Free The Green Mile by Stephen King

“nervous-tension migraines,” perhaps caused by the stress of Hal’s coming retirement. Except that neither of them could wait for his retirement, and my own wife had told me that migraine is not a disease of the old but the young; by the time its sufferers reached Melinda Moores’s age, they were usually getting better, not worse. And now this weakness of the hand. It didn’t sound like nervous tension to me; it sounded like a damned stroke.
    â€œDr. Haverstrom wants her to go in hospital up to Indianola,” Moores said. “Have some tests. Head X-rays, he means. Who knows what else. She is scared to death.” He paused, then added, “Truth to tell, so am I.”
    â€œYeah, but you see she does it,” I said. “Don’t wait. If it turns out to be something they can see with an X-ray, it may turn out to be something they can fix.”
    â€œYes,” he agreed, and then, for just a moment—the only one during that part of our interview, as I recall—our eyes met and locked. There was the sort of nakedly perfect understanding between us that needs no words. It could be a stroke, yes. It could also be a cancer growing in her brain, and if it was that, the chances that the doctors at Indianola could do anything about it were slim going on none. This was ’32, remember, when even something as relatively simple as a urinary infection was either sulfa and stink or suffer and wait.
    â€œI thank you for your concern, Paul. Now let’s talk about Percy Wetmore.”
    I groaned and covered my eyes.
    â€œI had a call from the state capital this morning,” the warden said evenly. “It was quite an angry call, as I’m sure you can imagine. Paul, the governor is so married he’s almost not there, if you take my meaning. And his wife has a brother who has one child. That child is PercyWetmore. Percy called his dad last night, and Percy’s dad called Percy’s aunt. Do I have to trace the rest of this out for you?”
    â€œNo,” I said. “Percy squealed. Just like the schoolroom sissy telling teacher he saw Jack and Jill smooching in the cloakroom.”
    â€œYep,” Moores agreed, “that’s about the size of it.”
    â€œYou know what happened between Percy and Delacroix when Delacroix came in?” I asked. “Percy and his damned hickory billy-club?”
    â€œYes, but—”
    â€œAnd you know how he runs it along the bars sometimes, just for the pure hell of it. He’s mean, and he’s stupid, and I don’t know how much longer I can take him. That’s the truth.”
    We’d known each other five years. That can be a long time for men who get on well, especially when part of the job is trading life for death. What I’m saying is that he understood what I meant. Not that I would quit; not with the Depression walking around outside the prison walls like a dangerous criminal, one that couldn’t be caged as our charges were. Better men than me were out on the roads or riding the rods. I was lucky and knew it—children grown and the mortgage, that two-hundred-pound block of marble, had been off my chest for the last two years. But a man’s got to eat, and his wife has to eat, too. Also, we were used to sending our daughter and son-in-law twenty bucks whenever we could afford it (and sometimes when we couldn’t, if Jane’s letters sounded particularly desperate). He was an out-of-work high-school teacher, and if that didn’t qualify for desperate back in those days, then the word had no meaning. So no, you didn’t walk off a steady-paycheck job like mine . . . not in cold blood, that was. But my blood wasn’t cold that fall. The temperatures outside were unseasonable, and the infection crawling around inside me had turned the thermostat up even more. And when a man’s in that kind of situation, why, sometimes his fist flies out pretty much of