It wasn’t just me and Brutal; Harry and Dean were looking at her, too, with a kind of horror.
“We never reported anything like that, ma’am,” Harry said. He spoke as if talking to a child. “The first thing people’d ask is why we didn’t. We’re supposed to report anything our cell-babies say about prior crimes. Theirs or anyone else’s.”
“Not that we would’ve believed him,” Brutal put in. “A man like Wild Bill Wharton lies about anything, Jan. Crimes he’s committed, bigshots he’s known, women he’s gone to bed with, touchdowns he scored in high school, even the damn weather.”
“But … but.. ” Her face was agonized. I went to put my arm around her and she pushed it violently away.
” But he was there! He painted their goddamned barn! HE ATE DINNER WITH THEM!”
“All the more reason why he might take credit for the crime,” Brutal said.” After all, what harm? Why not boast? You can’t fry a man twice, after all.”
“Let me see if I’ve got this right. We here at this table know that not only did John Coffey not kill those girls, he was trying to save their lives. Deputy McGee doesn’t know all that, of course, but he does have a
pretty good idea that the man condemned to die for the murders didn’t do them. And still … still I . . you can’t get him a new trial. Can’t even reopen the case.”
“Yessum,” Dean said. He was polishing his glasses furiously. “That’s about the size of it.”
She sat with her head lowered, thinking. Brutal started to say something and I raised a hand, shushing him. I didn’t believe Janice could think of a way to get John out of the killing box he was in, but I didn’t believe it was impossible, either. She was a fearsomely smart lady, my wife. Fearsomely determined, as well. That’s a combination that sometimes turns mountains into valleys.
“All right”, she said at last. “Then you’ve got to get him out on your own.”
“Ma’am?” Harry looked flabbergasted. Frightened, too.
“You can do it. You did it once, didn’t you? You can do it again. Only this time you won’t bring him back.”
“Would you want to be the one to explain to my kids why their daddy is in prison, Missus Edgecombe?”
Dean asked. “Charged with helping a murderer escape jail?”
“There won’t be any of that, Dean; we’ll work out a plan. Make it look like a real escape.”
“Make sure it’s a plan that could be worked out by a fellow who can’t even remember how to tie his own shoes, then”, Harry said. “They’ll have to believe that.”
She looked at him uncertainly.
“It wouldn’t do any good,” Brutal said. “Even if we could think of a way, it wouldn’t do any good.”
“Why not?” She sounded as if she might be going to cry. “Just why the damn hell not?”
“Because he’s a six-foot-eight-inch baldheaded black man with barely enough brains to feed himself”, I said. “How long do you think it would be before he was recaptured? Two hours? Six?”
“He got along without attracting much attention before”, she said. A tear trickled down her cheek. She slapped it away with the heel of her hand.
That much was true. I had written letters to some friends and relatives of mine farther down south, asking if they’d seen anything in the papers about a man fitting John Coffey’s description. Anything at all. Janice had done the same. We had come up with just one possible sighting so far, in the town of Muscle Shoals, Alabama. A twister had struck a church there during choir practice – in 1929, this had been -and a large black man had hauled two fellows out of the rubble. Both had looked dead to onlookers at first, but as it turned out, neither had been even seriously hurt. It was like a miracle, one of the witnesses was quoted as saying. The black man, a drifter who had been hired by the church pastor to do a day’s worth of chores, had disappeared in the excitement.
“You’re right, he got along,” Brutal said. “But you have to remember that he did most of his getting along before he was convicted of raping and murdering two little girls.”