Coffey's Hands

6

THAT WAS THE WEEK Melinda Moores, the warden’s wife, came home from Indianola. The doctors were done with her; they had their interesting, newfangled X-ray photographs of the tumor in her head; they had documented the weakness in her hand and the paralyzing pains that racked her almost constantly by then, and were done with her. They gave her husband a bunch of pills with morphine in them and sent Melinda home to die. Hal Moores had some sick-leave piled up—not a lot, they didn’t give you a lot in those days, but he took what he had so he could help her do what she had to do.

My wife and I went to see her three days or so after she came home. I called ahead and Hal said yes, that would be fine, Melinda was having a pretty good day and would enjoy seeing us.

“I hate calls like this,” I said to Janice as we drove to the little house where the Mooreses had spent most of their marriage.

“So does everyone, honey,” she said, and patted my hand. “We’ll bear up under it, and so will she.”

“I hope so.”

We found Melinda in the sitting room, planted in a bright slant of unseasonably warm October sun, and my first shocked thought was that she had lost ninety pounds. She hadn’t, of course—if she’d lost that much weight, she hardly would have been there at all—but that was my brain’s initial reaction to what my eyes were reporting. Her face had fallen away to show the shape of the underlying skull, and her skin was as white as parchment. There were dark circles under her eyes. And it was the first time I ever saw her in her rocker when she didn’t have a lapful of sewing or afghan squares or rags for braiding into a rug. She was just sitting there. Like a person in a train-station.

“Melinda,” my wife said warmly. I think she was as shocked as I was—more, perhaps—but she hid it splendidly, as some women seem able to do. She went to Melinda, dropped on one knee beside the rocking chair in which the warden’s wife sat, and took one of her hands. As she did, my eye happened on the blue hearthrug by the fireplace. It occurred to me that it should have been the shade of tired old limes, because now this room was just another version of the Green Mile.

“I brought you some tea,” Jan said, “the kind I put up myself. It’s a nice sleepy tea. I’ve left it in the kitchen.”

“Thank you so much, darlin,” Melinda said. Her voice sounded old and rusty.

“How you feeling, dear?” my wife asked.

“Better,” Melinda said in her rusty, grating voice. “Not so’s I want to go out to a barn dance, but at least there’s no pain today. They give me some pills for the headaches. Sometimes they even work.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

“But I can’t grip so well. Something’s happened… to my hand.” She raised it, looked at it as if she had never seen it before, then lowered it back into her lap. “Something’s happened… all over me.” She began to cry in a soundless way that made me think of John Coffey. It started to chime in my head again, that thing he’d said: I helped it, didn’t I? I helped it, didn’t I? Like a rhyme you can’t get rid of.

Hal came in then. He collared me, and you can believe me when I say I was glad to be collared. We went into the kitchen, and he poured me half a shot of white whiskey, hot stuff fresh out of some countryman’s still. We clinked our glasses together and drank. The shine went down like coal-oil, but the bloom in the belly was heaven. Still, when Moores tipped the mason jar at me, wordlessly asking if I wanted the other half, I shook my head and waved it off. Wild Bill Wharton was out of restraints—for the time being, anyway—and it wouldn’t be safe to go near where he was with a booze-clouded head. Not even with bars between us.

“I don’t know how long I can take this, Paul,” he said in a low voice. “There’s a girl who comes in mornings to help me with her, but the doctors say she may lose control of her bowels, and… and…” He stopped, his throat working, trying hard not to cry in front of me again.

“Go with it as best you can,” I said. I reached out across the table and briefly squeezed his palsied, liverspotted hand. “Do that day by day and give the rest over to God. There’s nothing else you can do, is there?”

“I guess not. But it’s hard, Paul. I pray you never have to find out how hard.”

He made an effort to collect himself.

“Now tell me the news. How are you doing with William Wharton? And how are you making out with Percy Wetmore?”

We talked shop for a while, and got through the visit. After, all the way home, with my wife sitting silent, for the most part—wet-eyed and thoughtful—in the passenger seat beside me, Coffey’s words ran around in my head like Mr. Jingles running around in Delacroix’s cell: I helped it, didn’t I?

“It’s terrible,” my wife said dully at one point. “And there’s nothing anyone can do to help her.”

I nodded agreement and thought, I helped it, didn’t I? But that was crazy, and I tried as best I could to put it out of my mind.

As we turned into our dooryard, she finally spoke a second time—not about her old friend Melinda, but about my urinary infection. She wanted to know if it was really gone. Really gone, I told her.

“That’s fine, then,” she said, and kissed me over the eyebrow, in that shivery place of mine. “Maybe we ought to, you know, get up to a little something. If you have the time and the inclination, that is.”

Having plenty of the latter and just enough of the former, I took her by the hand and led her into the back bedroom and took her clothes off as she stroked the part of me that swelled and throbbed but didn’t hurt anymore. And as I moved in her sweetness, slipping through it in that slow way she liked—that we both liked—I thought of John Coffey, saying he’d helped it, he’d helped it, hadn’t he? Like a snatch of song that won’t leave your mind until it’s damned good and ready.

Later, as I drove to the prison, I got to thinking that very soon we would have to start rehearsing for Delacroix’s execution. That thought led to how Percy was going to be out front this time, and I felt a shiver of dread. I told myself to just go with it, one execution and we’d very likely be shut of Percy Wetmore for good… but still I felt that shiver, as if the infection I’d been suffering with wasn’t gone at all, but had only switched locations, from boiling my groin to freezing my backbone.