Looking at that made it hard for a man to think, even a man as determined to do his job as Deputy McGee was. Bad thinking could cause mistakes, maybe more bloodshed. McGee drew him in a deep breath and calmed himself. Tried, anyway.
‘Wellsir, I don’t exactly remember, be dog if I do,” Coffey said in his tear-choked voice, “but it’s a little lunch, all right, sammidges and I think a swee’ pickle.”
I might just have a look for myself, it’s all the same to you,” McGee said. “Don’t you move now, John Coffey. Don’t do it, boy, because there are enough guns aimed at you to make you disappear from the waist up should you so much as twitch a finger.”
Coffey looked out across the river and didn’t move as McGee gently reached into the chest pocket of those biballs and pulled out something wrapped in newspaper and tied with a hank of butcher’s twine.
MeGee snapped the string and opened the paper, although he was pretty sure it was just what Coffey said it was, a little lunch. There was a bacon-tomato sandwich and a jelly fold-over. There was also a pickle, wrapped in its own piece of a funny page John Coffey would never be able to puzzle out. There were no sausages. Bowser had gotten the sausages out of John Coffey’s little lunch.
McGee handed the lunch back over his shoulder to one of the other men without taking his eyes off Coffey. Hunkered down like that, he was too close to want to let his attention stray for even a second.
The lunch, wrapped up again and tied for good measure, finally ended up with Bobo Marchant, who put it in his knapsack, where he kept treats for his dogs (and a few fishing lures, I shouldn’t wonder). It wasn’t introduced into evidence at the trial – justice in this part of the world is swift, but not as swift as a bacon-tomato sandwich goes over – though photographs of it were.
‘What happened here, John Coffey?” McGee asked in his low, earnest voice. “You want to tell me that?”
And Coffey said to McGee and the others almost exactly the same thing he said to me; they were also the last words the prosecutor said to the jury at Coffey’s trial. “I couldn’t help it,” John Coffey said, holding the murdered, violated girls naked in his arms. The tears began to pour down his cheeks again. “I tried to take it back, but it was too late!’
“Boy, you are under arrest for murder,” McGee said, and then he spit in John Coffey’s face.
The jury was out forty-five minutes. Just about time enough to eat a little lunch of their own. I wonder they had any stomach for it.
5.
I think you know I didn’t find all that out during one hot October afternoon in the soon-to-be-defunct prison library, from one set of old newspapers stacked in a pair of Pomona orange crates, but I learned enough to make it hard for me to sleep that night. When my wife got up at two in the morning and found me sitting in the kitchen, drinking buttermilk and smoking home-rolled Bugler, she asked me what was wrong and I lied to her for one of the few times in the long course of our marriage. I said I’d had another run-in with Percy Wetmore. I had, of course, but that wasn’t the reason she’d found me sitting up late. I was usually able to leave Percy at the office.
‘Well, forget that rotten apple and come on back to bed,” she said. “I’ve got something that’ll help you sleep, and you can have all you want.”
“That sounds good, but I think we’d better not,” I said. “I’ve got a little something wrong with my waterworks, and wouldn’t want to pass it on to you.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Waterworks, huh,” she said. “I guess you must have taken up with the wrong streetcorner girl the last time you were in Baton Rouge.” I’ve never been in Baton Rouge and never so much as touched a streetcorner girl, and we both knew it.