of Old Toot shouting that he was frying, he was frying, he was a done tom

turkey. There was no heat, no feeling of electricity, but for a moment the color seemed to jump out of

everything, as if the world had been somehow squeezed and made to sweat. I could see every pore on

john Coffey's face, I could see every bloodshot snap in his haunted eyes, I could see a tiny healing scrape

on his chin. I was aware that my fingers were hooked down into claws on thin air, and that my feet were

drumming on the floor of Coffey's cell.

Then it was over. So was my urinary infection. Both the heat and the miserable throbbing pain were gone

from my crotch, and the fever was likewise gone from my head. I could still feel the sweat it had drawn

out of my skin, and I could smell it, but it was gone, all right.

"What's going on?" Delacroix called shrilly. His voice still came from far away, but when John Coffey

bent forward, breaking eye-contact with me, the little Cajun's voice suddenly came clear. It was as if

someone had pulled wads of cotton or a pair of shooters' plugs out of my ears. "What's he doing to you?"

I didn't answer. Coffey was bent forward over his own lap with his face working and his throat bulging.

His eyes were bulging, too. He looked like a man with a chicken bone caught in his throat.

"John!" I said. I clapped him on the back; it was all I could think of to do. "John, what's wrong?"

He hitched under my hand, then made an unpleasant gagging, retching sound. His mouth opened the way

horses sometimes open their mouths to allow the bit - reluctantly, with the lips peeling back from the

teeth in a kind of desperate sneer. Then his teeth parted, too, and he exhaled a cloud of tiny black insects

that looked like gnats or noseeums. They swirled furiously between his knees, turned white, and

disappeared.

Suddenly all the strength went out of my middsection. It was as if the muscles there had turned to water.

I slumped back against the stone side of Coffey's cell. I remember thinking the name of the Savior -

Christ, Christ, Christ, over and over, like that - and I remember thinking that the fever had driven me

delirious. That was all.

Then I became aware that Delacroix was bawling for help; he was telling the world that John Coffey was

killing me, and telling it at the top of his lungs. Coffey was bending over me, all right, but only to make

sure I was okay.

"Shut up, Del," I said, and got on my feet. I waited for the pain to rip into my guts, but it didn't happen. I

was better. Really. There was a moment of dizziness, but that passed even before I was able to reach out

and grab the bars of Coffey's cell door for balance. "I'm totally okey-doke."

"You get on outta here," Delacroix said, sounding like a nervy old woman telling a kid to climb down out

of that-ere apple tree. "You ain't suppose to be in there wit no one else on the block."

I looked at John Coffey, who sat on the bunk with his huge hands on the tree stumps of his knees. John

Coffey looked back at me. He had to tilt his head up a little, but not much.

"What did you do, big boy?" I asked in a low voice. "What did you do to me?"

"Helped," he said. "I helped it, didn't I?"

"Yeah, I guess, but how? How did you help it?"

He shook his head - right, left, back to dead center. He didn't know how he'd helped it (how he'd cured it)

and his placid face suggested that he didn't give a rat's ass - any more than I'd give a rat's ass about the

mechanics of running when I was leading in the last fifty yards of a Fourth of July Two-Miler. I thought

about asking him how he'd known I was sick in the first place, except that would undoubtedly have

gotten the same headshake. There's a phrase I read somewhere and never forgot, something about "an

enigma wrapped in a mystery." That's what John Coffey was, and I suppose the only reason he could

sleep at night was because he didn't care. Percy called him the ijit, which was cruel but not too far off the

mark. Our big boy knew his name, and knew it wasn't spelled like the drink, and that was just about all

he cared to know.

As if to emphasize this for me, he shook his head m that deliberate way one more time, then lay down on

his bunk with his hands clasped under his left cheek like a pillow and his face to the wall. His legs

dangled off the end of the bunk from the shins on down, but that never seemed to bother him. The back

of his shirt had pulled up, and I could see the scars that crisscrossed his skin.

I left the cell, turned the locks, then faced Delacroix, who was standing across the way with his hands

wrapped around the bars of his cell, looking at me anxiously. Perhaps even fearfully. Mr. Jingles perched

on his shoulder with his fine whiskers quivering like filaments. "What dat darkie-man do to you?"

Delacroix asked. "Waddit gris-gris? He th'ow some gris-gris on you?" Spoken in that Cajun accent of his,

gris-gris rhymed with pee-pee.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Del."

"Devil you don't! Lookit you! All change! Even walk different, boss!"

I probably was walking different, at that. There was a beautiful feeling of calm in my groin, a sense of

peace so remarkable it was almost eestasy - anyone who's suffered bad pain and then recovered will

know what I'm talking about.

"Everything's all right, Del," I insisted. "John Coffey had a nightmare, that's all."

"He a gris-gris man!" Delacroix said vehemently. There was a nestle of sweat-beads on his upper lip. He

hadn't seen much, just enough to scare him half to death. "He a hoodoo man!"

"What makes you say that?"

Delacroix reached up and took the mouse in one hand. He cupped it in his palm and lifted it to his face.

