By World Series time of 1950 - this was the year Bobby Thompson hit his famous homerun at the end of the season, you will remember - Andy was having no more trouble fromthe sisters. Stammas and Hadley had passed the word. If Andy Dufresne came to either ofthem or any of the other screws that formed a part of their coterie, and showed so muchas a single drop of blood in his underpants, every sister in Shawshank would go to bedthat night with a headache. They didn‘t fight it As I have pointed out, there was always aneighteen-year-old car thief or a firebug or some guy who‘d gotten his kicks handling littlechildren. After the day on the plate-shop roof, Andy went his way and the sisters wenttheirs.
He was working in the library then, under a tough old con named Brooks Hatlen. Hatlenhad gotten the job back in the late 20s because he had a college education. Brooksie‘sdegree was in animal husbandry, true enough, but college educations in institutes oflower learning like The Shank are so rare that it‘s a case of beggars not being able to bechoosers.
In 1952 Brooksie, who had killed his wife and daughter after a losing streak at pokerback when Coolidge was President, was paroled. As usual, the state in all its wisdom hadlet him go long after any chance he might have had to become a useful part of societywas gone. He was sixty-eight and arthritic when he tottered out of the main gate in hisPolish suit and his French shoes, his parole papers in one ‘and and a Greyhound bus ticketin the other. He was crying "hen he left. Shawshank was his world. What lay beyond itsvails was as terrible to Brooks as the Western Seas had been to superstitious 13th-centurysailors. In prison, Brooksie had been a person of some importance. He was the headlibrarian, in educated man. If he went to the Kittery library and asked or a job, theywouldn‘t give him a library card. I heard he lied in a home for indigent old folks upFreeport way in 1952, and at that he lasted about six months longer than I thought hewould. Yeah, I guess the state got its own back on Brooksie, all right. They trained him tolike it inside the shithouse and then they threw him out.
Andy succeeded to Brooksie‘s job, and he was head librarian for twenty-three years. Heused the same force of will I‘d seen him use on Byron Hadley to get what he wanted forthe library, and I saw him gradually turn one small room (which still smelled ofturpentine because it had been a paint closet until 1922 and had never been properlyaired) lined with Reader‘s Digest Condensed Books and National Geographies into thebest prison library in New England.
He did it a step at a time. He put a suggestion box by the door and patiently weeded outsuch attempts at humour as More Fuk-Boox Pleeze and Escape in 10 EZ Lesions. He gotsold of the things the prisoners seemed serious about. He wrote to three major book clubsin New York and got two of them, The Literary Guild and The Book of the Month Club,to send editions of all their major selections to us at a special cheap rate. He discovered ahunger for information on such snail hobbies as soap-carving, woodworking, sleight ofhand, and card solitaire. He got all the books he could on such subjects. And those twojailhouse staples, Erie Stanley Gardener and Louis L‘Amour. Cons never seem to getenough of the courtroom or the open range. And yes, he did keep a box of fairly spicypaperbacks under the checkout desk, loaning them out carefully and making sure theyalways got back. Even so, each new acquisition of that type was quickly read to tatters.
He began to write to the state senate in Augusta in 1954. Staminas was warden by then,and he used to pretend Andy was some sort of mascot He was always in the library,shooting the bull with Andy, and sometimes he‘d even throw a paternal arm aroundAndy‘s shoulders or give him a goose. He didn‘t fool anybody. Andy Dufresne was noone‘s mascot.
He told Andy that maybe he‘d been a banker on the outside, but that part of his life wasreceding rapidly into his past and he had better get a hold on the facts of prison life. Asfar as that bunch of jumped-up Republican Rotarians in Augusta was concerned, therewere only three viable expenditures of the taxpayers‘ money in the field of prisons andcorrections. Number one was more walls, number two was more bars, and number threewas more guards. As far as the state senate was concerned, Stammas explained, the folksin Thomastan and Shawshank and Pittsfield and South Portland were the scum of theearth. They were there to do hard time, and by God and Sonny Jesus, it was hard timethey were going to do. And if there were a few weevils in the bread, wasn‘t that just toofucking bad?
Andy smiled his small, composed smile and asked Stammas what would happen to ablock of concrete if a drop of water fell on it once every year for a million years.
Stammas laughed and clapped Andy on the back. ‘You got no million years, old horse,but if you did, I believe you‘d do it with that same little grin on your face. You go on andwrite your letters. I‘ll even mail them for you if you pay for the stamps.‘Which Andy did. And he had the last laugh, although Stammas and Hadley weren‘taround to see it Andy‘s requests for library funds were routinely turned down until 1960,when he received a check for two hundred dollars - the senate probably appropriated it inhopes that he would shut up and go away. Vain hope. Andy felt that he had finally gottenone foot in the door and he simply redoubled his efforts; two letters a week instead ofone. In 1962 he got four hundred dollars, and for the rest of the decade the libraryreceived seven hundred dollars a year like clockwork. By 1971 that had risen to an eventhousand. Not much stacked up against what your average small-town library receives, Iguess, but a thousand bucks can buy a lot of recycled Perry Mason stories and JakeLogan Westerns. By the time Andy left, you could go into the library (expanded from itsoriginal paint-locker to three rooms), and find just about anything you‘d want. And if youcouldn‘t find it, chances were good that Andy could get it for you.
