again. “I tried to take it back, but it was too late!”
“Boy, you are under arrest for murder,” McGee said, and then he spit in John Coffey’s face.
The jury was out forty-five minutes. Just about time enough to eat a little lunch of their own. I wonder they had any stomach for it.
5
I think you know I didn’t find all that out during one hot October afternoon in the soon-to-be-defunct prison library, from one set of old newspapers stacked in a pair of Pomona orange crates, but I learned enough to make it hard for me to sleep that night. When my wife got up at two in the morning and found me sitting in the kitchen, drinking buttermilk and smoking home-rolled Bugler, she asked me what was wrong and I lied to her for one of the few times in the long course of our marriage. I said I’d had another run-in with Percy Wetmore. I had, of course, but that wasn’t the reason she’d found me sitting up late. I was usually able to leave Percy at the office.
“Well, forget that rotten apple and come on back to bed,” she said. “I’ve got something that’ll help you sleep, and you can have all you want.”
“That sounds good, but I think we’d better not,” I said. “I’ve got a little something wrong with my waterworks, and wouldn’t want to pass it on to you.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Waterworks, huh,” she said. “I guess you must have taken up with the wrong streetcorner girl the last time you were in Baton Rouge.” I’ve never been in Baton Rouge and never so much as touched a streetcorner girl, and we both knew it.
“It’s just a plain old urinary infection,” I said. “My mother used to say boys got them from taking a leak when the north wind was blowing.”
“Your mother also used to stay in all day if she spilled the salt,” my wife said. “Dr Sadler—”
“No, sir,” I said, raising my hand. “He’ll want me to take sulfa, and I’ll be throwing up in every comer of my office by the end of the week. It’ll run its course, but in the meantime, I guess we best stay out of the playground.”
She kissed my forehead right over my left eyebrow, which always gives me the prickles… as Janice well knew. “Poor baby. As if that awful Percy Wetmore wasn’t enough. Come to bed soon!”
I did, but before I did, I stepped out onto the back porch to empty out (and checked the wind direction with a wet thumb before I did—what our parents tell us when we are small seldom goes ignored, no matter how foolish it may be). Peeing outdoors is one joy of country living the poets never quite got around to, but it was no joy that night; the water coming out of me burned like a line of lit coal-oil. Yet I thought it had been a little worse that afternoon, and knew it had been worse the two or three days before. I had hopes that maybe I had started to mend. Never was a hope more ill-founded. No one had told me that sometimes a bug that gets up inside there, where it’s warm and wet, can take a day or two off to rest before coming on strong again. I would have been surprised to know it. I would have been even more surprised to know that, in another fifteen or twenty years, there would be pills you could take that would smack that sort of infection out of your system in record time… and while those pills might make you feel a little sick at your stomach or loose in your bowels, they almost never made you vomit the way Dr. Sadler’s sulfa pills did. Back in ‘32, there wasn’t much you could do but wait, and try to ignore that feeling that someone had spilled coal-oil inside your works and then touched a match to it.
I finished my butt, went into the bedroom, and finally got to sleep. I dreamed of girls with shy smiles and blood in their hair.
6
The next morning there was a pink memo slip on my desk, asking me to stop by the warden’s office as soon as I could. I knew what that was about—there were unwritten but very important rules to the game, and I had stopped playing by them for awhile yesterday—and so I put it off as long as possible. Like going to the doctor about my waterworks problem, I suppose. I’ve always thought this “get-it-over-with” business was overrated.
Anyway, I didn’t hurry to Warden Moores’s office. I stripped off my wool uniform coat instead, hung it over the back of my chair, and turned on the fan in the corner—it was another hot one. Then I sat down and went over Brutus Howell’s night-sheet. There was nothing there to get alarmed about. Delacroix had wept briefly after turning in—he did most nights, and more for himself than for the folks he had roasted alive, I am quite sure—and then had take Mr. Jingles, the mouse, out of the cigar box he slept in. That had calmed Del, and he had slept like a baby the rest of the night. Mr. Jingles had most likely spent it on Delacroix’s stomach, with his tail curled over his paws, eyes unblinking. It was as if God had decided Delacroix needed a guardian angel, but had decreed in His wisdom that only a mouse would do for a rat like our homicidal friend from Louisiana. Not all that was in Brutal’s report, of course, but I had done enough night watches myself to fill in the stuff between the lines. There was a brief note about Coffey: “Laid awake, mostly quiet, may have cried some. I tried to get some talk started, but after a few grunted replies from Coffey, gave up. Paul or Harry may have better luck.”
“Getting the talk started” was at the center of our job, really. I didn’t know it then, but looking back from the vantage point of this strange old age (I think all old ages seem strange to the folk who must endure them), I understand that it was, and why I didn’t see it then—it was too big, as central to our work as our respiration was to our lives. It wasn’t important that the floaters be good at “getting the talk started,” but it was vital for me and Harry and Brutal and Dean… and it was one reason why Percy Wetmore was such a disaster. The inmates hated him, the guards hated him… everyone hated him, presumably, except for his political connections, Percy himself, and maybe (but only maybe) his mother. He was like a dose of white arsenic sprinkled into a wedding cake, and I think I knew he spelled disaster the start. He was an accident waiting to happen. As for the rest of us, we would have scoffed at the idea that we functioned most usefully not as the guards of the condemned but as their psychiatrists part of me still wants to scoff at that idea today—but we knew about getting the talk started… and without the talk, men facing Old Sparky had a nasty habit of going insane.
I made a note at the bottom of Brutal’s report to talk to John Coffey—to try, at least—and then passed on to a note from Curtis Anderson, the warden’s chief assistant. It said that he, Anderson, expected a DOE order for Edward Delacrois (Anderson’s misspelling; the man’s name was actually Eduard Delacroix) very soon. DOE stood for date of execution, and according to the note, Curtis had been told on good authority that the little Frenchman would take the walk shortly before Halloween—October 27th was his best guess, and Curtis Anderson’s guesses were very informed. But before then we could expect a new resident, name of William Wharton. “He’s what you like to call ‘a problem child,’ ” Curtis had written in his backslanting and somehow prissy script. “Crazy-wild and proud of it. Has rambled all over the state for the last year or so, and has hit the big time at last. Killed three people in a holdup, one a pregnant woman, killed a fourth in the getaway. State Patrolman. All he missed was a nun and a blind man!” I smiled a little at that. “Wharton is 19 years old, has Billy the Kid tattooed on upper forearm. You will have to slap his nose a time or two, I guarantee you that, but be careful when you do it. This man just doesn’t care.” He had underlined this last sentiment twice, then finished: “Also, he may be a hang-arounder. He’s working appeals, and there’s the fact that he is a minor.”
A crazy kid, working appeals, apt to be around for awhile. Oh, that all sounded just fine. Suddenly the day seemed hotter than ever, and I could no longer put off seeing Warden Moores.
I worked for three wardens during my years as a Cold Mountain guard; Hal Moores was the last and best of them. In a walk.
