Stephen King - Coffey on the Mile

It was hard to meet Elaine’s eyes—I was afraid of the hate and contempt I might see there—but they were all right. Sad and wondering, but all right. No hate, no contempt, and no disbelief.

“Do you want the rest of the story?” I asked. I tapped the little pile of script with my aching hand. “It’s here, but I’ll understand if you’d just as soon not—”

“It isn’t a question of what I want ,” she said. “I have to know how it came out, although I guess there is no doubt that you executed him. The intervention of Providence-with-a-capital- P is greatly overrated in the lives of ordinary humans, I think. But before I take those pages… Paul…”

She stopped, as if unsure how to go on. I waited. Sometimes you can’t help people. Sometimes it’s better not even to try.

“Paul, you speak in here as though you had two grown children in 1932—not just one, but two . If you didn’t get married to your Janice when you were twelve and she was eleven, something like that—”

I smiled a little. “We were young when we married—a lot of hill-people are, my own mother was—but not that young.”

“Then how old are you? I’ve always assumed you were in your early eighties, my age, possibly even a little younger, but according to this…”

“I was forty the year John walked the Green Mile,” I said. “I was born in 1892. That makes me a hundred and four, unless my reckoning’s out.”

She stared at me, speechless.

I held out the rest of the manuscript, remembering again how John had touched me, there in his cell. You won’t ’splode , he’d said, smiling a bit at the very idea, and I hadn’t… but something had happened to me, all the same. Something lasting.

“Read the rest of it,” I said. “What answers I have are in there.”

“All right,” she almost whispered. “I’m a little afraid to, I can’t lie about that, but… all right. Where will you be?”

I stood up, stretched, listened to my spine crackle in my back. One thing that I knew for sure was that I was sick to death of the sunroom. “Out on the croquet course. There’s still something I want to show you, and it’s in that direction.”

“Is it… scary?” In her timid look I saw the little girl she had been back when men wore straw boaters in the summer and raccoon coats in the winter.

“No,” I said, smiling. “Not scary.”

“All right.” She took the pages. “I’m going to take these down to my room. I’ll see you out on the croquet course around…” She riffled the manuscript, estimating. “Four? Is that all right?”

“Perfect,” I said, thinking of the too-curious Brad Dolan. He would be gone by then.

She reached out, gave my arm a little squeeze, and left the room. I stood where I was for a moment, looking down at the table, taking in the fact that it was bare again except for the breakfast tray Elaine had brought me that morning, my scattered papers at last gone. I somehow couldn’t believe I was done… and as you can see, since all this was written after I recorded John Coffey’s execution and gave the last batch of pages to Elaine, I was not. And even then, part of me knew why.

Alabama.

I filched the last piece of cold toast off the tray, went downstairs, and out onto the croquet course. There I sat in the sun, watching half a dozen pairs and one slow but cheerful foursome pass by waving their mallets, thinking my old man’s thoughts and letting the sun warm my old man’s bones.

Around two-forty-five, the three-to-eleven shift started to trickle in from the parking lot, and at three, the day-shift folks left. Most were in groups, but Brad Dolan, I saw, was walking alone. That was sort of a happy sight; maybe the world hasn’t gone entirely to hell, after all. One of his joke-books was sticking out of his back pocket. The path to the parking lot goes by the croquet course, so he saw me there, but he didn’t give me either a wave or a scowl. That was fine by me. He got into his old Chevrolet with the bumper sticker reading I HAVE SEEN GOD AND HIS NAME IS NEWT. Then he was gone to wherever he goes when he isn’t here, laying a thin trail of discount motor oil behind.

Around four o’clock, Elaine joined me, just as she had promised. From the look of her eyes, she’d done a little more crying. She put her arms around me and hugged me tight. “Poor John Coffey,” she said. “And poor Paul Edgecombe, too.”

Poor Paul, I heard Jan saying. Poor old guy.

Elaine began to cry again. I held her, there on the croquet course in the late sunshine. Our shadows looked as if they were dancing. Perhaps in the Make-Believe Ballroom we used to listen to on the radio back in those days.

At last she got herself under control and drew back from me. She found a Kleenex in her blouse pocket and wiped her streaming eyes with it. “What happened to the Warden’s wife, Paul? What happened with Melly?”

“She was considered the marvel of the age, at least by the doctors at Indianola Hospital,” I said. I took her arm and we began to walk toward the path which led away from the employees’ parking lot and into the woods. Toward the shed down by the wall between Georgia Pines and the world of younger people. “She died—of a heart attack, not a brain tumor—ten or eleven years later. In forty-three, I think. Hal died of a stroke right around Pearl Harbor Day—could have been on Pearl Harbor Day, for all I remember, so she outlived him by two years. Sort of ironic.”

“And Janice?”

“I’m not quite prepared for that today,” I said. “I’ll tell you another time.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.” But that was one I never kept. Three months after the day we walked down into the woods together (I would have held her hand, if I hadn’t been afraid of hurting her bunched and swollen fingers), Elaine Connelly died quietly in her bed. As with Melinda Moores, death came as the result of a heart attack. The orderly who found her said she looked peaceful, as if it had come suddenly and without much pain. I hope he was right about that. I loved Elaine. And I miss her. Her and Janice and Brutal and just all of them.

We reached the second shed on the path, the one down by the wall. It stood back in a bower of scrub pines, its sagging roof and boarded-over windows laced and dappled with shadows. I started toward it. Elaine hung back a moment, looking fearful.

“It’s all right,” I said. “Really. Come on.”

There was no latch on the door—there had been once, but it had been torn away—and so I used a folded-over square of cardboard to wedge it shut. I pulled it free now, and stepped into the shed. I left the door as wide open as it would go, because it was dark inside.

“Paul, what?… Oh. Oh! ” That second “oh” was just shy of a scream.

There was a table pushed off to one side. On it was a flashlight and a brown paper bag. On the dirty floor was a Hav-A-Tampa cigar box I’d gotten from the concession man who refills the home’s soft-drink and candy machines. I’d asked him for it special, and since his company also sells tobacco products, it was easy for him to get. I offered to pay him for it—they were valuable commodities when I worked at Cold Mountain, as I may have told you—but he just laughed me off.

Peering over the edge of it were a pair of bright little oilspot eyes.

“Mr. Jingles,” I said in a low voice. “Come over here. Come on over here, old boy, and see this lady.”

I squatted down—it hurt, but I managed—and held out my hand. At first I didn’t think he was going to be able to get over the side of the box this time, but he made it with one final lunge. He landed on his side, then regained his feet, and came over to me. He ran with a hitching limp in one of his back legs; the injury that Percy had inflicted had come back in Mr. Jingles’s old age. His old, old age. Except for the top of his head and the tip of his tail, his fur had gone entirely gray.