Coffey on the Mile

7

TWO DAYS LATER, on the eighteenth, Bill Dodge, Hank Bitterman, and someone else—I don’t remember who, some floater—took John Coffey over to D Block for his shower, and we rehearsed his execution while he was gone. We didn’t let Toot-Toot stand in for John; all of us knew, even without talking about it, that it would have been an obscenity.

I did it.

“John Coffey,” Brutal said in a not-quite-steady voice as I sat clamped into Old Sparky, “you have been condemned to die in the electric chair, sentence passed by a jury of your peers…”

John Coffey’s peers? What a joke. So far as I knew, there was no one like him on the planet. Then I thought of what John had said while he stood looking at Sparky from the foot of the stairs leading down from my office: They’re still in there. I hear them screaming.

“Get me out of it,” I said hoarsely. “Undo these clamps and let me up.”

They did it, but for a moment I felt frozen there, as if Old Sparky did not want to let me go.

As we walked back to the block, Brutal spoke to me in a low voice, so not even Dean and Harry, who were setting up the last of the chairs behind us, would overhear. “I done a few things in my life that I’m not proud of, but this is the first time I ever felt really actually in danger of hell.”

I looked at him to make sure he wasn’t joking. I didn’t think he was. “What do you mean?”

“I mean we’re fixing to kill a gift of God,” he said. “One that never did any harm to us, or to anyone else. What am I going to say if I end up standing in front of God the Father Almighty and He asks me to explain why I did it? That it was my job? My job?”