Chapter 59 Chapter Thirteen

1956. Alabama in the rain. Our third granddaughter is graduating from the University of Florida and she is a beautiful girl. We sat down.I was 64 and looked like a young man, and Jen was 59 and still pretty, at least to me.We sat in the back all the way, and she kept blaming me for not getting her a new camera to capture the blissful moment.I opened my mouth and told her we could go shopping one day when we got there, and if she wanted a camera, she could buy one, the budget was fine, and I was thinking she was nagging because she was tired of traveling , and didn't like the book she bought, by Detective Mason.From then on, everything in my memory became blank in an instant, like a photographic negative exposed to sunlight.

Do you guys remember that car accident?I think a few readers may remember, but most have forgotten.But at the time, the crash was making headlines in newspapers across the country from coast to coast. We went into the outskirts of Birmingham, it was pouring rain, Janice was complaining about the old camera, and the car had a flat tire.The car wobbled into the sidewalk and was hit in the middle by a fertilizer truck.At sixty miles an hour the truck smashed the car into a bridge plinth and the car broke in two on the concrete pier, two shiny, rain-soaked bodies flying in both directions, the one with the fuel tank on it. That section exploded in mid-air, and a ball of red and black fire rose up in the gray rainy sky.Janice was complaining about her old Kodak camera, and all of a sudden I'm lying on the far side of the road under a bridge in the rain, staring at a pair of blue nylon pants that flew out of someone's suitcase, and the The words "Wednesday" are embroidered in black thread.There were broken bags, corpses, and fragments of corpses everywhere.Of the 73 people on board, only four survived.I was one of them, the only one not seriously injured.

I stood up and staggered through the open suitcases and shattered bodies, crying my wife's name.I remember kicking a clock, and I remember seeing a dead man of about thirty lying in a pile of shards of glass, with his walking shoes still on his feet, half his face gone.I felt the rain hitting my face, so I went into the bridge hole. The rain disappeared for a while, and when I got out from the other side, it hit my forehead and cheeks again.I saw Jen lying on all fours next to the compost truck, and I recognized her from the red coat, which was her second best dress, which, of course, she had saved for graduation.

She still has a breath.I always thought it would be a little better for me, if not for her, if she died at once.I might be able to get her to go earlier and more naturally. Maybe I'm just kidding myself.All I can be sure of is that I never gave up on her, never really gave up. She was shaking all over, and one shoe was missing.I saw her feet twitching, her eyes were open but expressionless, and her left eye was bloody.I knelt beside her, the smell of burnt smoke in the rain, and all I could think was that her feet were twitching, that she was electrified.She got electrocuted, and I had to pull the switch quickly.

"Help!" I yelled, "Help! Help me!" No one responded, no one came.It was raining heavily, and the pouring rain made my still black hair stick tightly to my skull. I held her in my arms, but no one came.She looked at me with blank eyes, bewildered, and blood was bubbling from the back of her shattered head.Beside a trembling, spasming arm was a chrome-plated plate with the word "Grey" on it, and next to it, probably the quartered body of a merchant who had once been wearing a brown wool coat. "Help!" I yelled again, and looked down the bridge to see John Coffey standing in the shadows, who was only a shadow himself, a huge man with long arms hanging at his sides and a bare head.

"John!" I yelled, "John, come to me! Come to Janice!" The rain got into my eyes, I blinked to squeeze the water out, and John was gone.I can still see the shadow that I mistook for John just now... but it's not just a phantom, I'm pretty sure.There he was, a ghost maybe, but there he was, the rain on his face mingling with the never-ending tears. She died in my arms, in the rain, next to that fertilizer truck, the smell of burning gasoline filling my nostrils.She never woke up: her eyes became clear, her lips moved, as if she was making the last declaration of love.The flesh in my arms twitched slightly stiffly, and she went.And then, for the first time in years, I thought of Melinda Moores, and how all the doctors at Indianola General Hospital thought she was going to die, and she sat up on the bed, refreshed and energetic, Bright, envious eyes looked at John Coffey.Melinda said I dreamed of you wandering in the dark, and so did I.We bumped into each other.

I put my wife's poor, shattered head on the wet interstate ground, stood up (it wasn't difficult, I just had a cut on the side of my left hand, nothing else), and headed down the overpass shadows shouted his name. "John! John Coffey! Where are you, Big Man?" I walked toward the shadows and kicked away a blood-stained furry bear, a pair of metal spectacle frames with shattered lenses, and a severed hand with reddish fingers Wearing a ring dyed crimson. "You saved Hal's wife, why didn't you save my wife? Why didn't you save Janice? Why didn't you save my Janice?"

