First Appearance of the Mouse (Steamboat Willy)

One summer night in 1932, during the period when Arlen Bitterbuck and Arthur Flanders were the only condemned men on E Block, a small brown mouse walked up the center of the Green Mile as if it owned the place. Dean Stanton and Paul Edgecombe were in the office going over the record-box when Brutus Howell called them out from the duty desk, laughing. The mouse trotted a little way toward them, then turned its head from side to side as if checking the cells, then made another forward spurt. It was a perfectly ordinary brown mouse, except for the way it seemed to be conducting a guard's inspection, even skipping nimbly in between the lower bars of empty cells. It showed no fear of the men at all, and when it finally reached a spot less than three feet from the duty desk, it stopped, curling its tail around its paws as prim as an old lady settling her skirts.

The Mouse's Behavior and the Guards' Reactions

The mouse's deliberate, fearless approach unsettled the men even as it amused them. Dean Stanton, watching nervously, suggested it might be rabid, but Brutus Howell scoffed at the idea, pointing out that he could see no foaming at the mouth. The mouse's eyes, dark little drops, looked interested and intelligent, not crazy. When Brutal tore a corner off his corned-beef sandwich and held it out, the mouse approached, sniffed, then sat up in front of it like a dog doing a trick, grabbed the bread, and pulled it apart to get at the meat with deliberate, knowing movements. It ate as neatly as a man tucking into a good roast-beef dinner, and all the while its eyes never left the guards. Paul Edgecombe felt a sudden cold sensation, imagining himself as that mouse, a convicted criminal looking up at a desk that must have seemed miles high, at the heavy-voiced, blue-coated giants who sat behind it. He stopped Dean from grabbing a mop to swing at the creature, and the mouse finished its meal, looked back at them as if wanting to remember their faces, then scurried off the way it had come, disappearing under the door to the restraint room.

Naming and Registration

Brutus Howell, finding the mouse's visit too remarkable to go unrecorded, took out the leather-bound visitors' book and, with a lick of his pencil, filled in the time of arrival and departure. In the space headed NAME OF VISITOR, he carefully printed "STEAMBOAT WILLY," after the Disney cartoon character. Dean Stanton protested, warning that Percy Wetmore might cause trouble if he saw the joke, but Brutal dismissed the concern, saying the day Percy sat at the duty desk would be the day he resigned. The mouse's appearance, so out of place in the death-house, became a source of dark premonition for Edgecombe, who felt for a moment as if he were looking up at the judgment seat of God from the perspective of a condemned creature. The mouse vanished into the restraint room, and when Brutal and Edgecombe searched for it the next night, they found no hole, no crack, and no sign of a nest—only a drain covered with a fine steel mesh that not even a fly could have passed. The mouse had simply appeared and then disappeared, a mystery that would deepen as it returned, always when Percy Wetmore was absent, and eventually formed an extraordinary bond with the condemned man Eduard Delacroix.