Janice was waiting up, as she always did on execution nights. I meant not to tell her the story, saw no sense in harrowing her with it, but she got a clear look at my face as I came in the kitchen door and would have it all. So I sat down, took her warm hands in my cold ones (the heater in my old Ford barely worked, and the weather had turned a hundred and eighty degrees since the storm), and told her what she thought she wanted to hear. About halfway through I broke down crying, which I hadn’t expected. I was a little ashamed, but only a little; it was her, you see, and she never taxed me with the times that I slipped from the way I thought a man should be… the way I thought I should be, at any rate. A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God’s creatures, and one without must be among the most miserable, I think, the only true blessing of their lives that they don’t know how poorly off they are. I cried, and she held my head against her breast, and when my own storm passed, I felt better… a little, anyway. And I believe that was when I had the first conscious sight of my idea. Not the shoe; I don’t mean that. The shoe was related, but different. All my real idea was right then, however, was an odd realization: that John Coffey and Melinda Moores, different as they might have been in size and sex and skin color, had exactly the same eyes: woeful, sad, and distant. Dying eyes.
“Come to bed,” my wife said at last. “Come to bed with me, Paul.”
So I did, and we made love, and when it was over she went to sleep. As I lay there watching the moon grin and listening to the walls tick—they were at last pulling in, exchanging summer for fall—I thought about John Coffey saying he had helped it. I helped Del’s mouse. I helped Mr. Jingles. He’s a circus mouse. Sure. And maybe, I thought, we were all circus mice, running around with only the dimmest awareness that God and all His heavenly host were watching us in our Bakelite houses through our ivy-glass windows.
I slept a little as the day began to lighten—two hours, I guess, maybe three; and I slept the way I always sleep these days here in Georgia Pines and hardly ever did then, in thin little licks. What I went to sleep thinking about was the churches of my youth. The names changed, depending on the whims of my mother and her sisters, but they were all really the same, all The First Backwoods Church of Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty. In the shadow of those blunt, square steeples, the concept of atonement came up as regularly as the toll of the bell which called the faithful to worship. Only God could forgive sins, could and did, washing them away in the agonal blood of His crucified Son, but that did not change the responsibility of His children to atone for those sins (and even their simple errors of judgement) whenever possible. Atonement was powerful; it was the lock on the door you closed against the past.
I fell asleep thinking of piney-woods atonement, and Eduard Delacroix on fire as he rode the lightning, and Melinda Moores, and my big boy with the endlessly weeping eyes. These thoughts twisted their way into a dream. In it, John Coffey was sitting on a riverbank and bawling his inarticulate mooncalf’s grief up at the early-summer sky while on the other bank a freight-train stormed endlessly toward a rusty trestle spanning the Trapingus. In the crook of each arm the black man held the body of a naked, blonde-haired girlchild. His fists, huge brown rocks at the ends of those arms, were closed. All around him crickets chirred and noseeums flocked; the day hummed with heat. In my dream I went to him, knelt before him, and took his hands. His fists relaxed and gave up their secrets. In one was a spool colored green and red and yellow. In the other was a prison guard’s shoe.
“I couldn’t help it,” John Coffey said. “I tried to take it back, but it was too late.”
And this time, in my dream, I understood him.
8
AT NINE O’CLOCK the next morning, while I was having a third cup of coffee in the kitchen (my wife said nothing, but I could see disapproval writ large on her face when she brought it to me), the telephone rang. I went into the parlor to take it, and Central told someone that their party was holding the line. She then told me to have a birdlarky day and rang off… presumably. With Central, you could never quite tell for sure.
Hal Moores’s voice shocked me. Wavery and hoarse, it sounded like the voice of an octogenarian. It occurred to me that it was good that things had gone all right with Curtis Anderson in the tunnel last night, good that he felt about the same as we did about Percy, because this man I was talking to would very likely never work another day at Cold Mountain.
“Paul, I understand there was trouble last night. I also understand that our friend Mr. Wetmore was involved.”
“A spot of trouble,” I admitted, holding the receiver tight to my ear and leaning in toward the horn, “but the job got done. That’s the important thing.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Can I ask who told you?” So I can tie a can to his tail? I didn’t add.
“You can ask, but since it’s really none of your beeswax, I think I’ll keep my mouth shut on that score. But when I called my office to see if there were any messages or urgent business, I was told an interesting thing.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Seems a transferral application landed in my basket. Percy Wetmore wants to go to Briar Ridge as soon as possible. Must have filled out the application even before last night’s shift was over, wouldn’t you think?”
“It sounds that way,” I agreed.
“Ordinarily I’d let Curtis handle it, but considering the… atmosphere on E Block just lately, I asked Hannah to run it over to me personally on her lunch hour. She has graciously agreed to do so. I’ll approve it and see it’s forwarded on to the state capital this afternoon. I expect you’ll get a look at Percy’s backside going out the door in no more than a month. Maybe less.”
He expected me to be pleased with this news, and had a right to expect it. He had taken time out from tending his wife to expedite a matter that might otherwise have taken upwards of half a year, even with Percy’s vaunted connections. Nevertheless, my heart sank. A month! But maybe it didn’t matter much, one way or the other. It removed a perfectly natural desire to wait and put off a risky endeavor, and what I was now thinking about would be very risky indeed. Sometimes, when that’s the case, it’s better to jump before you can lose your nerve. If we were going to have to deal with Percy in any case (always assuming I could get the others to go along with my insanity—always assuming there was a we, in other words), it might as well be tonight.
“Paul? Are you there?” His voice lowered a little, as if he thought he was now talking to himself. “Damn, I think I lost the connection.”
“No, I’m here, Hal. That’s great news.”
“Yes,” he agreed, and I was again struck by how old he sounded. How papery, somehow. “Oh, I know what you’re thinking.”
No, you don’t, Warden, I thought. Never in a million years could you know what I’m thinking.
“You’re thinking that our young friend will still be around for the Coffey execution. That’s probably true—Coffey will go well before Thanksgiving, I imagine—but you can put him back in the switch room. No one will object. Including him, I should think.”
“I’ll do that,” I said. “Hal, how’s Melinda?”
There was a long pause—so long I might have thought I’d lost him, except for the sound of his breathing. When he spoke this time, it was in a much lower tone of voice. “She’s sinking,” he said.
Sinking. That chilly word the old-timers used not to describe a person who was dying, exactly, but one who had begun to uncouple from living.