The library

The prison library at Cold Mountain Penitentiary was a cramped, L-shaped room, no bigger than Paul Edgecombe's office, and was located in an old clapboard building shouldered between A and B Blocks. The building was always swimming with a vague, pissy smell from the adjacent cellblock bathrooms, a fact Edgecombe considered the only good reason for its planned relocation. The library was in the process of being moved to a new building that was intended to become the prison auto shop, a plan Edgecombe dismissed as more "pork in someone's pocket," though he kept his opinion to himself during the Depression. The move was never completed; the following spring, the prison itself was relocated sixty miles down the road to Brighton.

A Repository of the Past

Despite the heat and the impending move, the library still held its old newspapers, stored in a pair of Pomona orange crates. It was here, on a sweltering October afternoon, that Edgecombe came to look up the details of the Detterick twins' murder case. The room was stifling, perhaps a hundred degrees, and the heat exacerbated the throbbing pain of the urinary infection that was plaguing him. The only other occupant was a scrawny old trusty named Gibbons, who dozed in a corner with a Wild West novel in his lap, undisturbed by the heat or the sounds of the infirmary being moved upstairs. Edgecombe found the newspapers easily enough, and the story of the Detterick twins was front-page news from the commission of the crime in June through the trial in late August and September.

A Place of Unwelcome Knowledge

As Edgecombe read, he forgot the heat and the noise from upstairs. The thought of the nine-year-old girls, with their fluffy blonde hair and engaging smiles, in connection with John Coffey's hulking darkness was unpleasant but impossible to ignore. Given his size, it was easy to imagine him as a giant in a fairy tale, and what he had done was even worse. Edgecombe reflected that it was a lucky thing for Coffey that he hadn't been lynched on the riverbank, if waiting to walk the Green Mile and sit in Old Sparky's lap could be considered lucky. The library, a place of quiet and storage, became the site where Edgecombe first confronted the full, horrifying details of the crime that would come to define his year and haunt his memories for the rest of his life.