No answer, just the smell of burning gasoline and burning corpses, just the rain pouring down from the gray sky incessantly, beating the concrete floor, and my wife dead on the ground behind me. No answer, no then, no now.Of course, in 1932, it wasn't just Meryl Moores that John saved, and it wasn't just Del's rat, the one that could only do tricks with the help of a spool, and who seemed to be looking for Del long before he showed up...even Long before John Coffey came along. John saved me too, but years later, when I stood in the pouring rain in Alabama looking for the man who didn't exist in the shadows under the overpass, when I stood among the scattered luggage and decapitated In the dead body, I learned a terrible truth: Sometimes, there is no difference between salvation and damnation at all.

As we sat together on his bed that day, November 18, 1932, I felt this power pouring into me, maybe salvation, maybe curse.That power poured out of him and into me, whatever strange power it was in him, passed through our hands in a way our normal love and hope and kindness couldn't do, the feeling , a tingle at first, and then it surged like a tide, becoming a power beyond anything I've ever experienced before or since.Since that day, I have never had arthritis, flu, or even strep throat.I never had a UTI again, not even a wound infection.I've had colds, but very rarely, once every six or seven years, and although colds are usually severe for people who don't often have them, I never did.During that terrible first half of 1956, I had a kidney stone.Even though I think some readers might still find it weird, I kind of like the pain when the kidney stones go away.That was the only real pain I've had since a urinary tract problem 24 years ago.My friends and my beloved contemporaries passed away one by one, dying of stroke, cancer, heart disease, liver disease, blood disease, etc., but I didn’t suffer from any of these diseases, they all bypassed me, just Like people driving around corners to avoid deer or raccoons on the road.In that terrible car accident, I was unscathed except for a cut hand. In 1932, John injected me with the antibody of life, perhaps, he injected me with life by electroshock.Finally I'm going to die, of course I'm going to die, and with Mister Clank dead, any illusion of immortality is gone, but the fact is, I was looking for death before it came to me.

Honestly, I've been looking for it since Elaine Connelly died.Do I need to explain? I read the pages again, turning the pages with trembling, speckled hands, wondering if there really was any meaning in those books that expressed lofty and lofty thoughts. I think back to the sermons I heard as a child in the Praise of Jesus, God Almighty Church, those certain assertions, and I think of the pastor who used to say that God's eyes are on the sparrow's head, and he can notice the most insignificant and smallest things he created thing.When I think of Mr. Jingle, and the sawdust we found in that hole in the beam, I think the parson was right.And yet the same God sacrificed John Coffey, as the Old Testament prophets savagely sacrificed sheep, as Abraham would have sacrificed his own son if God had really commanded him. It is like offering sacrifices, and this John, although he has been ignorant all his life, only wants to do good deeds.I thought of John saying that Wharton killed the Detrick sisters because of their mutual love, saying that it happens every day, all over the world.If it happened, God made it happen, and when we say, "I don't understand," God replies, "I don't care."

I thought of Mr. Clank's death as I was turning away, and my attention was taken away by a very mean person, and if there was anything not malicious about this guy, it was curiosity that seemed vindictive.I thought of Janice, and I knelt beside her in the rain, watching her convulsively die. Stop, that's what I tried to say to him that day in his cell, let go of my hand, if you don't let go I'm going to drown, drown or explode. "You're not going to explode," he answered with a smile, hearing my thoughts.The scary thing is: I didn't actually explode, and haven't all the time. I still suffer from at least one geriatric disease: I have insomnia.Every night I lie on the bed, listening to the hopeless coughing of frail old men and women, listening to them coughing and coughing, getting old.Sometimes I hear a ringing bell, or the creaking of leather shoes in the hall, or Mrs. Javits tuning the small TV to the evening news.I lie here, and if the moon is out the window, I'll look at the moon.I lay here thinking of Brutal, and Dean, and William Wharton saying niggers sometimes, and you're right, just wait and see.I thought of Delacroix saying, Chief Edgecombe, look at this, I taught Mr. Clank a new trick.I thought of Elaine standing in the sunroom ordering Brad Dolan to leave me alone.Sometimes, in my sleep, I see the overpass in the rain, and John Coffey stands in the shadow under it.In such a fragmented dream, I definitely didn't look at it. It must be him, my big guy, and he just stood there watching.I lie down and I wait.I thought of Janice, how I had lost her, that she was red in the rain, gone through my fingers, and I waited.We're all going to die, no exceptions, I know that, but God, sometimes the Mile is just too long.

---

Notes: