the summer of 1932

The summer of 1932 at Cold Mountain Penitentiary was a season of unrelenting heat and violent weather, a time when the world outside the prison walls was gripped by the Great Depression and the world inside E Block began to fill with the condemned men who would define Paul Edgecombe's final year on the Green Mile. It was a rainy, dank summer, one that seemed to press down on the prison like a fever, and it was during these months that the first of the strange and terrible events of that year began to unfold.

The Mouse on the Mile

The most remarkable arrival of the summer was not a prisoner but a mouse. The creature first appeared on E Block during a night shift, trotting up the center of the Green Mile as if it were a tiny guard making its rounds. Brutus Howell, amused by the mouse's fearless inspection of empty cells, named it Steamboat Willy and even recorded its visit in the official visitors' book. The mouse showed no fear of the guards, ate only from the hands of the regular E Block officers, and seemed to know instinctively when Percy Wetmore was on duty, vanishing whenever he was present. It was during this summer that the mouse, later renamed Mr. Jingles by Delacroix, established itself as a fixture of life on the Mile, a small, inexplicable presence that brought a measure of wonder to a place of death.

Delacroix's Arrival and Percy's Cruelty

On a rainy Monday in late July, Eduard Delacroix was brought onto the block. His arrival was marked by violence: Percy Wetmore, dragging the small Cajun by one arm, beat him with his hickory baton, striking him repeatedly even after Edgecombe intervened. Delacroix, convicted of raping and murdering a young girl and then setting a fire that killed six more people, arrived cowering and terrified. The beating was a clear violation of E Block's unwritten code of conduct, and it deepened the already simmering conflict between Edgecombe and Percy. The summer thus saw the introduction of two of the fall's central figures—Delacroix and his mouse—and the establishment of Percy's sadistic nature, which would have catastrophic consequences in the months to come.

The Seeds of Tragedy

The summer of 1932 was also the season in which the crime that would bring John Coffey to the Green Mile was committed. In June, on a warm night, the Detterick twins, nine-year-old Cora and Kathe, were abducted from their family's porch, raped, and murdered. The manhunt that followed ended on the banks of the Trapingus River, where John Coffey was found holding the girls' bodies, wailing in grief. The trial and conviction that summer set the stage for Coffey's arrival on E Block in October. The oppressive heat of that summer seemed to foreshadow the moral and emotional inferno that would consume the prison in the fall, as the summer's events—the mouse's arrival, Delacroix's beating, and the Detterick murders—converged toward the executions and miracles that would forever mark the Green Mile.