Зеленая миля / The Green Mile

2

1932 was the year of John Coffey. The details would be in the papers, still there for anyone who cared enough to look them out—someone with more energy than one very old man whittling away the end of his life in a Georgia nursing home. That was a hot fall, I remember that; very hot, indeed. October almost like August, and the warden’s wife, Melinda[7 - Melinda – Мелинда], up in the hospital at Indianola for a spell. It was the fall I had the worst urinary infection of my life, not bad enough to put me in the hospital myself, but almost bad enough for me to wish I was dead every time I took a leak.

It was the fall of Delacroix[8 - Delacroix – Делакруа], the little half-bald Frenchman with the mouse, the one that came in the summer and did that cute trick with the spool. Mostly, though, it was the fall that John Coffey came to E Block, sentenced to death for the rape-murder of the Detterick[9 - Detterick – Деттерик] twins.

There were four or five guards on the block each shift, but a lot of them were floaters. Dean Stanton[10 - Dean Stanton – Дин Стэнтон], Harry Terwilliger[11 - Harry Terwilliger – Гарри Тервиллиджер], and Brutus Howell[12 - Brutus Howell – Брутус Хауэлл] (the men called him “Brutal,” but it was a joke, he wouldn’t hurt a fly unless he had to, in spite of his size) are all dead now, and so is Percy Wetmore[13 - Percy Wetmore – Перси Уэтмор], who really was brutal… not to mention stupid.

Percy had no business on E Block, where an ugly nature was useless and sometimes dangerous, but he was related to the governor by marriage, and so he stayed.

It was Percy Wetmore who ushered Coffey onto the block, with the supposedly traditional cry of “Dead man walking! Dead man walking here!”

It was still as hot as the hinges of hell, October or not. The door to the exercise yard opened, letting in a flood of brilliant light and the biggest man I’ve ever seen, except for some of the basketball fellows they have on the TV down in the “Resource Room” of this home for wayward droolers I’ve finished up in.

He wore chains on his arms and across his water-barrel of a chest; he wore legirons on his ankles and shuffled a chain between them that sounded like cascading coins as it ran along the lime—colored corridor between the cells.