Stephen King - Coffey's Hands

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.

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 turd-studded 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.

“All right,” 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 Penitentiary. 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.”