John Coffey’s Hands

(Light’s up, sit)

This happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain and the electric chair was there, too, of course.

The inmates made jokes about the chair; the way people always make jokes about things that frighten them that can’t be gotten away from. They called it old Sparky, or the big juicy. They made cracks about the power bill and how Warden Moores would cook his thanksgiving turkey that fall, when his wife, Melinda, was too sick to cook

(Goes to table)

But for the ones who actually had to sit down in that chair, the humour went out of the situation in a hurry. I presided over 78 executions during my time at cold mountain and I think that for most of those men, the truth of what was happening to them finally hit all the way home when their ankles were being clamped to the stout oak of ‘Old Sparky’s’ legs. The realization came then (you would see it in their eyes a kind of…Cold Dismay) that their own legs had finished their careers. The blood still ran in them, their muscles were still strong, but they were finished, all the same, they were never going to walk another country mile or dance with a girl at a barn raising again. Old Sparky’s clients came to a knowledge of the deaths from the ankles up. There was a black silk bag that went over their heads after they had finished their rambling and mostly disjointed last remarks. It was supposed to be for them, but I always thought it was really for us, to keep us from seeing the awful tide of dismay in their eyes as they realized they were going to die with their knees bent.

(Walks over to armchair and sits down)

1932 was the year of John Coffey. The details would be in the papers still there for anyone who cared enough to look them out. It was the fall I had the worst urinary infection of my life, not bad enough to put me in the hospital myself, but almost bad enough for me to wish I was dead everytime I took a leak. It was the fall of Delacroix, the little half-bald Frenchman with the mouse, the one that came in the summer and did that cute trick with the spool. Mostly, though it was the fall that John Coffey came to E-block, sentenced to death for the Rape Murder of the Detterick twins. It was Percy Wetmore who ushered Coffey onto the block, with the supposedly traditional call of ‘dead man walking! Dead man walking here!”

John Coffey was black, like most of the men who came to stay for a while in E-block before dying in Old Sparky’s lap, and he stood six feet, eight inches tall, made Brutus Howell look like a kid next to him, he was broad in the shoulders and deep through the chest, laced over with muscle in every direction. They’d put him in the biggest denims they could find, and still the cuffs of the pants rode halfway up his bunched and scarred calves. He looked like he could have snapped the chains that held him, as easily as you might snap the ribbons on a Christmas present, but when you looked into his face, you knew he wasn’t going to do anything like that.

“Do you leave the light on after bedtime?” he asked right away, as if he had only been waiting for the chance. I had been asked a lot of strange questions by newcomers – once about the size of my wife’s tits, but never that one. Coffey was smiling a trifle uneasy as if he knew we would think him foolish but couldn’t help himself, “Because I get a little scared in the dark sometimes” he said “If it’s a strange place” I looked at him – the pure size of him – and felt strangely touched, they did touch you, you know, you didn’t see them at their worst, hammering out their horrors like demons at a forge.

He said something and I heard it with perfect clarity, and although I didn’t know much about what he’d done, it still gave me a chill.

“I couldn’t help it boss” he said, “I tried to take it back, but it was too late.”

(Sips tea)

So often you read in the papers that the killer showed no remorse but that wasn’t the case here. John Coffey was torn open by what he had done…but he would live. The girls would not. They had been torn open in a more fundamental way.

(Walks back to table)

I was walking down the mile, one day, and I glanced into Coffey’s cell. Coffey sat on the end of his bunk, looking at me with his strange wet eyes. “Boss Edgecombe” He said, and it sounded urgent. “I need to talk to you.”

“So talk John Coffey,” I said.

“No you have to come in here” he replied

That’s the nuttiest thing I’ve ever heard I thought and then I then realised something even nuttier, I was going to do it. I sat down there next to him, and he put his arm round my shoulders as if we were at the movies and I was his girl. I asked him what he wanted. “Just to help” he said. He sighed like a man will when he’s faced with a job he doesn’t much want to do, and then he put his hand down in my crotch.

A jolt slammed through me then, a big painless whack of something. Then it was gone and so was my urinary infection. “What did you do big boy” I asked. “Helped” he said” I helped it didn’t I.”

I fell asleep that night thinking of Eduard Delacroix riding the lightning, Melinda Moores and my big boy with the endlessly weeping eyes. Those thoughts twisted their way into a dream. In it, John Coffey was sitting on the riverbank and bawling his inarticulate mooncalf’s grief up at the early summer sky. In the crook of each arm the black man held the body of a naked girl child. In my dream, I went to him, knelt before him and took his hands. “I couldn’t help it” he said, “I tried to take it back but it was to late”

I couldn’t help it

I couldn’t help it (emphasizing ‘help’)

And this time in my dream, I understood him.

I got Brutal and Dean right away. I didn’t know just how to begin. I had known this would come up, of course I did, but I still didn’t know how to start telling them what I knew.

Brutal helped me. “You think that big lug is innocent,” he said.

“I’m positive,” I said

Then he said, “How in the name of Jesus can you be,”

Then I leaned forward and told them what I knew.

There were no thunderstorms on the night it came John Coffey’s turn to walk the Green Mile.

“I be all right,” John said ‘this the hard part; I be all right in a little while”

I had no trouble understanding how a man could simultaneously want to go and still be terrified of the trip. John’s eyes turned to me. I saw no resignation in them, no hope of heaven, no dawning peace. How I would love to tell you that I did. What I saw was fear, misery, incompletion, and incomprehension.

They were the eyes of a trapped and terrified animal.

Brutal took the mask off its brass hook, but as soon as John saw it and understood what it was, his eyes widened in horror.

“Please, boss, don’t put that thing over my face” he said “please don’t put me in the dark, don’t make me go in the dark, I’s afraid of the dark”

The mask was tradition, not law. It was, in fact, to spare the witnesses. I decided that they did not need to be spared, not this once. John, after all, hadn’t done a goddamn thing in his life to warrant dying under a mask

“All right, John” I said, “All right.”

(Lights fade)