From his pocket, Delacroix took out a pink fragment - one of those peppermint candies. He held it out,

but at first the mouse ignored it, stretching out its neck toward the man instead, sniffing at his breath the

way a person might sniff at a bouquet of flowers. Its little oildrop eyes slitted most of the way closed in

an expression that looked like ecstasy. Delacroix kissed its nose, and the mouse allowed its nose to be

kissed. Then it took the offered piece of candy and began to munch it. Delacroix looked at it a moment

longer, then looked at me. All at once I got it.

"The mouse told you," I said. "Am I right?"

"Oui."

"Like he whispered his name to you."

"Oui, in my ear he whisper it."

"Lie down, Del," I said. "Have you a little rest. All that whispering back and forth must wear you out."

He said something else-accused me of not believing him, I suppose. His voice seemed to be coming from

a long way off again. And when I went back up to the duty desk, I hardly seemed to be walking at all - it

was more like I was floating, or maybe not even moving, the cells just rolling past me on either side,

movie props on hidden wheels.

I started to sit like normal, but halfway into it my knees unlocked and I dropped onto the blue cushion

Harry had brought from home the year before and plopped onto the seat of the chair. If the chair hadn't

been there, I reckon I would have plopped straight to the floor without passing Go or collecting two

hundred dollars.

I sat there, feeling the nothing in my groin where a forest fire had been blazing not ten minutes before. I

helped it, didn't I? John Coffey had said, and that was true, as far as my body went. My peace of mind

was a different story, though. That he hadn't helped at all.

My eyes fell on the stack of forms under the tin ashtray we kept on the corner of the desk. BLOCK

REPORT was printed at the top, and about halfway down was a blank space headed Report All Unusual

Occurrences. I would use that space in tonight's report, telling the story of William Wharton's colorful

and action-packed arrival. But suppose I also told what had happened to me in John Coffey's cell? I saw

myself picking up the pencil - the one whose tip Brutal was always licking - and writing a single word in

big capital letters: MIRACLE.

That should have been funny, but instead of smiling, all at once I felt sure that I was going to cry I put my

hands to my face, palms against my mouth to stifle the sobs - I didn't want to scare Del again just when

he was starting to get settled down - but no sobs came. No tears, either. After a few moments I lowered

my hands back to the desk and folded them. I didn't know what I was feeling, and the only clear thought

in my head was a wish that no one should come back onto the block until I was a little more in control of

myself. I was afraid of what they might see in my face.

I drew a Block Report form toward me. I would wait until I had settled down a bit more to write about

how my latest problem child had almost strangled Dean Stanton, but I could fill out the rest of the

boilerplate foolishness in the meantime. I thought my handwriting might look funny - trembly - but it

came out about the same as always.

About five minutes after I started, I put the pencil down and went into the W.C. adjacent to my office to

take a leak. I didn't need to go very bad, but I could manage enough to test what had happened to me, I

thought. As I stood there, waiting for my water to flow, I became sure that it would hurt just the way it

had that morning, as if I were passing tiny shards of broken glass; what he'd done to me would turn out to

be only hypnosis, after all, and that might be a relief in spite of the pain.

Except there was no pain, and what went into the bowl was clear, with no sign of pus. I buttoned my fly,

pulled the chain that flushed the commode, went back to the duty desk, and sat down again.

I knew what had happened; I suppose I knew even when I was trying to tell myself I'd been hypnotized.

I'd experienced a healing, an authentic Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty. As a boy who'd grown up going

to whatever Baptist or Pentecostal church my mother and her sisters happened to be in favor of during

any given month, I had heard plenty of Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty miracle stories. I didn't believe

all of them, but there were plenty of people I did believe. One of these was a man named Roy Delfines,

who lived with his family about two miles down the road from us when I was six or so. Delfines had

chopped his son's little finger off with a hatchet, an accident which had occurred when the boy

unexpectedly moved his hand on a log he'd been holding on the backyard chopping block for his dad.

Roy Delfines said he had practically worn out the carpet with his knees that fall and winter, and in the

spring the boy's finger had grown back. Even the nail had grown back. I believed Roy Delfines when he

testified at Thursday-night rejoicing. There was a naked, uncomplicated honesty in what he said as he

stood there talking with his hands jammed deep into the pockets of his biballs that was impossible not to

believe. "It itch him some when thet finger started coming, kep him awake nights," Roy Delfines said,

"but he knowed it was the Lord's itch and let it be." Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty.

Roy Delfines's story was only one of many; I grew up in a tradition of miracles and healings. I grew up

believing in gris-gris, as well (only, up in the hills we said it to rhyme with kiss-kiss): stump-water for

warts, moss under your pillow to ease the heartache of lost love, and, of course, what we used to call

haints - but I did not believe John Coffey was a gris-gris man. I had looked into his eyes. More

important,' I had felt his touch. Being touched by him was like being touched by some strange and

wonderful doctor.

I helped it, didn't I?