Now you‘re asking yourself if all this came about just because Andy told Byron Hadleyhow to save the taxes on his windfall inheritance. The answer is yes ... and no. You canprobably figure out what happened for yourself.
Word got around that Shawshank was housing its very own pet financial wizard. In thelate spring and the summer of 1950, Andy set up two trust funds for guards who wanted10 assure a college education for their kids, he advised a couple of others who wanted totake small fliers in common stock (and they did pretty damn well, as things turned out; :
ne of them did so well he was able to take an early retirement two years later), and I‘ll bedamned if he didn‘t advise the warden himself, old Lemon Lips George Dunahy, on howto go about setting up a tax-shelter for himself. That was just before Dunahy got thebum‘s rush, and I believe he - ust have been dreaming about ail the millions his book wasgoing to make him. By April of 1951, Andy was doing the tax returns for half the screwsat Shawshank, and by 1952, he was doing almost all of them. He was paid in what maybe a prison‘s most valuable coin: simple goodwill.
Later on, after Greg Stammas took over the warden‘s office, Andy became even moreimportant - but if I tried to tell you the specifics of just how, I‘d be guessing. There aresome things I know about and others I can only guess at. I know that there were someprisoners who received all sorts of special considerations - radios in their cells,extraordinary visiting privileges, things like that - and there were people on the outsidewho were paying for them to have those privileges. Such people are known as ‘angels‘ bythe prisoners. All at once some fellow would be excused from working in the plate-shopon Saturday forenoons, and you‘d know that fellow had an angel out there who‘d coughedup a chuck of dough to make sure it happened. The way it usually works is that the angelwill pay the bribe to some middle-level screw, and the screw will spread the grease bothup and down the administrative ladder.
Then there was the discount auto repair service that laid Warden Dunahy low, It wentunderground for a while and then emerged stronger than ever in the late fifties. And someof the contractors that worked at the prison from time to time were paying kickbacks tothe top administration officials, I‘m pretty sure, and the same was almost certainly true ofthe companies whose equipment was bought and installed in the laundry and the licenceplateshop and the stamping-mill that was built in 1963.
By the late sixties there was also a booming trade in pills, and the same administrativecrowd was involved in turning a buck on that All of it added up to a pretty good-sizedriver of illicit income. Not like the pile of clandestine bucks that must fly around a reallybig prison like Attica or San Quentin, but not peanuts, either. And money itself becomesa problem after a while. You can‘t just stuff it into your wallet and then shell out a bunchof crumpled twenties and dog-eared tens when you want a pool built in your back yard oran addition put on your house. Once you get past a certain point, you have to explainwhere that money came from ... and if your explanations aren‘t convincing enough, you‘reapt to wind up wearing a number yourself.
So there was a need for Andy‘s services. They took him out of the laundry and installedhim in the library, but if you wanted to look at it another way, they never took him out ofthe laundry at all. They just set him to work washing dirty money instead of dirty sheets.
He funnelled it into stocks, bonds, tax-free municipals, you name it.
He told me once about ten years after that day on the plate-shop roof that his feelingsabout what he was doing were pretty clear, and that his conscience was relativelyuntroubled. The rackets would have gone on with him or without him. He had not askedto be sent to Shawshank, he went on; he was an innocent man who had been victimizedby colossal bad luck, not & missionary or a do-gooder.
‘Besides, Red,‘ he told me with that same half-grin, ‘what I‘m doing in here isn‘t all thatdifferent from what I was doing outside. I‘ll hand you a pretty cynical axiom: the amountof expert financial help an individual or company needs rises in direct proportion to howmany people that person or business is screwing.
The people who run this place are stupid, brutal monsters for the most part. The peoplewho run the straight world are brutal and monstrous, but they happen not to be quite asstupid, because the standard of competence out there is a little higher. Not much, but alittle.‘‘But the pills,‘ I said. ‘I don‘t want to tell you your business, but they make me nervous.
Reds, uppers, downers, nembutals - now they‘ve got these things they call Phase Fours. Iwon‘t get anything like that. Never have.‘‘No,‘ Andy said. ‘I don‘t like the pills either. Never have. But I‘m not much of a one forcigarettes or booze, either. But I don‘t push the pills. I don‘t bring them in, and I don‘t sellthem once they are in. Mostly it‘s the screws who do that.‘‘But-‘‘Yeah, I know. There‘s a fine line there. What it comes down to, Red, is some peoplerefuse to get their hands dirty at all. That‘s called sainthood, and the pigeons land on yourshoulders and crap all over your shirt. The other extreme is to take a bath in the dirt anddeal any goddamned thing that will turn a dollar - guns, switchblades, big H, what thehell. You ever have a con come up to you and offer you a contract?‘I nodded. It‘s happened a lot of times over the years. You‘re, after all, the man who canget it. And they figure if you can get them a nine-bolt battery for their transistor radio or a-anon of Luckies or a lid of reefer, you can put them in touch with a guy who‘ll use aknife.
