When John got back from his shower and the floaters had left, I unlocked his cell, went in, and sat down on the bunk beside him. Brutal was on the desk. He looked up, saw me in there on my own, but said nothing. He just went back to whatever paperwork he was currently mangling, licking away at the tip of his pencil the whole time.
John looked at me with his strange eyes - bloodshot, distant, on the verge of tears... and yet calm, too, as if crying was not such a bad way of life, not once you got used to it. He even smiled a little. He smelled of Ivory soap, I remember, as clean and fresh as a baby after his evening bath.
'Hello, boss,' he said, and then reached out and took both of my hands in both of his. It was done with a perfect unstudied naturalness.
'Hello, John.' There was a little block in my throat, and I tried to swallow it away. 'I guess you know that we're coming down to it now. Another couple of days.'
He said nothing, only sat there holding my hands in his. I think, looking back on it, that something had already begun to happen to me, but I was too fixed - mentally and emotionally - on doing my duty to notice.
'Is there anything special you'd like that night for dinner, John? We can rustle you up most anything. Even bring you a beer, if you want. Just have to put her in a coffee cup, that's all.'
'Never got the taste,' he said.
'Something special to eat, then?'
His brow creased below that expanse of clean brown skull. Then the lines smoothed out and he smiled. 'Meatloaf'd be good.'
'Meatloaf it is. With gravy and mashed.' I felt a tingle like you get in your arm when you've slept on it, except this one was all over my body. In my body. 'What else to go with it?'
'Dunno, boss. Whatever you got, I guess. Okra, maybe, but I's not picky.'
'All right,' I said, and thought he would also have Mrs. Janice Edgecombe's peach cobbler for dessert. 'Now, what about a preacher? Someone you could say a little prayer with, night after next? It comforts a man, so I've seen that many times. I could get in touch with Reverend Schuster, he's the man who came when Del - '
'Don't want no preacher,' John said. 'You been good to me, boss. You can say a prayer, if you want. That'd be all right. I could get kneebound with you a bit, I guess.'
'Me! John, I couldn't - '
He pressed down on my hands a little, and that feeling got stronger. 'You could,' he said. 'Couldn't you, boss?'
'I suppose so,' I heard myself say. My voice seemed to have developed an echo. 'I suppose I could, if it came to that.'
The feeling was strong inside me by then, and it was like before, when he'd cured my waterworks, but it was different, too. And not just because there was nothing wrong with me this time. It was different because this time he didn't know he was doing it. Suddenly I was terrified, almost choked with a need to get out of there. Lights were going on inside me where there had never been lights before. Not just in my brain; all over my body.
'You and Mr. Howell and the other bosses been good to me,' John Coffey said. 'I know you been worryin, but you ought to quit on it now. Because I want to go, boss.'
I tried to speak and couldn't. He could, though. What he said next was the longest I ever heard him speak.
'I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin from or goin to or why. I'm tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would. But I cain't.'
Stop it, I tried to say. Stop it, let go of my hands, I'm going to drown if you don't. Drown or explode.
'You won't 'splode,' he said, smiling a little at the idea... but he let go of my hands.
I leaned forward, gasping. Between my knees I could see every crack in the cement floor, every groove, every flash of mica. I looked up at the wall and saw names that had been written there in 1924, 1926, 1931. Those names had been washed away, the men who had written them had also been washed away, in a manner of speaking, but I guess you can never wash anything completely away, not from this dark glass of a world, and now I saw them again, a tangle of names overlying one another, and looking at them was like listening to the dead speak and sing and cry out for mercy. I felt my eyeballs pulsing in their sockets, heard my own heart, felt the windy whoosh of my blood rushing through all the boulevards of my body like letters being mailed to everywhere.
I heard a train-whistle in the distance - the three-fifty to Priceford, I imagine, but I couldn't be sure, because I'd never heard it before. Not from Cold Mountain, I hadn't, because the closest it came to the state pen was ten miles east. I couldn't have heard it from the pen, so you would have said and so, until November of '32, I would have believed, but I heard it that day.
Somewhere a lightbulb shattered, loud as a bomb.
'What did you do to me?' I whispered. 'Oh John, what did you do?'