That kept chiming in my head, like a snatch of song you can't get rid of, or words you'd speak to set a

spell.

I helped it, didn't I?

Except he hadn't. God had. John Coffey's use of "I" could be chalked up to ignorance rather than pride,

but I knew - believed, at least - what I had learned about healing in those churches of Praise Jesus, The

Lord Is Mighty, piney-woods amen corners much beloved by my twenty-two-year-old mother and my

aunts: that healing is never about the healed or the healer, but about God's will. For one to rejoice at the

sick made well is normal, quite the expected thing, but the person healed has an obligation to then ask

why - to meditate on God's will, and the extraordinary lengths to which God has gone to realize His will.

What did God want of me, in this case? What did He want badly enough to put healing power in the

hands of a child-murderer? To be on the block, instead of at home, sick as a dog, shivering in bed with

the stink of sulfa running out of my pores? Perhaps; I was maybe supposed to be here instead of home in

case Wild Bill Wharton decided to kick up more dickens, or to make sure Percy Wetmore didn't get up to

some foolish and potentially destructive piece of fuckery All right, then. So be it. I would keep my eyes

open - and my mouth shut, especially about miracle cures.

No one was apt to question my looking and sounding better; I'd been telling the world I was getting

better, and until that very day I'd honestly believed it. I had even told Warden Moores that I was on the

mend. Delacroix had seen something, but I thought he would keep his mouth shut, too (probably afraid

John Coffey would throw a spell on him if he didn't). As for Coffey himself, he'd probably already

forgotten it. He was nothing but a conduit, after all, and there isn't a culvert in the world that remembers

the water that flowed through it once the rain has stopped. So I resolved to keep my mouth completely

shut on the subject, with never an idea of how soon I'd be telling the story, or who I'd be telling it to.

But I was curious about my big boy, and there's no sense not admitting it. After what had happened to me

there in his cell, I was more curious than ever.

4.

Before leaving that night, I arranged with Brutal to cover for me the next day, should I come in a little

late, and when I got up the following morning, I set out for Tefton, down in Trapingus County.

"I'm not sure I like you worrying so much about this fellow Coffey," my wife said, handing me the lunch

she'd put up for me-Janice never believed in roadside hamburger stands; she used to say there was a

bellyache waiting in every one. "It's not like you, Paul."

"I'm not worried about him," I said. "I'm curious, that's all."

"In my experience, one leads to the other," Janice said tartly, then gave me a good, hearty kiss on the

mouth. "You look better, at least, I'll say that. For awhile there, you had me nervous. Waterworks all

cured up?"

"All cured up," I said, and off I went, singing songs like "Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine" and

'We're in the Money" to keep myself company.

I went to the offices of the Tefton Intelligencer first, and they told me that Burt Hammersmith, the fellow

I was looking for, was most likely over at the county courthouse. At the courthouse they told me that

Hammersmith had been there but had left when a burst waterpipe had closed down the main proceedings,

which happened to be a rape trial (in the pages of the Intelligencer the crime would be referred to as

"assault on a woman," which was how such things were done in the days before Ricki Lake and Carnie

Wilson came on the scene). They guessed he'd probably gone on home. I got some directions out a dirt

road so rutted and narrow I just about didn't dare take my Ford up it, and there I found my man.

Hammersmith had written most of the stories on the Coffey trial, and it was from him I found out most of

the details about the brief manhunt that had netted Coffey in the first place. The details the Intelligencer

considered too gruesome to print is what I mean, of course.

Mrs. Hammersmith was a young woman with a tired, pretty face and hands red from lye soap. She didn't

ask my business, just led me through a small house fragrant with the smell of baking and onto the back

porch, where her husband sat with a bottle of pop in his hand and an unopened copy of Liberty magazine

on his lap. There was a small, sloping backyard; at the foot of it, two little ones were squabbling and

laughing over a swing. From the porch, it was impossible to tell their sexes, but I thought they were boy

and girl. Maybe even twins, which cast an interesting sort of light on their father's part, peripheral as it

had been, in the Coffey trial. Nearer at hand, set like an island in the middle of a turdstudded patch of

bare, beatup-looking ground, was a doghouse. No sign of Fido; it was another unseasonably hot day, and

I guessed he was probably inside, snoozing.

"Burt, yew-all got you a cump'ny," Mrs. Hammersmith said.

"Allright," he said. He glanced at me, glanced at his wife, then looked back at his kids, which was where

his heart obviously lay. He was a thin man - almost painfully thin, as if he had just begun to recover from

a serious illness - and his hair had started to recede. His wife touched his shoulder tentatively with one of

her red, wash-swollen hands. He didn't look at it or reach up to touch it, and after a moment she took it

back. It occurred to me, fleetingly, that they looked more like brother and sister than husband and wife -

he'd gotten the brains, she'd gotten the looks, but neither of them had escaped some underlying

resemblance, a heredity that could never be escaped. Later, going home, I realized they didn't look alike

at all; what made them seem to was the aftermath of stress and the lingering of sorrow. It's strange how

pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.

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

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 646