LITMIR.BIZ

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thumb and first finger of his right hand. I felt a funny little chill go up my back. I had never seen a mere mouse attend to something with such sharpness—with such intelligence. I don’t really believe that Mr. Jingles was a supernatural visitation, and if I have given you that idea, I’m sorry, but I have never doubted that he was a genius of his kind.

      Delacroix bent over and rolled the threadless spool across the floor of his cell. It went easily, like a pair of wheels connected by an axle. The mouse was out of his box in a flash and across the floor after it, like a dog chasing after a stick. I exclaimed with surprise, and Delacroix grinned.

      The spool hit the wall and rebounded. Mr. Jingles went around it and pushed it back to the bunk, switching from one end of the spool to the other whenever it looked like it was going to veer off course. He pushed the spool until it hit Delacroix’s foot. Then he looked up at him for a moment, as if to make sure Delacroix had no more immediate tasks for him (a few arithmetic problems to solve, perhaps, or some Latin to parse). Apparently satisfied on this score, Mr. Jingles went back to the cigar box and settled down in it again.

      “You taught him that,” I said.

      “Yessir, Boss Edgecombe,” Delacroix said, his smile only slightly dissembling. “He fetch it every time. Smart as hell, ain’t he?”

      “And the spool?” I asked. “How did you know to fetch that for him, Eddie?”

      “He whisper in my ear that he want it,” Delacroix said serenely. “Same as he whisper his name.”

      Delacroix showed all the other guys his mouse’s trick… all except Percy. To Delacroix, it didn’t matter that Percy had suggested the cigar box and procured the cotton with which to line it. Delacroix was like some dogs: kick them once and they never trust you again, no matter how nice you are to them.

      I can hear Delacroix now, yelling, Hey, you guys! Come and see what Mr. Jingles can do! And them going down in a bluesuit cluster—Brutal, Harry, Dean, even Bill Dodge. All of them had been properly amazed, too, the same as I had been.

      Three or four days after Mr. Jingles started doing the trick with the spool, Harry Terwilliger rummaged through the arts and crafts stuff we kept in the restraint room, found the Crayolas, and brought them to Delacroix with a smile that was almost embarrassed. “I thought you might like to make that spool different colors,” he said. “Then your little pal’d be like a circus mouse, or something.”

      “A circus mouse!” Delacroix said, looking completely, rapturously happy. I suppose he was completely happy, maybe for the first time in his whole miserable life. “That just what he is, too! A circus mouse! When I get outta here, he gonna make me rich, like inna circus! You see if he don’t.”

      Percy Wetmore would no doubt have pointed out to Delacroix that when he left Cold Mountain, he’d be riding in an ambulance that didn’t need to run its light or siren, but Harry knew better. He just told Delacroix to make the spool as colorful as he could as quick as he could, because he’d have to take the crayons back after dinner.

      Del made it colorful, all right. When he was done, one end of the spool was yellow, the other end was green, and the drum in the middle was firehouse red. We got used to hearing Delacroix trumpet, “Maintenant, m’sieurs et mesdames! Le cirque présentement le mous' amusant et amazeant!”[31] That wasn’t exactly it, but it gives you an idea of that stewpot French of his. Then he’d make this sound way down in his throat—I think it was supposed to represent a drumroll—and fling the spool. Mr. Jingles would be after it in a flash, either nosing it back or rolling it with his paws. That second way really was something you would have paid to see in a circus, I think. Delacroix and his mouse and his mouse’s brightly colored spool were our chief amusements at the time that John Coffey came into our care and custody, and that was the way things remained for awhile. Then my urinary infection, which had lain still for awhile, came back, and William Wharton arrived, and all hell broke loose.

      10

      The dates have mostly slipped out of my head. I suppose I could have my granddaughter, Danielle, look some of them out of the old newspaper files, but what would be the point? The most important of them, like the day we came down to Delacroix’s cell and found the mouse sitting on his shoulder, or the day William Wharton came on the block and almost killed Dean Stanton, would not be in the papers, anyway. Maybe it’s better to go on just as I have been; in the end, I guess the dates don’t matter much, if you can remember the things you saw and keep them in the right order.

      I know that things got squeezed together a little. When Delacroix’s DOE papers finally came to me from Curtis Anderson’s office, I was amazed to see that our Cajun pal’s date with Old Sparky had been advanced from when we had expected, a thing that was almost unheard of, even in those days when you didn’t have to move half of heaven and all the earth to execute a man. It was a matter of two days, I think, from the twenty-seventh of October to the twenty-fifth. Don’t hold me to it exactly, but I know that’s close; I remember thinking that Toot was going to get his Corona box back even sooner than he had expected.

      Wharton, meanwhile, got to us later than expected. For one thing, his trial ran longer than Anderson’s usually reliable sources had thought it would (when it came to Wild Billy, nothing was reliable, we would soon discover, including our time-tested and supposedly foolproof methods of prisoner control). Then, after he had been found guilty—that much, at least, went according to the script—he was taken to Indianola General Hospital for tests. He had had a number of supposed seizures during the trial, twice serious enough to send him crashing to the floor, where he lay shaking and flopping and drumming his feet on the boards. Wharton’s court-appointed lawyer claimed he suffered from “epilepsy spells” and had committed his crimes while of unsound mind; the prosecution claimed the fits were the sham acting of a coward desperate to save his own life. After observing the so-called “epilepsy spells” at first hand, the jury decided the fits were an act. The judge concurred but ordered a series of pre-sentencing tests after the verdict came down. God knows why; perhaps he was only curious.

      It’s a blue-eyed wonder that Wharton didn’t escape from the hospital (and the irony that Warden Moore’s wife, Melinda, was in the same hospital at the same time did not escape any of us), but he didn’t. They had him surrounded by guards, I suppose, and perhaps he still had hopes of being declared incompetent by reason of epilepsy, if there is such a thing.

      He wasn’t. The doctors found nothing wrong with his brain—physiologically, at least—and Billy “the Kid” Wharton was at last bound for Cold Mountain. That might have been around the sixteenth or the eighteenth; it’s my recollection that Wharton arrived about two weeks after John Coffey and a week or ten days before Delacroix walked the Green Mile.

      The day our new psychopath joined us was an eventful one for me. I woke up at four that morning with my groin throbbing and my penis feeling hot and clogged and swollen. Even before I swung my feet out of bed, I knew that my urinary infection wasn’t getting better, as I had hoped. It had been a brief turn for the better, that was all, and it was over.

      I went out to the privy to do my business—this was at least three years before we put in our first water-closet—and had gotten no further than the woodpile at the comer of the house when I realized I couldn’t hold it any longer. I lowered my pajama pants just as the urine started to flow, and that flow was accompanied by the most excruciating pain of my entire life. I passed a gall-stone in 1956, and I know people say that is the worst, but that gall-stone was like a touch of acid indigestion compared to this outrage.

      My knees came unhinged and I fell heavily onto them, tearing out the seat of my pajama pants when I spread my legs to keep from losing my balance and going face-first into a puddle of my own piss. I still might have gone over if I hadn’t grabbed one of the woodpile logs with my left hand. All that, though, could have been going on in Australia, or even on another planet. All I was concerned with was the pain that had set me on fire; my lower belly was burning, and my penis—an organ which had gone mostly forgotten by me except when providing me the most intense physical pleasure a man can experience—now felt as if it were melting; I expected to look down and see blood gushing from its tip, but it appeared

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