“Stop it, Warden!” Brutal raised his hands, palms out, toward the man with the gun. I have never heard his voice sound the way it did then; it was as if the shakes turned out of Moores’s hands had somehow found their way into Brutus Howell’s throat. “It’s us! It’s Paul and me and… it’s us!”
He took the first step up, so that the light over the stoop could fall fully on his face. I joined him. Hal Moores looked back and forth between us, his angry determination giving way to bewilderment. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Not only is it the shank of the morning, you boys have the duty. I know you do, I’ve got the roster pinned up in my workshop. So what in the name of… oh, Jesus. It’s not a lockdown, is it? Or a riot?” He looked between us, and his gaze sharpened. “Who else is down by that truck?”
Let me do the talking. So I had instructed Brutal, but now the time to talk was here and I couldn’t even open my mouth. On my way into work that afternoon I had carefully planned out what I was going to say when we got here, and had thought that it didn’t sound too crazy. Not normal—nothing about it was normal—but maybe close enough to normal to get us through the door and give us a chance. Give John a chance. But now all my carefully rehearsed words were lost in a roaring confusion. Thoughts and images—Del burning, the mouse dying, Toot jerking in Old Sparky’s lap and screaming that he was a done tom turkey—whirled inside my head like sand caught in a dust-devil. I believe there is good in the world, all of it flowing in one way or another from a loving God. But I believe there’s another force as well, one every bit as real as the God I have prayed to my whole life, and that it works consciously to bring all our decent impulses to ruin. Not Satan, I don’t mean Satan (although I believe he is real, too), but a kind of demon of discord, a prankish and stupid thing that laughs with glee when an old man sets himself on fire trying to light his pipe or when a much-loved baby puts its first Christmas toy in its mouth and chokes to death on it. I’ve had a lot of years to think on this, all the way from Cold Mountain to Georgia Pines, and I believe that force was actively at work among us on that morning, swirling everywhere like a fog, trying to keep John Coffey away from Melinda Moores.
“Warden… Hal… I…” Nothing I tried made any sense.
He raised the pistol again, pointing it between Brutal and me, not listening. His bloodshot eyes had gotten very wide. And here came Harry Terwilliger, being more or less pulled along by our big boy, who was wearing his wide and daffily charming smile.
“Coffey,” Moores breathed. “John Coffey.” He pulled in breath and yelled in a voice that was reedy but strong: “Halt! Halt right there, or I shoot!”
From somewhere behind him, a weak and wavery female voice called: “Hal? What are you doing out there? Who are you talking to, you fucking cocksucker?”
He turned in that direction for just a moment, his face confused and despairing. Just a moment, as I say, but it should have been long enough for me to snatch the long-barrelled gun out of his hand. Except I couldn’t lift my own hands. They might have had weights tied to them. My head seemed full of static, like a radio trying to broadcast during an electrical storm. The only emotions I remember feeling were fright and a kind of dull embarrassment for Hal.
Harry and John Coffey reached the foot of the steps. Moores turned away from the sound of his wife’s voice and raised the gun again. He said later that yes, he fully intended to shoot Coffey; he suspected we were all prisoners, and that the brains behind whatever was happening were back by the truck, lurking in the shadows. He didn’t understand why we should have been brought to his house, but revenge seemed the most likely possibility.
Before he could shoot, Harry Terwilliger stepped up ahead of Coffey and then moved in front of him, shielding most of his body. Coffey didn’t make him do it; Harry did it on his own.
“No, Warden Moores!” he said. “It’s all right! No one’s armed, no one’s going to get hurt, we’re here to help!”
“Help?” Moores’s tangled, tufted eyebrows drew together. His eyes blazed. I couldn’t take my eyes off the cocked hammer of the Buntline. “Help what? Help who?”
As if in answer, the old woman’s voice rose again, querulous and certain and utterly lost: “Come in here and poke my mudhole, you son of a bitch! Bring your asshole friends, too! Let them all have a turn!”
I looked at Brutal, shaken to my soul. I’d understood that she swore—that the tumor was somehow making her swear—but this was more than swearing. A lot more.
“What are you doing here?” Moores asked us again. A lot of the determination had gone out of his voice—his wife’s wavering cries had done that. “I don’t understand. Is it a prison break, or…”
John set Harry aside—just picked him up and moved him over—and then climbed to the stoop. He stood between Brutal and me, so big he almost pushed us off either side and into Melly’s holly bushes. Moores’s eyes turned up to follow him, the way a person’s eyes do when he’s trying to see the top of a tall tree. And suddenly the world fell back into place for me. That spirit of discord, which had jumbled my thoughts like powerful fingers sifting through sand or grains of rice, was gone. I thought I also understood why Harry had been able to act when Brutal and I could only stand, hopeless and indecisive, in front of our boss. Harry had been with John… and whatever spirit it is that opposes that other, demonic one, it was in John Coffey that night. And, when John stepped forward to face Warden Moores, it was that other spirit—something white, that’s how I think of it, as something white—which took control of the situation. The other thing didn’t leave, but I could see it drawing back like a shadow in a sudden strong light.
“I want to help,” John Coffey said. Moores looked up at him, eyes fascinated, mouth hanging open. When Coffey plucked the Buntline Special from his hand and passed it to me, I don’t think Hal even knew it was gone. I carefully lowered the hammer. Later, when I checked the cylinder, I would find it had been empty all along. Sometimes I wonder if Hal knew that. Meanwhile, John was still murmuring. “I came to help her. Just to help. That’s all I want.”
“Hal!” she cried from the back bedroom. Her voice sounded a little stronger now, but it also sounded afraid, as if the thing which had so confused and unmanned us had now retreated to her. “Make them go away, whoever they are! We don’t need no salesmen in the middle of the night! No Electrolux! No Hoover! No French knickers with come in the crotch! Get them out! Tell them to take a flying fuck at a rolling d… d…” Something broke—it could have been a waterglass—and then she began to sob.
“Just to help,” John Coffey said in a voice so low it was hardly more than a whisper. He ignored the woman’s sobbing and profanity equally. “Just to help, boss, that’s all.”
“You can’t,” Moores said. “No one can.” It was a tone I’d heard before, and after a moment I realized it was how I’d sounded myself when I’d gone into Coffey’s cell the night he cured my urinary infection. Hypnotized. You mind your business and I’ll mind mine was what I’d told Delacroix… except it had been Coffey who’d been minding my business, just as he was minding Hal Moores’s now.
“We think he can,” Brutal said. “And we didn’t risk our jobs—plus a stretch in the can ourselves, maybe—just to get here and turn around and go back without giving it the old college try.”