It was Klaus Detterick who broke the tableau. Screaming, he flung himself at the monster who had raped and killed his daughters. Sam Hollis knew his job and tried to do it, but couldn’t. He was six inches taller than Klaus and outweighed him by at least seventy pounds, but Klaus seemed to almost shrug his encircling arms off. Klaus flew across the intervening open ground and launched a flying kick at Coffey’s head. His workboot, caked with spilled milk that had already soured in the heat, scored a direct hit on Coffey’s left temple, but Coffey seemed not to feel it at all. He only sat there, keening and rocking and looking out across the river; the way I imagine it, he could almost have been a picture out of some piney woods Pentecostal sermon, the faithful follower of the Cross looking out toward Goshen Land … if not for the corpses, that was.
It took four men to haul the hysterical farmer off John Coffey, and he fetched Coffey I don’t know how many good licks before they finally did. It didn’t seem to matter to Coffey, one way or the other; he just went on looking out across the river and keening. As for Detterick, all the fight went out of him when he was finally pulled off – as if some strange galvanizing current had been running through the huge black man (I still have a tendency to think in electrical metaphors; you’ll have to pardon me), and when Detterick’s contact with that power source was finally broken, he went as limp as a man flung back from a live wire. He knelt wide-legged on the riverbank with his hands to his face, sobbing. Howie joined him and they hugged each other forehead to forehead.
Two men watched them while the rest formed a rifle-toting ring around the rocking, wailing black man.
He still seemed not to realize that anyone but him was there. McGee stepped forward, shifted uncertainly from foot to foot for a bit, then hunkered.
“Mister,” he said in a quiet voice, and Coffey hushed at once. McGee looked at eyes that were bloodshot from crying. And still they streamed, as if someone had left a faucet on inside him. Those eyes wept, and yet were somehow untouched … distant and serene. I thought them the strangest eyes I had ever seen in my life, and McGee felt much the same. “Like the eyes of an animal that never saw a man before,” he told a reporter named Hammersmith just before the trial.
“Mister, do you hear me?” McGee asked.
Slowly, Coffey nodded his head. Still he curled his arms around his unspeakable dolls, their chins down on their chests so their faces could not be clearly seen, one of the few mercies God saw fit to bestow that day.
“Do you have a name?” MeGee asked.
“John Coffey,” he said in a thick and tear-clotted voice. “Coffey like the drink, only not spelled the same way.”
McGee nodded, then pointed a thumb at the chest pocket of Coffey’s jumper, which was bulging. It looked to McGee like it might have been a gun – not that a man Coffey’s size would need a gun to do some major damage, if he decided to go off. “What’s that in there, John Coffey? Is that maybe a heater?
A pistol?”
“Nosir,” Coffey said in his thick voice, and those strange eyes – welling tears and agonized on top, distant and weirdly serene underneath, as if the true John Coffey was somewhere else, looking out on some other landscape where murdered little girls were nothing to get all worked up about -never left Deputy McGee’s. “That’s just a little lunch I have.”
“Oh, now, a little lunch, is that right?” McGee asked, and Coffey nodded and said yessir with his eyes running and dear snot-runners hanging out of his nose. “And where did the likes of you get a little lunch, John Coffey?” Forcing himself to be calm, although he could smell the girls by then, and could see the flies lighting and sampling the places on them that were wet. It was their hair that was the worst, he said later … and this wasn’t in any newspaper story; it was considered too grisly for family reading. No, this I got from the reporter who wrote the story, Mr. Hammersmith. I looked him up later on, because later on John Coffey became sort of an obsession with me. McGee told this Hammersmith that their blonde hair wasn’t blonde anymore. It was auburn. Blood had run down their cheeks out of it like it was a bad dye-job, and you didn’t have to be a doctor to see that their fragile skulls had been dashed together with the force of those mighty arms. Probably they had been crying. Probably he had wanted to make them stop. If the girls had been lucky, this had happened before the rapes.