“Helped,” he said. “I helped it, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, I guess, but how? How did you help it?”
He shook his head – right, left, back to dead center. He didn’t know how he’d helped it (how he’d cured it) and his placid face suggested that he didn’t give a rat’s ass – any more than I’d give a rat’s ass about the mechanics of running when I was leading in the last fifty yards of a Fourth of July Two-Miler. I thought about asking him how he’d known I was sick in the first place, except that would undoubtedly have gotten the same headshake. There’s a phrase I read somewhere and never forgot, something about “an enigma wrapped in a mystery.” That’s what John Coffey was, and I suppose the only reason he could sleep at night was because he didn’t care. Percy called him the ijit, which was cruel but not too far off the mark. Our big boy knew his name, and knew it wasn’t spelled like the drink, and that was just about all he cared to know.
As if to emphasize this for me, he shook his head m that deliberate way one more time, then lay down on his bunk with his hands clasped under his left cheek like a pillow and his face to the wall. His legs dangled off the end of the bunk from the shins on down, but that never seemed to bother him. The back of his shirt had pulled up, and I could see the scars that crisscrossed his skin.
I left the cell, turned the locks, then faced Delacroix, who was standing across the way with his hands wrapped around the bars of his cell, looking at me anxiously. Perhaps even fearfully. Mr. Jingles perched on his shoulder with his fine whiskers quivering like filaments. “What dat darkie-man do to you?”
Delacroix asked. “Waddit gris-gris? He th’ow some gris-gris on you?” Spoken in that Cajun accent of his, gris-gris rhymed with pee-pee.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Del.”
“Devil you don’t! Lookit you! All change! Even walk different, boss!”
I probably was walking different, at that. There was a beautiful feeling of calm in my groin, a sense of peace so remarkable it was almost eestasy – anyone who’s suffered bad pain and then recovered will know what I’m talking about.
“Everything’s all right, Del,” I insisted. “John Coffey had a nightmare, that’s all.”
“He a gris-gris man!” Delacroix said vehemently. There was a nestle of sweat-beads on his upper lip. He hadn’t seen much, just enough to scare him half to death. “He a hoodoo man!”
“What makes you say that?”
Delacroix reached up and took the mouse in one hand. He cupped it in his palm and lifted it to his face.
From his pocket, Delacroix took out a pink fragment – one of those peppermint candies. He held it out, but at first the mouse ignored it, stretching out its neck toward the man instead, sniffing at his breath the way a person might sniff at a bouquet of flowers. Its little oildrop eyes slitted most of the way closed in
an expression that looked like ecstasy. Delacroix kissed its nose, and the mouse allowed its nose to be kissed. Then it took the offered piece of candy and began to munch it. Delacroix looked at it a moment longer, then looked at me. All at once I got it.
“The mouse told you,” I said. “Am I right?”
“Oui.”
“Like he whispered his name to you.”
“Oui, in my ear he whisper it.”
“Lie down, Del,” I said. “Have you a little rest. All that whispering back and forth must wear you out.”
He said something else-accused me of not believing him, I suppose. His voice seemed to be coming from a long way off again. And when I went back up to the duty desk, I hardly seemed to be walking at all – it was more like I was floating, or maybe not even moving, the cells just rolling past me on either side, movie props on hidden wheels.
I started to sit like normal, but halfway into it my knees unlocked and I dropped onto the blue cushion Harry had brought from home the year before and plopped onto the seat of the chair. If the chair hadn’t been there, I reckon I would have plopped straight to the floor without passing Go or collecting two hundred dollars.