“Yeah, I guess so. I remembered what he said to McGee when McGee asked him what had happened. It was in every story about the murders, just about. ‘I couldn’t help it. I tried to take it back, but it was too late.’ A man saying a thing like that with two little dead girls in his arms, them white and blonde, him as big as a house, no wonder they got it wrong. They heard what he was saying in a way that would agree with what they were seeing, and what they were seeing was black. They thought he was confessing, that he was saying he’d had a compulsion to take those girls, rape them, and kill them. That he’d come to his senses and tried to stop.
“But by then it was too late,” Brutal murmured
“Yes. Except what he was really trying to tell them was that he’d found them, tried to heal them – to bring them back – and had no success. They were too far gone in death.”
“Paul, do you believe that?” Dean asked. “Do you really, honest-to-God believe that?”
I examined my heart as well as I could one final time, then nodded my head. Not only did I know it now, there was an intuitive part of me that had known something wasn’t right with John Coffey’s situation from the very beginning, when Percy had come onto the block hauling on Coffey’s arm and blaring
“Dead man walking! – at the top of his lungs. I had shaken hands with him, hadn’t I? I had never shaken the hand of a man coming on the Green Mile before, but I had shaken Coffey’s.
“Jesus,” Dean said. “Good Jesus Christ.”
“Your shoe’s one thing,” Harry said. “What’s the other?”
“Not long before the posse found Coffey and the girls, the men came out of the woods near the south bank of the Trapingus River. They found a patch of flattened-down grass there, a lot of blood, and the rest of Cora Detterick’s nightie. The dogs got confused for a bit. Most wanted to go southeast, downstream along the bank. But two of them-the coon-dogs – wanted to go upstream. “Bobo Marchant
was running the dogs, and when he save the coonies a sniff of the nightgown, they turned with the others.”
“The coonies got mixed up, didn’t they?” Brutal asked. A strange, sickened little smile was playing around the corners of his mouth. “They ain’t built to be trackers, strictly speaking , and they got mixed up on what their job was.”
‘Yes.
“I don’t get it,” Dean said.
“The coonies forgot whatever it was Bobo ran under their noses to get them started,” Brutal said. “By the time they came out on the riverbank, the coonies were tracking the killer, not the girls. That wasn’t a problem as long as the killer and the girls were together, but …”
The light was dawning in Dean’s eyes. Harry had already gotten it.
“When you think about it,” I said, “you wonder how anybody, even a jury wanting to pin the crime on a wandering black fellow, could have believed John Coffey was their man for even a minute. Just the idea of keeping the dog quiet with food until he could snap its neck would have been beyond Coffey.
“He was never any closer to the Detterick farm than the south bank of the Trapingus, that’s what I think.
Six or more miles away. He was just mooning along, maybe meaning to go down to the railroad tracks and catch a freight to somewhere else-when they come off the trestle, they’re going slow enough to hop-when he heard a commotion to the north.”
“The killer?” Brutal asked.
“The killer. He might have raped them already, or maybe the rape was what Coffey heard. In any case, that bloody patch in the grass was where the killer finished the business; dashed their heads together, dropped them, and then hightailed it.”
“Hightailed it northwest,” Brutal said. “The direction the coon-dogs wanted to go.”
“Right. John Coffey comes through a stand of alders that grows a little way southeast of the spot where the girls were left, probably curious about all the noise, and he finds their bodies. One of them might still have been alive; I suppose it’s possible both of them were, although not for much longer. John Coffey wouldn’t have known if they were dead, that’s for sure. All he knows is that he’s got a healing power in his hands, and he tried to use it on Cora and Kathe Detterick. When it didn’t work, he broke down, crying and hysterical. Which is how they found him.”