Pleasure Reading

 The Green Mile

Part 1

"The Two Dead Girls"

This happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain. And the electric chair was there, too, of course. 1932 was the year of John Coffey, sentenced to death for the rape-murder of the Detterick twins. John Coffey was black, like most of men who came to stay for awhile in E Block before dying in Old Sparky’s lap, and he stood six feet, eight inches tall. The narrator looked up and down mostly to register his height as a fact and not an optical illusion. King Cotton had been deposed in the South seventy years. There were no more cotton plantations, but there were forty or fifty prosperous cotton farms in the southern part of the state. Klaus Detterick owned one of them. He and his wife had three children: Howard, who was twelve or thereabouts, and the twin girls, Cora and Kathe. On a warm night in June of that year, the girls asked for and were given permission to sleep on the screen-enclosed side porch, which ran the length of the house. This was a great treat for them. Their mother kissed them goodnight just shy of nine, when the last light had gone out of the sky. It was the final time she saw either of them until they were in their coffins and the undertaker had repaired the worst of the damage. Marjorie went out onto the porch, screamed for Klaus. What he found on the porch would have jellied the legs of the most courageous parent. The blankets in which the girls would have bundled themselves as the night drew on and grew colder had been cast into one comer. The screen door had been yanked off its upper hinge and hung drunkenly out into the dooryard. 18. And on the boards of both the porch and the steps beyond the mutilated screen door, there were spatters of blood. They saw it that day, Sitting on the riverbank in a faded, bloodstained jumper was the biggest man any of them had ever seen - John Coffey.