The hands were limp again, the formerly bluish-white moons at the base of the fingernails now a deep eggplant hue, a tendril of smoke rising off cheeks still wet with salt water from the sponge … and his tears.
John Coffey’s last tears.
11.
I was all right until I got home. It was dawn by then, and birds singing. I parked my flivver, I got out, I walked up the back steps, and then the second greatest grief I have ever known washed over me. It was thinking of how he’d been afraid of the dark that did it. I remembered the first time we’d met, how he’d asked if we left a light on at night, and my legs gave out on me. I sat on my steps and hung my head over my knees and cried. It didn’t feel like that weeping was just for John , either, but for all of us.
Janice came out and sat down beside me. She put an arm over my shoulders.
“You didn’t hurt him any more than you could help, did you?”
I shook my head no.
“And he wanted to go.”
I nodded.
“Come in the house,” she said, helping me up. It made me think of the way John had helped me up after we’d prayed together. “Come in and have coffee.”
I did. The first morning passed, and the first afternoon, then the first shift back at work. Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness.
Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again. That’s all I know, except that this happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain.
And the electric chair, of course.
12.
A round quarter past two in the afternoon, my friend Elaine Connelly came to me where I sat in the sunroom, with the last pages of my story squared up neatly in front of me. Her face was very pale, and there were shiny places under her eyes. I think she had been crying.
Me, I’d been looking. Just that. Looking out the window and over the hills to the east, my right hand throbbing at the end of its wrist. But it was a peaceful throb, somehow. I felt empty, husked out. A feeling that was terrible and wonderful at the same time.
It was hard to meet Elaine’s eyes – l was afraid of the hate and contempt I might see there – but they were all right. Sad and wondering, but all right. No hate, no contempt, and no disbelief.
“Do you want the rest of the story?” I asked. I tapped the little pile of script with my aching hand.
“It’s here, but I’ll understand if you’d just as soon not – ”
“It isn’t a question of what I want”, she said. “I have to know how it came out, although I guess there is no doubt that you executed him. The intervention of Providence-with-a-capital-P is greatly overrated in the lives of ordinary humans, I think. But before I take those pages … Paul …”
She stopped, as if unsure how to go on. I waited. Sometimes you can’t help people. Sometimes it’s better not even to try.
“Paul, you speak in here as though you had two grown children in 1932 – not just one, but two. If you didn’t get married to your Janice when you were twelve and she was eleven, something like that – ”
I smiled a little. “We were young when we married – a lot of hill-people are, my own mother was – but not that young.”
“Then how old are you? I’ve always assumed you were in your early eighties, my age, possibly even a little younger, but according to this…”
“I was forty the year John walked the Green Mile”, I said. “I was born in 1892. That makes me a hundred
and four, unless my reckoning’s out.”
She stared at me, speechless.
I held out the rest of the manuscript, remembering again how John had touched me, there in his cell.