the lunch

The lunch is a small parcel of food that John Coffey carried with him on the day of his arrest, and its seemingly trivial details become a key piece of evidence that Paul Edgecombe later uses to argue Coffey's innocence. Found in the chest pocket of Coffey's bib overalls by Deputy Rob McGee, the lunch consisted of a bacon-tomato sandwich, a jelly fold-over, and a pickle, all wrapped in newspaper and tied with butcher's twine. McGee initially feared the bulge might be a gun, but Coffey calmly identified it as "a little lunch." The lunch's most significant feature is what it did not contain: the sausages that had been used to lure and kill the Dettericks' dog, Bowser. The prosecution argued that Coffey had fed those sausages to the dog, but the lunch's intact wrapping contradicted that theory. Coffey, as Edgecombe later discovered, could not tie a simple knot, making it impossible for him to have opened the lunch, removed the sausages, and then retied the string. This discrepancy, combined with Coffey's own words—"I couldn't help it. I tried to take it back, but it was too late"—led Edgecombe to believe that Coffey had found the girls already dead and had tried to heal them, not harm them. The lunch thus becomes a silent witness to the truth, a piece of physical evidence that the legal system overlooked in its rush to judgment.