Mr. Jingles Learns the Spool Trick

Eduard Delacroix, a slight, balding Cajun condemned for rape and murder, discovered that the mouse he called Mr. Jingles was not merely a pet but a creature of startling intelligence. In the weeks before his execution, Delacroix taught the mouse a trick that would become the chief entertainment on E Block: fetching and rolling a small wooden spool. The performance, which Delacroix announced with a theatrical drumroll and a flourish of stewpot French, transformed the death-house corridor into a circus ring, if only for a few moments at a time.

The Spool and the Circus Mouse

The spool itself was a simple object, obtained from Old Toot-Toot's snack cart. Delacroix would hold it between thumb and finger, then bend and roll it across the floor of his cell. Mr. Jingles, who had already shown an uncanny ability to distinguish regular guards from floaters and to appear only when Percy Wetmore was absent, responded with an eagerness that seemed almost human. He was out of his cigar-box bed in a flash, chasing the spool as a dog chases a stick. When the spool hit the wall and rebounded, the mouse would go around it and push it back to Delacroix's foot, switching from one end to the other whenever it threatened to veer off course. The little Frenchman was simply overcome with delight, watching his pet perform with the pride of a classical pianist hearing his five-year-old son play his first halting exercises.

Coloring the Performance

Harry Terwilliger, one of the regular E Block guards, took the trick a step further. He rummaged through the arts-and-crafts supplies kept in the restraint room, found a set of Crayola crayons, and brought them to Delacroix with an almost embarrassed smile. "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." Delacroix seized on the idea with rapturous happiness. "A circus mouse!" he exclaimed. "That just what he is, too! When I get outta here, he gonna make me rich, like inna circus!" He colored the spool with care: one end yellow, the other end green, and the drum in the middle a firehouse red. The transformation was complete. Now Mr. Jingles was not just a clever mouse but a performer in a miniature circus, his brightly colored prop a flag of defiance against the gray routine of death row.

The Whispered Name and the Limits of Training

Delacroix insisted that he had not chosen the mouse's name himself. "He whisper it in my ear," he said, claiming the mouse had told him its name was Mr. Jingles, not Steamboat Willy as Brutus Howell had dubbed it. When Paul Edgecombe asked how Delacroix had known to fetch a spool for the mouse, Delacroix gave the same serene answer: "He whisper in my ear that he want it." The guards, who had seen the mouse's uncanny behavior from the start—its fearless approach to the duty desk, its refusal to eat from floaters, its apparent knowledge of Percy's schedule—were inclined to believe that the mouse had trained itself, and that Delacroix was merely its willing student. The spool trick became the block's chief amusement, a bright spot in the grim waiting that defined life on the Green Mile. Delacroix showed all the other guards, gathering them in a bluesuit cluster to watch Mr. Jingles perform. Only Percy Wetmore was excluded; Delacroix, like some dogs, never trusted again after being kicked once.

Peppermint and the Scent of Memory

The trick was not the only thing that bound Delacroix and Mr. Jingles together. The mouse also developed a taste for the peppermint candies that Delacroix's maiden aunt sent him in enormous bags. Mr. Jingles would sit beside Delacroix on the bunk, holding a pink mint in his paws and munching contentedly, his white-furred belly distending from the treat. The half-bitter, half-sweet smell of peppermint became inseparable from the mouse's presence, a scent that would later haunt the restraint room where Brutal Howell found the colored splinters of the spool hidden in a hole in a beam. The spool trick and the peppermint candies were the last innocent pleasures of Eduard Delacroix's life, and they would end together when Percy Wetmore, in a moment of calculated cruelty, stamped on Mr. Jingles and broke his back.