The storage room

The storage room at Cold Mountain Penitentiary is the terminal point of the Green Mile, the linoleum-floored corridor of E Block. It is a miserable, unheated chamber with a metal roof that makes it stifling in summer and cold enough to see one's breath in winter. The room is entered through a small door from Paul Edgecombe's office, which requires even an average-sized man to duck his head; John Coffey, the giant condemned man, had to sit and scoot through it. Three cement steps lead down to a board floor. The room's dual function—as a storage space for prison supplies and as the execution chamber—creates a stark juxtaposition of the mundane and the lethal. On the left side of the room, tools locked in chained frames, dry goods, sacks of seeds for the prison gardens, boxes of toilet paper, pallets of blanks for the plate-shop, and even bags of lime for marking the baseball diamond and football gridiron are stored. On the right side, death sits: Old Sparky, the electric chair, on a plank platform at the southeast corner. The chair has stout oak legs and broad oak arms that have absorbed the terrorized sweat of scores of men. A metal cap, usually hung jauntily on the back of the chair, is connected by a cord through a gasket-circled hole in the cinderblock wall to the generator. Beside the chair sits a galvanized tin bucket containing a circle of sponge, cut to fit the cap and soaked in brine before executions to conduct the charge of direct-current electricity into the condemned man's brain. The room's inadequate ventilation was demonstrated during the execution of Elmer Manfred in July or August of 1930, when nine of the witnesses passed out from the heat and the atmosphere. The storage room also contains the door to the switch room, where Jack Van Hay operates the generator, and a black wall telephone that can only ring in from the governor's office—a phone that never rang during Paul Edgecombe's entire tenure. The room is the site of the rehearsals for executions, where Old Toot-Toot, the trusty, traditionally stands in for the condemned, and where the actual executions, including the botched electrocution of Eduard Delacroix, take place. After Delacroix's execution, the room was scrubbed for hours, but the lingering odor of burned flesh remained. The storage room is also where Percy Wetmore, after being released from the restraint room, polished the oak arms and legs of the electric chair with paste furniture polish, a macabre act that seemed normal to him. It is the place where John Coffey, on the night of his own execution, stood frozen, looking at the chair, and said, "They're still in there. Pieces of them, still in there. I hear them screaming." The room is thus not merely a physical space but a repository of the accumulated horror and trauma of the executions carried out within it.