“Look, boss!” he cried in a low, rapturous voice, pointing up into the black night. “It’s Cassie, the lady in the rockin chair!”
He was right; I could see her in the lane of stars between the dark bulk of the passing trees. But it wasn’t Cassiopeia I thought of when he spoke of the lady in the rocking chair; it was Melinda Moores.
“I see her, John,” I said, and tugged on his arm. “But you have to sit down now, all right?”
He sat with his back against the cab, never taking his eyes off the night sky. On his face was a look of sublime unthinking happiness. The Green Mile fell farther behind us with each revolution of the Farmall’s bald tires, and for the time being, at least, the seemingly endless flow of John Coffey’s tears had stopped.
7.
It was twenty-five miles to Hal Moores’s house on Chimney Ridge, and in Harry Terwilliger’s slow and rattly farm truck, the trip took over an hour. It was an eerie ride, and although it seems to me now that every moment of it is still etched in my memory – every turn, every bump, every dip, the scary times (two of them) when trucks passed us going the other way – I don’t think I could come even close to describing how I felt, sitting back there with John Coffey, both of us bundled up like Indians in the old blankets Harry had been thoughtful enough to bring along.
It was, most of all, a sense of lostness – the deep and terrible ache a child feels when he realizes he has gone wrong somewhere, all the landmarks are strange, and he no longer knows how to find his way home. I was out in the night with a prisoner – not just any prisoner, but one who had been tried and convicted for the murder of two little girls, and sentenced to die for the crime. My belief that he was innocent wouldn’t matter if we were caught; we would go to jail ourselves, and probably Dean Stanton would, too. I had thrown over a life of work and belief because of one bad execution and because I believed the overgrown lummox sitting beside me might be able to cure a woman’s inoperable brain tumor. Yet watching john watch the stars, I realized with dismay that I no longer did believe that, if I ever really had; my urinary infection seemed faraway and unimportant now, as such harsh and painful things always do once they are past (if a woman could really remember how bad it hurt to have her first baby, my mother once said, she’d never have a second). As for Mr. Jingles, wasn’t it possible, even likely, that we had been wrong about how badly Percy had hurt him? Or that John – who really did have some kind of hypnotic power, there was no doubt of that much, at least – had somehow fooled us into thinking we’d seen something we hadn’t seen at all? Then there was the matter of Hal Moores. On the day I’d surprised him in his office, I’d encountered a palsied, weepy old man. But I didn’t think that was the truest side of the warden. I thought the real Warden Moores was the man who’d once broken the wrist of a skatehound who tried to stab him; the man who had pointed out to me with cynical accuracy that Delacroix’s nuts were going to cook no matter who was out front on the execution team. Did I think that Hal Moores would stand meekly aside and let us bring a convicted child-murderer into his house to lay hands on his wife?
My doubt grew like a sickness as we rode along. I simply did not understand why I had done the things I had, or why I’d persuaded the others to go along with me on this crazy night journey, and I did not believe we had a chance of getting away with it – not a hound’s chance of heaven, as the oldtimers used to say. Yet I made no effort to cry it off, either, which I might have been able to do; things wouldn’t pass irrevocably out of our hands until we showed up at Moores’s house. Something – I think it might have been no more than the waves of exhilaration coming off the giant sitting next to me – kept me from hammering on top of the cab and yelling at Harry to turn around and go back to the prison while there was still time.