“Just who do you think you are?” he asked her. He was hulking over her, now, trying to laugh and not quite making it.
“I think,” she said calmly, “that I am the grandmother of the man who is currently Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives. A man who loves his relatives, Mr. Dolan. Especially his older relatives.”
The effortful smile dropped off his face the way that writing comes off a blackboard swiped with a wet sponge. I saw uncertainty, the possibility that he was being bluffed, the fear that he was not, and a certain dawning logical assumption: it would be easy enough to check, she must know that, ergo she was telling the truth.
Suddenly I began to laugh, and although the sound was rusty, it was right. I was remembering how many times Percy Wetmore had threatened us with his connections, back in the bad old days. Now, for the first time in my long, long life, such a threat was being made again… but this time it was being made on my behalf.
Brad Dolan looked at me, glaring, then looked back at her.
“I mean it,” Elaine said. “At first I thought I’d just let you be—I’m old, and that seemed easiest. But when my friends are threatened and abused, I do not just let be. Now get out of here. And without one more word.”
His lips moved like those of a fish—oh, how badly he wanted to say that one more word (perhaps the one that rhymes with witch). He didn’t, though. He gave me a final look, and then strode past her and out into the hall.
I let out my breath in a long, ragged sigh as Elaine set the tray down in front of me and then set herself down across from me. “Is your grandson really Speaker of the House?” I asked.
“He really is.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Speaker of the statehouse makes him powerful enough to deal with a roach like Brad Dolan, but it doesn’t make him rich,” she said, laughing. “Besides, I like it here. I like the company.”
“I will take that as a compliment,” I said, and I did.
“Paul, are you all right? You look so tired.” She reached across the table and brushed my hair away from my forehead and eyebrows. Her fingers were twisted, but her touch was cool and wonderful. I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them again, I had made a decision.
“I’m all right,” I said. “And almost finished. Elaine, would you read something?” I offered her the pages I had clumsily swept together. They were probably no longer in the right order—Dolan really had scared me badly—but they were numbered and she could quickly put them right.
She looked at me consideringly, not taking what I was offering. Yet, anyway. “Are you done?”
“It’ll take you until afternoon to read what’s there,” I said. “If you can make it out at all, that is.”
Now she did take the pages, and looked down at them. “You write with a very fine hand, even when that hand is obviously tired,” she said. “I’ll have no trouble with this.”
“By the time you finish reading, I will have finished writing,” I said. “You can read the rest in a half an hour or so. And then… if you’re still willing… I’d like to show you something.”
“Is it to do with where you go most mornings and afternoons?”
I nodded.
She sat thinking about it for what seemed a long time, then nodded herself and got up with the pages in her hand. “I’ll go out back,” she said. “The sun is very warm this morning.”
“And the dragon’s been vanquished,” I said. “This time by the lady fair.”
She smiled, bent, and kissed me over the eyebrow in the sensitive place that always makes me shiver. “We’ll hope so,” she said, “but in my experience, dragons like Brad Dolan are hard to get rid of.” She hesitated. “Good luck, Paul. I hope you can vanquish whatever it is that has been festering in you.”
“I hope so, too,” I said, and thought of John Coffey. I couldn’t help it, John had said. I tried, but it was too late.
I ate the eggs she’d brought, drank the juice, and pushed the toast aside for later. Then I picked up my pen and began to write again, for what I hoped would be the last time.
One last mile.
A green one.
2
WHEN WE BROUGHT JOHN back to E Block that night, the gurney was a necessity instead of a luxury. I very much doubt if he could have made it the length of the tunnel on his own; it takes more energy to walk at a crouch than it does upright, and it was a damned low ceiling for the likes of John Coffey. I didn’t like to think of him collapsing down there. How would we explain that, on top of trying to explain why we had dressed Percy in the madman’s dinner-jacket and tossed him in the restraint room?
But we had the gurney—thank God—and John Coffey lay on it like a beached whale as we pushed him back to the storage-room stairs. He got down off it, staggered, then simply stood with his head lowered, breathing harshly. His skin was so gray he looked as if he’d been rolled in flour. I thought he’d be in the infirmary by noon… if he wasn’t dead by noon, that was.
Brutal gave me a grim, desperate look. I gave it right back. “We can’t carry him up, but we can help him,” I said. “You under his right arm, me under his left.”
“What about me?” Harry asked.
“Walk behind us. If he looks like going over backward, shove him forward again.”
“And if that don’t work, kinda crouch down where you think he’s gonna land and soften the blow,” Brutal said.
“Gosh,” Harry said thinly, “you oughta go on the Orpheum Circuit, Brute, that’s how funny you are.”
“I got a sense of humor, all right,” Brutal admitted.
In the end, we did manage to get John up the stairs. My biggest worry was that he might faint, but he didn’t. “Go around me and check to make sure the storage room’s empty,” I gasped to Harry.
“What should I say if it’s not?” Harry asked, squeezing under my arm. “‘Avon calling,’ and then pop back in here?”
“Don’t be a wisenheimer,” Brutal said.
Harry eased the door open a little way and poked his head through. It seemed to me that he stayed that way for a very long time. At last he pulled back, looking almost cheerful. “Coast’s clear. And it’s quiet.”
“Let’s hope it stays that way,” Brutal said. “Come on, John Coffey, almost home.”
He was able to cross the storage room under his own power, but we had to help him up the three steps to my office and then almost push him through the little door. When he got to his feet again, he was breathing stertorously, and his eyes had a glassy sheen. Also—I noticed this with real horror—the right side of his mouth had pulled down, making it look like Melinda’s had, when we walked into her room and saw her propped up on her pillows.
Dean heard us and came in from the desk at the head of the Green Mile. “Thank God! I thought you were never coming back, I’d half made up my mind you were caught, or the Warden plugged you, or—” He broke off, really seeing John for the first time. “Holy cats, what’s wrong with him? He looks like he’s dying!”
“He’s not dying… are you, John?” Brutal said. His eyes flashed Dean a warning.
“Course not, I didn’t mean actually dyin”—Dean gave a nervous little laugh—“but, jeepers…”
“Never mind,” I said. “Help us get him back to his cell.”
Once again we were foothills surrounding a mountain, but now it was a mountain that had suffered a few million years’ worth of erosion, one that was blunted and sad. John Coffey moved slowly, breathing through his mouth like an old man who smoked too much, but at least he moved.