By three that afternoon I was well up in the ridge country. I got to the Purdom County Courthouse just before it closed, looked at some records, then had a visit from the Sheriff, who had been informed by the county clerk that a stranger was poking in amongst the local skeletons. Sheriff Catlett wanted to know what I thought I was doing. I told him. Catlett thought it over and then told me something interesting. He said he’d deny he’d ever said a word if I spread it around, and it wasn’t conclusive anyway, but it was something, all right. It was sure something. I thought about it all the way home, and that night there was a lot of thinking and precious little sleeping on my side of the bed.
The next day I got up while the sun was still just a rumor in the east and drove downstate to Trapingus County. I skirted around Homer Cribus, that great bag of guts and waters, speaking to Deputy Sheriff Rob McGee instead. McGee didn’t want to hear what I was telling him. Most vehemently didn’t want to hear it. At one point I was pretty sure he was going to punch me in the mouth so he could stop hearing it, but in the end he agreed to go out and ask Klaus Detterick a couple of questions. Mostly, I think, so he could be sure I wouldn’t. “He’s only thirty-nine, but he looks like an old man these days,” McGee said, “and he don’t need a smartass prison guard who thinks he’s a detective to stir him up just when some of the sorrow has started to settle. You stay right here in town. I don’t want you within hailing distance of the Detterick farm, but I want to be able to find you when I’m done talking to Klaus. If you start feeling restless, have a piece of pie down there in the diner. It’ll weight you down.” I ended up having two pieces, and it was kind of heavy.
When McGee came into the diner and sat down at the counter next to me, I tried to read his face and failed. “Well?” I asked.
“Come on home with me, we’ll talk there,” he said. “This place is a mite too public for my taste.”
We had our conference on Rob McGee’s front porch. Both of us were bundled up and chilly, but Mrs. McGee didn’t allow smoking anywhere in her house. She was a woman ahead of her time. McGee talked awhile. He did it like a man who doesn’t in the least enjoy what he’s hearing out of his own mouth.
“It proves nothing, you know that, don’t you?” he asked when he was pretty well done. His tone was belligerent, and he poked his home-rolled cigarette at me in an aggressive way as he spoke, but his face was sick. Not all proof is what you see and hear in a court of law, and we both knew it. I have an idea that was the only time in his life when Deputy McGee wished he was as country-dumb as his boss.
“I know,” I said.
“And if you’re thinking of getting him a new trial on the basis of this one thing, you better think again, señor. John Coffey is a Negro, and in Trapingus County we’re awful particular about giving new trials to Negroes.”
“I know that, too.”
“So what are you going to do?”
I pitched my cigarette over the porch rail and into the street. Then I stood up. It was going to be a long, cold ride back home, and the sooner I got going the sooner the trip would be done. “That I wish I did know, Deputy McGee,” I said, “but I don’t. The only thing I know tonight for a fact is that second piece of pie was a mistake.”
“I’ll tell you something, smart guy,” he said, still speaking in that tone of hollow belligerence. “I don’t think you should have opened Pandora’s Box in the first place.”
“It wasn’t me opened it,” I said, and then drove home.
I got there late—after midnight—but my wife was waiting up for me. I’d suspected she would be, but it still did my heart good to see her, and to have her put her arms around my neck and her body nice and firm against mine. “Hello, stranger,” she said, and then touched me down below. “Nothing wrong with this fellow now, is there? He’s just as healthy as can be.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and lifted her up in my arms. I took her into the bedroom and we made love as sweet as sugar, and as I came to my climax, that delicious feeling of going out and letting go, I thought of John Coffey’s endlessly weeping eyes. And of Melinda Moores saying I dreamed you were wandering in the dark, and so was I.
Still lying on top of my wife, with her arms around my neck and our thighs together, I began to weep myself.
“Paul!” she said, shocked and afraid. I don’t think she’d seen me in tears more than half a dozen times before in the entire course of our marriage. I have never been, in the ordinary course of things, a crying man. “Paul, what is it?”
“I know everything there is to know,” I said through my tears. “I know too goddam much, if you want to know the truth. I’m supposed to electrocute John Coffey in less than a week’s time, but it was William Wharton who killed the Detterick girls. It was Wild Bill.”
5
THE NEXT DAY, the same bunch of screws who had eaten lunch in my kitchen after the botched Delacroix execution ate lunch there again. This time there was a fifth at our council of war: my wife. It was Jan who convinced me to tell the others; my first impulse had been not to. Wasn’t it bad enough, I asked her, that we knew?
“You’re not thinking clear about it,” she’d answered. “Probably because you’re still upset. They already know the worst thing, that John’s on the spot for a crime he didn’t commit. If anything, this makes it a little better.”
I wasn’t so sure, but I deferred to her judgement. I expected an uproar when I told Brutal, Dean, and Harry what I knew (I couldn’t prove it, but I knew, all right), but at first there was only thoughtful silence. Then, taking another of Janice’s biscuits and beginning to put an outrageous amount of butter on it, Dean said: “Did John see him, do you think? Did he see Wharton drop the girls, maybe even rape them?”
“I think if he’d seen that, he would have tried to stop it,” I said. “As for seeing Wharton, maybe as he ran off, I suppose he might have. If he did, he forgot it later.”
“Sure,” Dean said. “He’s special, but that doesn’t make him bright. He only found out it was Wharton when Wharton reached through the bars of his cell and touched him.”
Brutal was nodding. “That’s why John looked so surprised… so shocked. Remember the way his eyes opened?”
I nodded. “He used Percy on Wharton like a gun, that was what Janice said, and it was what I kept thinking about. Why would John Coffey want to kill Wild Bill? Percy, maybe—Percy stamped on Delacroix’s mouse right in front of him, Percy burned Delacroix alive and John knew it—but Wharton? Wharton messed with most of us in one way or another, but he didn’t mess with John at all, so far as I know—hardly passed four dozen words with him the whole time they were on the Mile together, and half of those were that last night. Why would he want to? He was from Purdom County, and as far as white boys from up there are concerned, you don’t even see a Negro unless he happens to step into your road. So why did he do it? What could he’ve seen or felt when Wharton touched him that was so bad that he saved back the poison he took out of Melly’s body?”
“And half-killed himself doing it, too,” Brutal said.
“More like three-quarters. And the Detterick twins were all I could think of that was bad enough to explain what he did. I told myself the idea was nuts, too much of a coincidence, it just couldn’t be. Then I remembered something Curtis Anderson wrote in the first memo I ever got about Wharton—that Wharton was crazy-wild, and that he’d rambled all over the state before the holdup where he killed all those people. Rambled all over the state. That stuck with me. Then there was the way he tried to choke Dean when he came in. That got me thinking about—”