Night Journey

The Night Journey is the central, secret event of Paul Edgecombe's memoir: the midnight expedition in which he and three fellow guards smuggled the condemned giant John Coffey out of Cold Mountain Penitentiary to the home of Warden Hal Moores, so that Coffey could use his miraculous healing power on the warden's wife, Melinda, who was dying of a brain tumor. The journey is the moral and narrative hinge of the story—the point at which the guards' professional duty collides with their private knowledge of Coffey's innocence and his gift, forcing them into an act of desperate, illegal compassion that will determine the fate of everyone involved.

Origins and Planning

The idea for the Night Journey was born in the aftermath of Eduard Delacroix's botched execution, a horror that Percy Wetmore had engineered by using a dry sponge. Paul Edgecombe, sickened by what he had witnessed and haunted by the memory of John Coffey healing his own urinary infection and later reviving Delacroix's crushed mouse, Mr. Jingles, began to see a possible atonement. He had also learned, through his own investigation, that Coffey was almost certainly innocent of the rape-murder of the Detterick twins—the crime for which he was condemned. The final catalyst was a telephone call from Warden Moores, who told Edgecombe that his wife Melinda was "sinking" from an inoperable brain tumor, that she had begun to swear uncontrollably, and that the doctors had sent her home to die. Edgecombe called his three most trusted men—Brutus Howell, Harry Terwilliger, and Dean Stanton—to his house for lunch the day after Delacroix's execution. Over cold beef sandwiches and iced tea, he laid out his plan: they would drug William Wharton, subdue Percy Wetmore, and take John Coffey out of the prison to Melinda Moores's bedside. The men were stunned, but the memory of what Coffey had done to the mouse—and to Edgecombe himself—was too vivid to dismiss. After a long, tense discussion, they agreed.

The Escape from E Block

On the night of the journey, the guards executed their plan with precision. Dean Stanton had already secured a supply of morphine from the infirmary. Edgecombe laced a bottle of R.C. Cola with the drug and gave it to William Wharton, who drank it eagerly and soon lay unconscious on his bunk. Then the three guards—Edgecombe, Howell, and Terwilliger—confronted Percy Wetmore in Edgecombe's office. When Percy realized they meant to put him in a straitjacket, he panicked, screaming that he knew important people and threatening them with the breadlines. Brutus Howell twisted his ears until he submitted, and they strapped him into the jacket, taped his mouth, and locked him in the restraint room at the far end of the Green Mile. With Percy neutralized and Wharton insensible, they opened John Coffey's cell. Coffey, who seemed to know what was happening, stepped out without resistance. "You still want to go for that ride, John?" Howell asked. "Yes, sir," Coffey replied. "I reckon." They led him through the storage room, past the silent electric chair—which made him stop and stare, saying he could hear pieces of the dead still screaming inside it—and down the stairs into the tunnel that ran under the highway. At the far end, Edgecombe used his master key, Aladdin, to unlock the bulkhead door. They emerged onto the shoulder of the road, crossed into the woods, and found Harry Terwilliger's old Farmall truck hidden under pine boughs. Coffey rode in the back, wrapped in a blanket, staring up at the stars with a look of sublime happiness. "Look, boss!" he cried, pointing. "It's Cassie, the lady in the rockin chair!"

The Healing at Chimney Ridge

The twenty-five-mile drive to the Moores house on Chimney Ridge took over an hour in the rattling truck. When they arrived, Warden Moores came to the door with a long-barreled pistol, ready to shoot. Only Coffey's calm presence and the warden's own desperate hope prevented violence. Coffey walked past Moores and into the back bedroom, where Melinda lay propped against the headboard, her face ravaged by the tumor, her speech a stream of obscenities. He sat beside her on the bed, looked into her eyes, and said, "I see it. I see it, and I can help." Then he bent and pressed his mouth to hers, inhaling deeply. The house shook; a grandfather clock fell over in the parlor; a windowpane cracked. Smoke rose from the bedclothes. When Coffey pulled away, Melinda's face had smoothed out, the droop on the right side of her mouth was gone, and some of her hair had turned black again. She sat up, clear-eyed, and asked where she was. Coffey, meanwhile, collapsed to the floor, coughing violently, his skin gray. He had taken the tumor—the sickness, the death—into himself.

The Return and Its Cost

Coffey was so weakened by the healing that the guards had to help him back through the tunnel on a gurney. He coughed and gasped, his face the color of ashes, but he made it. Back on E Block, they found Percy still locked in the restraint room, and Wharton still unconscious. But when they released Percy, Coffey reached through the bars of his cell, grabbed him, and kissed him—transferring the tumor, the black swarm of death, into Percy's body. Percy immediately drew his gun and emptied all six shots into the sleeping Wharton, killing him. Then he went catatonic, never to speak again. The guards, terrified, agreed on a cover story: Percy had simply gone crazy and shot Wharton. The truth of the Night Journey—the midnight ride, the healing, the transfer of the tumor—was never revealed. The journey had saved Melinda Moores, but it had also destroyed Percy Wetmore and sealed John Coffey's fate. Edgecombe would later write that he had learned a terrible thing that night: "sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation."