of course I will, any illusions of immortality I might have had died with Mr. Jingles – but I will have wished for death long before death finds me. Truth to tell, I wish for it already and have ever since Elaine Connelly died. Need I tell you?
I look back over these pages, leafing through them with my trembling, spotted hands, and I wonder if there is some meaning here, as in those books which are supposed to be uplifting and ennobling. I think back to the sermons of my childhood, booming affirmations in the church of Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty, and I recall how the preachers used to say that God’s eye is on the sparrow, that He sees and marks even the least of His creations. When I think of Mr. Jingles, and the tiny scraps of wood we found in that hole in the beam, I think that is so. Yet this same God sacrificed John Coffey, who tried only to do good in his blind way, as savagely as any Old Testament prophet ever sacrificed a defenseless Iamb … as Abraham would have sacrificed his own son if actually called upon to do so. I think of John saying that Wharton killed the Detterick twins with their love for each other, and that it happens every day, all over the world. If it happens, God lets it happen, and when we say “I don’t understand,” God replies, “I don’t care.”
I think of Mr. Jingles dying while my back was turned and my attention usurped by an unkind man whose finest emotion seemed to be a species of vindictive curiosity. I think of Janice, jittering away her last mindless seconds as I knelt with her in the rain.
Stop it, I tried to tell John that day in his cell. Let go of my hands, I’m going to drown if you don’t. Drown or explode.
“You won’t ‘splode,” he answered, hearing my thought and smiling at the idea. And the horrible thing is that I didn’t. I haven’t.
I have at least one old man’s ill: I suffer from insomnia. Late at night I lie in my bed, listening to the dank and hopeless sound of infirm men and women coughing their courses deeper into old age. Sometimes I hear a call-bell, or the squeak of a shoe in the corridor, or Mrs. Javits’s little TV tuned to the late news. I lie here, and if the moon is in my window, I watch it. I lie here and think about Brutal, and Dean, and sometimes William Wharton saying That’s right, nigger, bad as you’d want. I think of Delacroix saying Watch this Boss Edgecombe, I teach Mr. Jingles a new trick. I think of Elaine, standing in the door of the sunroom and telling Brad Dolan to leave me alone. Sometimes I doze and see that underpass in the rain, with John Coffey standing beneath it in the shadows. It’s never just a trick of the eye, in these little dreams; it’s always him for sure, my big boy, just standing there and watching. I he here and wait. I think about Janice, how I lost her, how she ran away red through my fingers in the rain, and I wait. We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long.
Author’s Afterword
I don’t think I’d want to do another serial novel (if only because the critics get to kick your ass six times instead of just the once), but I wouldn’t have missed the experience for the world. As I write this afterword on the day before Part 2 of The Green Mile is to be published, the serialization experiment is looking like a success, at least in terms of sales. For that, Constant Reader, I want to thank you. And something a bit different wakes us all up a little, maybe – lets us see the old business of storytelling in a new way. That’s how it worked for me, anyway.
I wrote in a hurry because the format demanded that I write in a hurry. That was part of the exhilaration, but it also may have produced a number of anachronisms. The guards and prisoners listen to Allen’s Alley on their E Block radio, and I doubt if Fred Allen was actually broadcasting in 1932. The same may hold true for Kay Kyser and his Kollege of Musical Knowledge. This isn’t to let me off the hook, but it sometimes seems to me that history which has recently fallen over the horizon is harder to research than the Middle Ages or the time of the Crusades. I was able to determine that Brutal might indeed have called the mouse on the Mile Steamboat Willy – the Disney cartoon had been in existence almost four years by then – but I have a sneaking suspicion that the little pornographic comic book featuring Popeye and Olive Oyl is an artifact out of time. I might clean up some of this stuff when and if I decide to do The Green Mile as a single volume … but maybe I’ll leave the goofs. After all, doesn’t the great Shakespeare himself include in Julius Caesar the anachronism of a striking clock long before mechanical clocks were invented?