The Two Dead Girls, Chapter One

This happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was
still at Cold Mountain. And the electric chair was there, too,
of course.

The inmates made jokes about the chair the way people
always make jokes about things that frighten them but
can't be gotten away from. They called it Old Sparky, or the
Big Juicy. They made cracks about the Power bill, and how
Warden Moores would cook his Thanksgiving dinner that
fall, with his wife, Melinda, too sick to cook.

But for the ones who actually had to sit down in that chair,
the humor went out of the situation in a hurry. I presided
over seventy-eight executions during my time at Cold
Mountain (that's one figure I've never been confused
about; I'll remember it on my deathbed), and I think that,
for most of those men, the truth of what was happening to
them finally hit all the way home when their ankles were
being damped to the stout oak of "Old Sparky's" legs. The
realization came then (you would see it rising in their eyes,
a kind of cold dismay) that their, own legs had finished
their careers. The blood still ran in them, the muscles were
still strong, but they were finished, all the same; they were
never going to walk another country mile or dance with a
girl at a barn-raising. Old Sparky's clients came to a
knowledge of their deaths from the ankles up. There was a
black silk bag that went over their heads after they had
finished their rambling and mostly disjointed last remarks.
It was supposed to be for them, but I always thought it was
really for us, to keep us from seeing the awful tide of
dismay in their eyes as they realized they were going to
die with their knees bent.

There was no death row at Cold Mountain, only E Block, set
apart from the other four and about a quarter their size,
brick instead of wood, with a horrible bare metal roof that
glared in the summer sun like a delirious eyeball. Six cells
inside, three on each side of a wide center aisle, each
almost twice as big as the cells in the other four blocks.
Singles, too. Great accommodations for a prison (especially
in the thirties), but the inmates would have traded for cells
in any of the other four. Believe me, they would have
traded.

There was never a time during my years as block
superintendent when all six cells were occupied at one time
-- thank God for small favors. Four was the most, mixed
black and white (at Cold Mountain, there was no
segregation among the walking dead), and that was a little
piece of hell. One was a woman, Beverly McCall. She was
black as the ace of spades and as beautiful as the sin you
never had nerve enough to commit. She put up with six
years of her husband beating her, but wouldn't put up with
his creeping around for a single day. On the evening after
she found out he was cheating, she stood waiting for the
unfortunate Lester McCall, known to his pals (and,
presumably, to his extremely short-term mistress) as
Cutter, at the top of the stairs leading to the apartment
over his barber shop. She waited until he got his overcoat
half off, then dropped his cheating guts onto his tu-tone
shoes. Used one of Cutter's own razors to do it. Two nights
before she was due to sit in Old Sparky, she called me to
her cell and said she had been visited by her African
spirit-father in a dream. He told her to discard her
slave-name and to die under her free name, Matuomi.
That was her request, that her deathwarrant should be read
under the name of Beverly Matuomi. I guess her
spirit-father didn't give her any first name, or one she
could make out, anyhow. I said yes, okay, fine. One thing
those years serving as the bull-goose screw taught me was
never to refuse the condemned unless I absolutely had to.
In the case of Beverly Matuomi, it made no difference,
anyway. The governor called the next day around three in
the afternoon, commuting her sentence to life in the
Grassy Valley Penal Facility for Women -- all penal and no
penis, we used to say back then. I was glad to see Bev's
round ass going left instead of right when she got to the
duty desk, let me tell you.

Thirty-five years or so later -- had to be at least thirty-five
-- I saw that name on the obituary page of the paper,
under a picture of a skinny-faced black lady with a cloud of
white hair and glasses with rhinestones at the corners. It
was Beverly. She'd spent the last ten years of her life a
free woman, the obituary said, and had rescued the
small-town library of Raines Falls pretty much
single-handed. She had also taught Sunday school and
had been much loved in that little backwater. LIBRARIAN
DIES OF HEART FAILURE, the headline said, and below
that, in smaller type, almost as an afterthought: Served
Over Two Decades in Prison for Murder. Only the eyes, wide
and blazing behind the glasses with the rhinestones at the
comers, were the same. They were the eyes of a woman
who even at seventy-whatever would not hesitate to pluck a
safety razor from its blue jar of disinfectant, if the urge
seemed pressing. You know murderers, even if they finish
up as old lady librarians in dozey little towns. At least you
do if you've spent as much time minding murderers as I
did. There was only one time I ever had a question about
the nature of my job. That, I reckon, is why I'm writing this.

The wide corridor up the center of E Block was floored with
linoleum the color of tired old limes, and so what was
called the Last Mile at other prisons was called the Green
Mile at Cold Mountain. It ran, I guess, sixty long paces
from south to north, bottom to top. At the bottom was the
restraint room. At the top end was a T-junction. A left turn
meant life -- if you called what went on in the sunbaked
exercise yard life, and many did; many lived it for years,
with no apparent ill effects. Thieves and arsonists and sex
criminals, all talking their talk and walking their walk and
making their little deals.

A right turn, though -- that was different. First you went into
my office (where the carpet was also green, a thing I kept
meaning to change and not getting around to), and
crossed in front of my desk, which was flanked by the
American flag on the left and the state flag on the right.
On the far side were two doors. One led into the small
W.C. that I and the E Block guards (sometimes even
Warden Moores) used; the other opened on a kind of
storage shed. This was where you ended up when you
walked the Green Mile.

It was a small door -- I had to duck my head when I went
through, and John Coffey actually had to sit and scoot. You
came out on a little landing, then went down three cement
steps to a board floor. It was a miserable room without
heat and with a metal roof, just like the one on the block
to which it was an adjunct. It was cold enough in there to
see your breath during the winter, and stifling in the
summer. At the execution of Elmer Manfred -- in July or
August of '30, that one was, I believe -- we had nine
witnesses pass out.

On the left side of the storage shed -- again -- there was
life. Tools (all locked down in frames crisscrossed with
chains, as if they were carbine rifles instead of spades and
pickaxes), dry goods, sacks of seeds for spring planting in
the prison gardens, boxes of toilet paper, pallets
cross-loaded with blanks for the prison plate-shop...even
bags of lime for marking out the baseball diamond and
the football gridiron -- the cons played in what was known
as The Pasture, and fall afternoons were greatly looked
forward to at Cold Mountain.

On the right -- once again -- death. Old Sparky his
ownself, sitting up on a plank platform at the southeast
comer of the storeroom, stout oak legs, broad oak arms
that had absorbed the terrorized sweat of scores of men in
the last few minutes of their lives, and the metal cap,
usually hung jauntily on the back of the chair, like some
robot kid's beanie in a Buck Rogers comic-strip. A cord ran
from it and through a gasket-circled hole in the cinderblock
wall behind the chair. Off to one side was a galvanized tin
bucket. If you looked inside it, you would see a circle of
sponge, cut just right to fit the metal cap. Before
executions, it was soaked in brine to better conduct the
charge of direct-current electricity that ran through the wire,
through the sponge, and into the condemned man's brain.

Copyright © 1996 by Stephen King

Want to read the rest? Try Amazon.com

The Green Mile
By Stephen King
Pocket Books 1999 ( 544 pages, $7.99 )
Mass Market Paperback, ISBN: 0-671-04178-9