Stephen King: Night Journey

“THAT WON’T HAPPEN.”

“How in God’s name can you be so sure?” Dean asked.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know just how to begin. I had known this would come up, of course I had, but I still didn’t know how to start telling them what was in my head and heart. Brutal helped.

“You don’t think he did it, do you, Paul?” He looked incredulous. “You think that big lug is innocent.”

“I’m positive he’s innocent,” I said.

“How can you be?”

“There are two things,” I said. “One of them is my shoe.”

“Your shoe ?” Brutal exclaimed. “What has your shoe got to do with whether or not John Coffey killed those two little girls?”

“I took off one of my shoes and gave it to him last night,” I said. “After the execution, this was, when things had settled back down a little. I pushed it through the bars, and he picked it up in those big hands of his. I told him to tie it. I had to make sure, you see, because all our problem children normally wear is slippers—a man who really wants to commit suicide can do it with shoelaces, if he’s dedicated. That’s something all of us know.”

They were nodding.

“He put it on his lap and got the ends of the laces crossed over all right, but then he was stuck. He said he was pretty sure someone had showed him how to do it when he was a lad—maybe his father or maybe one of the boyfriends his mother had after the father was gone—but he’d forgot the knack.”

“I’m with Brutal—I still don’t see what your shoe has to do with whether or not Coffey killed the Detterick twins,” Dean said.

So I went over the story of the abduction and murder again—what I’d read that hot day in the prison library with my groin sizzling and Gibbons snoring in the corner, and all that the reporter, Hammersmith, told me later.

“The Dettericks’ dog wasn’t much of a biter, but it was a world-class barker,” I said. “The man who took the girls kept it quiet by feeding it sausages. He crept a little closer every time he gave it one, I imagine, and while the mutt was eating the last one, he reached out, grabbed it by the head, and twisted. Broke its neck.

“Later, when they caught up with Coffey, the deputy in charge of the posse—Rob McGee, his name was—spotted a bulge in the chest pocket of the biballs Coffey was wearing. McGee thought at first it might be a gun. Coffey said it was a lunch, and that’s what it turned out to be—a couple of sandwiches and a pickle, wrapped up in newspaper and tied with butcher’s string. Coffey couldn’t remember who gave it to him, only that it was a woman wearing an apron.”

“Sandwiches and a pickle but no sausages,” Brutal said.

“No sausages,” I agreed.

“Course not,” Dean said. “He fed those to the dog.”

“Well, that’s what the prosecutor said at the trial,” I agreed, “but if Coffey opened his lunch and fed the sausages to the dog, how’d he tie the newspaper back up again with that butcher’s twine? I don’t know when he even would have had the chance, but leave that out of it, for the time being. This man can’t even tie a simple granny knot.”

There was a long moment of thunderstruck silence, broken at last by Brutus. “Holy shit,” he said in a low voice. “How come no one brought that up at the trial?”

“Nobody thought of it,” I said, and found myself again thinking of Hammersmith, the reporter—Hammersmith who had been to college in Bowling Green, Hammersmith who liked to think of himself as enlightened, Hammersmith who had told me that mongrel dogs and Negroes were about the same, that either might take a chomp out of you suddenly, and for no reason. Except he kept calling them your Negroes, as if they were still property… but not his property. No, not his. Never his. And at that time, the South was full of Hammersmiths. “Nobody was really equipped to think of it, Coffey’s own attorney included.”

“But you did,” Harry said. “Goddam, boys, we’re sittin here with Mr. Sherlock Holmes.” He sounded simultaneously joshing and awed.

“Oh, put a cork in it,” I said. “I wouldn’t have thought of it either, if I hadn’t put together what he told Deputy McGee that day with what he said after he cured my infection, and what he said after he healed the mouse.”

“What?” Dean asked.

“When I went into his cell, it was like I was hypnotized. I didn’t feel like I could have stopped doing what he wanted, even if I’d tried.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Harry said, and shifted uneasily in his seat.

“I asked him what he wanted, and he said ‘Just to help.’ I remember that very clearly. And when it was over and I was better, he knew. ‘I helped it,’ he said. ‘I helped it, didn’t I?’ ”

Brutal was nodding. “Just like with the mouse. You said ‘You helped it,’ and Coffey said it back to you like he was a parrot. ‘I helped Del’s mouse.’ Is that when you knew? It was, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess so. I remembered what he said to McGee when McGee asked him what had happened. It was in every story about the murders, just about. ‘I couldn’t help it. I tried to take it back, but it was too late.’ A man saying a thing like that with two little dead girls in his arms, them white and blonde, him as big as a house, no wonder they got it wrong. They heard what he was saying in a way that would agree with what they were seeing, and what they were seeing was black. They thought he was confessing, that he was saying he’d had a compulsion to take those girls, rape them, and kill them. That he’d come to his senses and tried to stop—”

“But by then it was too late,” Brutal murmured.

“Yes. Except what he was really trying to tell them was that he’d found them, tried to heal them—to bring them back—and had no success. They were too far gone in death.”

“Paul, do you believe that?” Dean asked. “Do you really, honest-to-God believe that?”

I examined my heart as well as I could one final time, then nodded my head. Not only did I know it now, there was an intuitive part of me that had known something wasn’t right with John Coffey’s situation from the very beginning, when Percy had come onto the block hauling on Coffey’s arm and blaring “Dead man walking!” at the top of his lungs. I had shaken hands with him, hadn’t I? I had never shaken the hand of a man coming on the Green Mile before, but I had shaken Coffey’s.

“Jesus,” Dean said. “Good Jesus Christ.”

“Your shoe’s one thing,” Harry said. “What’s the other?”

“Not long before the posse found Coffey and the girls, the men came out of the woods near the south bank of the Trapingus River. They found a patch of flattened-down grass there, a lot of blood, and the rest of Cora Detterick’s nightie. The dogs got confused for a bit. Most wanted to go southeast, downstream along the bank. But two of them—the coon-dogs—wanted to go upstream . Bobo Marchant was running the dogs, and when he gave the coonies a sniff of the nightgown, they turned with the others.”

“The coonies got mixed up, didn’t they?” Brutal asked. A strange, sickened little smile was playing around the corners of his mouth. “They ain’t built to be trackers, strictly speaking, and they got mixed up on what their job was.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t get it,” Dean said.

“The coonies forgot whatever it was Bobo ran under their noses to get them started,” Brutal said. “By the time they came out on the riverbank, the coonies were tracking the killer , not the girls. That wasn’t a problem as long as the killer and the girls were together, but…”