Stephen King: The Green Mile

by Stephen King

  "Help me!" I screamed again, and turned toward the underpass, and there I saw John Coffey standing in the shadows, only a shadow himself, a big man with long, dangling arms and a bald head. "John!" I screamed. "Oh John , please help me! Please help Janice!"

  Rain ran into my eyes. I blinked it away, and he was gone. I could see the shadows I had mistaken for John ... but it hadn't been only shadows. I'm sure of that. He was there. Maybe only as a ghost, but he was there, the rain on his face mixing with the endless flow of his tears.

  She died in my arms, there in the rain beside that fertilizer truck with the smell of burning diesel fuel in my nose. There was no moment of awareness - the eyes clearing, the lips moving in some whispered final declaration of love. There was a kind of shivery clench in the flesh beneath my hands, and then she was gone. I thought of Melinda Moores for the first time in years, then, Melinda sitting up in the bed where all the doctors at Indianola General Hospital had believed she would die; Melinda Moores looking fresh and rested and peering at John Coffey with bright, wondering eyes. Melinda saying I dreamed you were wandering in the dark, and so was I. We found each other.

  I put my wife's poor, mangled head down on the wet pavement of the interstate highway, got to my feet (it was easy; I had a little cut on the side of my left hand, but that was all), and screamed his name into the shadows of the underpass.

  "John! JOHN COFFEY! WHERE ARE YOU, BIG BOY?"

  I walked toward those shadows, kicking aside a teddy-bear with blood on its fur, a pair of steel rimmed eyeglasses with one shattered lens, a severed hand with a garnet ring on the pinky finger. "You saved Hal's wife, why not my wife? Why not Janice? WHY NOT MY JANICE?"

  No answer; only the smell of burning diesel and burning bodies, only the rain falling ceaselessly out of the gray sky and drumming on the cement while my wife lay dead on the road behind me. No answer then and no answer now. But of course it wasn't only Melly Moores that John Coffey saved in 1932, or Del's mouse, the one that could do that cute trick with the spool and seemed to be looking for Del long before Del showed up ... long before John Coffey showed up, either.

  John saved me, too, and years later, standing in the pouring Alabama rain and looking for a man who wasn't there in the shadows of an underpass, standing amid the spilled luggage and the ruined dead, I learned a terrible thing: sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation.

  I felt one or the other pouring through me as we sat together on his bunk - November the eighteenth, nineteen and thirty-two. Pouring out of him and into me, whatever strange force he had in him coming through our joined hands in a way our love and hope and good intentions somehow never can, a feeling that began as a tingle and then turned into something tidal and enormous, a force beyond anything I had ever experienced before or have ever experienced since. Since that day I have never had pneumonia, or the flu, or even a strep throat. I have never had another urinary infection, or so much as an infected cut. I have had colds, but they have been infrequent - six or seven years apart, and although people who don't have colds often are supposed to suffer more serious ones, that has never been the case with me. Once, earlier on in that awful year of 1956, I passed a gallstone. And although I suppose it will sound strange to some reading this in spite of all I have said, part of me relished the pain that came when that gallstone went. It was the only serious pain I'd had since that problem with my waterworks, twenty-four years before. The ills that have taken my friends and same-generation loved ones until there are none of them left - the strokes, the cancers, the heart attacks, the liver diseases, the blood diseases - have all left me untouched, have swerved to avoid me the way a man driving a car swerves to avoid a deer or a raccoon in the road. The one serious accident I was in left me untouched save for a scratch on the hand. In 1932, John Coffey inoculated me with life. Electrocuted me with life, you might say. I will pass on eventually - 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 som
e 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?

  Doing The Green Mile as a single volume would present its own unique challenges, I have come to realize, partly because the book couldn't be published as it was issued in its installments. Because I took Charles Dickens as my model, I asked several people how Dickens had handled the problem of refreshing his readers, recollections at the beginning of each new episode. I had expected something like the synopses which preceded each installment of my beloved Saturday Evening Post serials, and discovered that Dickens had not been so crude; he built the synopsis into the actual story.

  While I was trying to decide how to do this, my Wife began telling me (she doesn't exactly nag, but sometimes she advocates rather ruthlessly) that I had never really finished the story of Mr. Jingles, the circus mouse. I thought she was right, and began to see that, by making Mr. Jingles a secret of Paul Edgecombe's in his old age, I could create a fairly interesting "front story."(The result is a little bit like the form taken by the film version of Fried Green Tomatoes.) In fact, everything in Paul's front story - the story of his life at the Georgia Pines old folks, home - turned out to my satisfaction. I particularly liked the way that Dolan, the orderly, and Percy Wetmore became entwined in Paul's mind. And that was not something I planned or did on purpose; like the happiest of fictions, it just ambled along and stepped into its place.

  I want to thank Ralph Vicinanza for bringing me the - serial thriller - idea in the first place, and all my friends at Viking Penguin and Signet for getting behind it, even though they were scared to death at the beginning (all writers are crazy, and of course they knew that). I also want to thank Marsha DeFilippo, who transcribed a whole stenographer's notebook full of my cramped handwriting and never complained. Well ... rarely complained.

  Most of all, though, I want to thank my wife, Tabitha, who read this story and said she liked it. Writers almost always write with some ideal reader in mind, I think, and my wife is mine. We don't always see eye to eye when it comes to what we each write (hell, we rarely see eye to eye when we're shopping together in the supermarket), but when she says it's good, it usually is. Because she's tough, and if I try to cheat or cut a comer, she always sees it.

  And you, Constant Reader. Thank you, as well, and if you have any ideas about The Green Mile as a single volume, please let me know.

  Stephen King

  April 28, 1996

  New York City