“You know, I fell asleep this afternoon and had a dream, boss,” he said. “I dreamed about Del’s mouse.”
“Did you, John?” I flanked him on the left. Harry took the right. Dean fell in behind, and then we were walking the Green Mile. For me, it was the last time I ever walked it with a prisoner.
“Yep,” he said. “I dreamed he got down to that place Boss Howell talked about, that Mouseville place. I dreamed there was kids, and how they laughed at his tricks! My!” He laughed himself at the thought of it, then grew serious again. “I dreamed those two little blonde-headed girls were there. They ’us laughin, too. I put my arms around em and there ’us no blood comin out they hair and they ’us fine. We all watch Mr. Jingles roll that spool, and how we did laugh. Fit to bus’, we was.”
“Is that so?” I was thinking I couldn’t go through with it, just could not, there was no way. I was going to cry or scream or maybe my heart would burst with sorrow and that would be an end to it.
We went into my office. John looked around for a moment or two, then dropped to his knees without having to be asked. Behind him, Harry was looking at me with haunted eyes. Dean was as white as paper.
I got down on my knees with John and thought there was a funny turnaround brewing here: after all the prisoners I’d had to help up so they could finish the journey, this time I was the one who was apt to need a hand. That’s the way it felt, anyway.
“What should we pray for, boss?” John asked.
“Strength,” I said without even thinking. I closed my eyes and said, “Lord God of Hosts, please help us finish what we’ve started, and please welcome this man, John Coffey—like the drink but not spelled the same—into heaven and give him peace. Please help us to see him off the way he deserves and let nothing go wrong. Amen.” I opened my eyes and looked at Dean and Harry. Both of them looked a little better. Probably it was having a few moments to catch their breath. I doubt it was my praying.
I started to get up, and John caught my arm. He gave me a look that was both timid and hopeful. “I ’member a prayer someone taught me when I ’us little,” he said. “At least I think I do. Can I say it?”
“You go right on and do her,” Dean said. “Lots of time yet, John.”
John closed his eyes and frowned with concentration. I expected now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep, or maybe a garbled version of the Lord’s prayer, but I got neither; I had never heard what he came out with before, and have never heard it again, not that either the sentiments or expressions were particularly unusual. Holding his hands up in front of his closed eyes, John Coffey said: “Baby Jesus, meek and mild, pray for me, an orphan child. Be my strength, be my friend, be with me until the end. Amen.” He opened his eyes, started to get up, then looked at me closely.
I wiped my arm across my eyes. As I listened to him, I had been thinking about Del; he had wanted to pray one more at the end, too. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death. “Sorry, John.”
“Don’t be,” he said. He squeezed my arm and smiled. And then, as I’d thought he might have to do, he helped me to my feet.
10
THERE WEREN’T MANY WITNESSES—maybe fourteen in all, half the number that had been in the storage room for the Delacroix execution. Homer Cribus was there, overflowing his chair as per usual, but I didn’t see Deputy McGee. Like Warden Moores, he had apparently decided to give this one a miss.
Sitting in the front row was an elderly couple I didn’t recognize at first, even though I had seen their pictures in a good many newspaper articles by that day in the third week of November. Then, as we neared the platform where Old Sparky waited, the woman spat, “Die slow, you son of a bitch!” and I realized they were the Dettericks, Klaus and Marjorie. I hadn’t recognized them because you don’t often see elderly people who haven’t yet climbed out of their thirties.
John hunched his shoulders at the sound of the woman’s voice and Sheriff Cribus’s grunt of approval. Hank Bitterman, who had the guard-post near the front of the meager group of spectators, never took his eyes off Klaus Detterick. That was per my orders, but Detterick never made a move in John’s direction that night. Detterick seemed to be on some other planet.
Brutal, standing beside Old Sparky, gave me a small finger-tilt as we stepped up onto the platform. He holstered his sidearm and took John’s wrist, escorting him toward the electric chair as gently as a boy leading his date out onto the floor for their first dance as a couple.
“Everything all right, John?” he asked in a low voice.
“Yes, boss, but…” His eyes were moving from side to side in their sockets, and for the first time he looked and sounded scared. “But they’s a lot of folks here hate me. A lot. I can feel it. Hurts. Bores in like bee-stings an’ hurts.”
“Feel how we feel, then,” Brutal said in that same low voice. “We don’t hate you—can you feel that?”
“Yes, boss.” But his voice was trembling worse now, and his eyes had begun to leak their slow tears again.
“Kill him twice, you boys!” Marjorie Detterick suddenly screamed. Her ragged, strident voice was like a slap. John cringed against me and moaned. “You go on and kill that raping baby-killer twice, that’d be just fine!” Klaus, still looking like a man dreaming awake, pulled her against his shoulder. She began to sob.
I saw with dismay that Harry Terwilliger was crying, too. So far none of the spectators had seen his tears—his back was to them—but he was crying, all right. Still, what could we do? Besides push on with it, I mean?
Brutal and I turned John around. Brutal pressed on one of the big man’s shoulders and John sat. He gripped Sparky’s wide oak arms, his eyes moving from side to side, his tongue darting out to wet first one corner of his mouth, then the other.
Harry and I dropped to our knees. The day before, we’d had one of the shop-trusties weld temporary flexible extensions to the chair’s ankle clamps, because John Coffey’s ankles were nigh on the size of an ordinary fellow’s calves. Still, I had a nightmarish moment when I thought they were still going to come up small, and we’d have to take him back to his cell while Sam Broderick, who was head of the shop guys in those days, was found and tinkered some more. I gave a final, extra-hard shove with the heels of my hands and the clamp on my side closed. John’s leg jerked and he gasped. I had pinched him.
“Sorry, John,” I murmured, and glanced at Harry. He had gotten his clamp fixed more easily (either the extension on his side was a little bigger or John’s right calf was a little smaller), but he was looking at the result with a doubtful expression. I guessed I could understand why; the modified clamps had a hungry look, their jaws seeming to gape like the mouths of alligators.
“It’ll be all right,” I said, hoping that I sounded convincing… and that I was telling the truth. “Wipe your face, Harry.”
He swabbed at it with his arm, wiping away tears from his cheeks and beads of sweat from his forehead. We turned. Homer Cribus, who had been talking too loudly to the man sitting next to him (the prosecutor, judging from the string tie and rusty black suit), fell silent. It was almost time.
Brutal had clamped one of John’s wrists, Dean the other. Over Dean’s shoulder I could see the doctor, unobtrusive as ever, standing against the wall with his black bag between his feet. Nowadays I guess they just about run such affairs, especially the ones with the IV drips, but back then you almost had to yank them forward if you wanted them. Maybe back then they had a clearer idea of what was right for a doctor to be doing, and what was a perversion of the special promise they make, the one where they swear first of all to do no harm.