“Never got the taste”, he said.
“Something special to eat, then?”
His brow creased below that expanse of clean brown skull. Then the lines smoothed out and he smiled.
“Meatloaf’d be good.”
“Meatloaf it is. With gravy and mashed.” I felt a tingle like you get in your arm when you’ve slept on it, except this one was all over my body. In my body. “What else to go with it?”
“Dunno, boss. Whatever you got, I guess. Okra, maybe, but I’s not picky.”
“All right”, I said, and thought he would also have Mrs. Janice Edgecombe’s peach cobbler for dessert.
“Now, what about a preacher? Someone you could say a little prayer with, night after next? It comforts a man, so I’ve seen that many times. I could get in touch with Reverend Schuster, he’s the man who came when Del – ”
“Don’t want no preacher”, John said. “You been good to me, boss. You can say a prayer, if you want.
That’d be all right. I could get kneebound with you a bit, I guess.”
“Me! John , I couldn’t – ”
He pressed down on my hands a little, and that feeling got stronger. “You could,” he said. “Couldn’t you, boss?”
“I suppose so”, I heard myself say. My voice seemed to have developed an echo. “I suppose I could, if it came to that.”
The feeling was strong inside me by then, and it was like before, when he’d cured my waterworks, but it was different, too. And not just because there was nothing wrong with me this time. It was different because this time he didn’t know he was doing it. Suddenly I was terrified, almost choked with a need to get out of there. Lights were going on inside me where there had never been lights before. Not just in my brain; all over my body.
“You and Mr. Howell and the other bosses been good to me”, John Coffey said. “I know you been worryin, but you ought to quit on it now. Because I want to go, boss.”
I tried to speak and couldn’t. He could, though. What he said next was the longest I ever heard him speak.
“I’m rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I’m tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we’s comin from or goin to or why. I’m tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I’m tired of all the times I’ve wanted to help and couldn’t. I’m tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it’s the pain. There’s too much. If I could end it, I would. But I cain’t.”
Stop it, I tried to say. Stop it, let go of my hands, I’m going to drown if you don’t. Drown or explode.
“You won’t ‘splode,” he said, smiling a little at the idea … but he let go of my hands.
I leaned forward, gasping. Between my knees I could see every crack in the cement floor, every groove, every flash of mica. I looked up at the wall and saw names that had been written there in 1924, 1926, 1931. Those names had been washed away, the men who had written them had also been washed away, in a manner of speaking, but I guess you can never wash anything completely away, not from this dark glass of a world, and now I saw them again, a tangle of names overlying one another, and looking at them was like listening to the dead speak and sing and cry out for mercy. I felt my eyeballs pulsing in their sockets, heard my own heart, felt the windy whoosh of my blood rushing through all the boulevards of my body like letters being mailed to everywhere.
I heard a train-whistle in the distance – the threefifty to Priceford, I imagine, but I couldn’t be sure, because I’d never heard it before. Not from Cold Mountain, I hadn’t, because the closest it came to the state pen was ten miles east. I couldn’t have heard it from the pen, so you would have said and so, until November of ’32, I would have believed, but I heard it that day.