“Oh God save us” in a weak and watery voice. Then the stuff turned a white so dazzling it was like January sun on fresh snow. A moment later the cloud was gone. Percy straightened slowly up and resumed his vacant gaze down the length of the Green Mile.
“We didn’t see that,” Brutal said. “Did we, Paul?”
“No. I didn’t and you didn’t. Did you see it, Harry?”
“No,” Harry said.
“Dean?”
“See what?” Dean took his glasses off and began to polish them. I thought he would drop them out of his trembling hands, but he managed not to.
” See what, that’s good. That’s just the ticket. Now listen to your scoutmaster, boys, and get it right the first time, because time is short. It’s a simple story. Let’s not complicate it.”
3.
I told all this to Jan at around eleven o’clock that morning – the next morning, I almost wrote, but of course it was the same day. The longest one of my whole life, without a doubt. I told it pretty much as I have here, finishing with how William Wharton had ended up lying dead on his bunk, riddled with lead from Percy’s sidearm.
No, that’s not right. What I actually finished with was the stuff that came out of Percy, the bugs or the whatever-it-was. That was a hard thing to tell, even to your wife, but I told it.
As I talked, she brought me black coffee by the half-cup at first my hands were shaking too badly to pick up a whole one without spilling it. By the time I finished, the shaking had eased some, and I felt that I could even take some food an egg, maybe, or some soup.
“The thing that saved us was that we didn’t really have to lie, any of us.”
“Just leave a few things out,” she said, and nodded. “Little things, mostly, like how you took a condemned murderer out of prison, and how he cured a dying woman, and how he drove that Percy
Wetmore crazy by – what? – spitting a pureed brain tumor down his throat?”
“I don’t know, Jan,” I said. “I only know that if you keep talking like that, you’ll end up either eating that soup yourself, or feeding it to the dog.”
“I’m sorry. But I’m right, aren’t I?”
“Yeah,” I said. Except we got away with the-” The what? You couldn’t call it an escape, and furlough wasn’t right, either. “the field trip. Not even Percy can tell them about that, if he ever comes back.”
“If he comes back,” she echoed. “How likely is that?”
I shook my head to indicate I had no idea. But I did, actually; I didn’t think he was going to come back, not in 1932, not in ’42 or ’52, either. In that I was right. Percy Wetmore stayed at Briar Ridge until it burned flat in 1944. Seventeen inmates were killed in that fire, but Percy wasn’t one of them. Still silent and blank in every regard-the word I learned to describe that state is catatonic – he was led out by one of the guards long before the fire reached his wing. He went on to another institution – I don’t remember the name and guess it doesn’t matter, anyway – and died in 1965. So far as I know, the last time he ever spoke was when he told us we could clock him out at quitting time… unless we wanted to explain why he had left early.
The irony was that we never had to explain much of anything. Percy had gone crazy and shot William Wharton to death. That was what we told, and so far as it went, every word was true. When Anderson asked Brutal how Percy had seemed before the shooting and Brutal answered with one word – “Quiet” – I had a terrible moment when I felt that I might burst out laughing. Because that was true, too, Percy had been quiet, for most of his shift he’d had a swatch of friction-tape across his mouth and the best he’d been able to come up with was mmmph, mmmph, mmmph.