‘Sure you have,‘ Andy agreed. ‘But you don‘t do it. Because guys like us, Red, we knowthere‘s a third choice. An alternative to staying simon-pure or bathing in the filth and theslime. It‘s the alternative that grown-ups all over the world pick. You balance off yourwalk through the hog-wallow against what it gains you. You choose the lesser of twoevils and try to keep your good intentions in front of you. And I guess you judge howwell you‘re doing by how well you sleep at night... and what your dreams are like.‘‘Good intentions,‘ I said, and laughed. ‘I know all about that, Andy. A fellow can toddleright off to hell on that road.‘‘Don‘t you believe it,‘ he said, growing sombre. This is hell right here. Right here in TheShank. They sell pills and I tell them what to do with the money. But I‘ve also got thelibrary, and I know of over two dozen guys who have used the books in here to help thempass their high school equivalency tests. Maybe when they get out of here they‘ll be ableto crawl off the shitheap. When we needed that second room back in 1957,1 got itBecause they want to keep me happy. I work cheap. That‘s the trade-off.‘‘And you‘ve got your own private quarters.‘‘Sure. That‘s the way I like it.‘The prison population had risen slowly all through the fifties, and it damn near explodedin the sixties, what with every college-age kid in America wanting to try dope and theperfectly ridiculous penalties for the use of a little reefer. But in all that time Andy neverhad a cellmate, except for a big, silent Indian named Normaden (like all Indians in TheShank, he was called Chief), and Normaden didn‘t last long. A lot of the other longtimersthought Andy was crazy, but Andy just smiled. He lived alone and he liked it thatway ... and as he‘d said, they liked to keep him happy. He worked cheap.
Prison time is slow time, sometimes you‘d swear it‘s stop-time, but it passes. It passes.
George Dunahy departed the scene in a welter of newspaper headlines shoutingSCANDAL and NEST-FEATHERING. Stammas succeeded him, and for the next sixyears Shawshank was a kind of living hell. During the reign of Greg Stammas, the bedsin the infirmary and the cells in the solitary wing were always full.
One day in 1958 I looked at myself in a small shaving mirror I kept in my cell and saw aforty-year-old man looking back at me. A kid had come in back in 1938, a kid with a bigmop of carrotty red hair, half-crazy with remorse, thinking about suicide. That kid wasgone. The red hair was half grey and starting to recede. There were crow‘s tracks aroundthe eyes. On that day I could see an old man inside, waiting his time to come out. Itscared me. Nobody wants to grow old in stir.
Stammas went early in 1959. There had been several investigative reporters sniffingaround, and one of them even did four months under an assumed name, for a crime madeup out of whole cloth. They were getting ready to drag out SCANDAL and NESTFEATHERINGagain, but before they could bring the hammer down on him, Stammasran. I can understand that; boy, can I ever. If he had been tried and convicted, he couldhave ended up right in here. If so, he might have lasted all of five hours. Byron Hadleyhad gone two years earlier. The sucker had a heart attack and took an early retirement.
Andy never got touched by the Stammas affair. In early 1959 a new warden wasappointed, and a new assistant warden, and a new chief of guards. For the next eightmonths or so, Andy was just another con again. It was during that period that Normaden,the big half-breed Passamaquoddy, shared Andy‘s cell with him. Then everything juststarted up again. Normaden was moved out, and Andy was living in solitary splendouragain. The names at the top change, but die rackets never do.
I talked to Normaden once about Andy. ‘Nice fella,‘ Normaden said. It was hard to makeout anything he said because he had & harelip and a cleft palate; his words all came outin a slush. ‘I liked it there. He never made fun. But he didn‘t want me there. I could tell.‘Big shrug. ‘I was glad to go, me. Bad draught in that cell. All the time cold. He don‘t letnobody touch his things. That‘s okay. Nice man, never made fun. But big draught.‘Rita Hay worth hung in Andy‘s cell until 1955, if I remember right Then it was MarilynMonroe, that picture from The Seven Year Itch where she‘s standing over a subwaygrating and the warm air is flipping her skirt up. Marilyn lasted until i960, and she wasconsiderably tattered about the edges when Andy replaced her with Jayne Mansfield.
Jayne was, you should pardon the expression, a bust. After only a year or so she wasreplaced with an English actress - might have been Hazel Court, but I‘m not sure. In 1966that one came down and Raquel Welch went up for a record-breaking six-yearengagement in Andy‘s ceil. The last poster to hang there was a pretty country-rock singerwhose name was Linda RonstadtI asked him once what the posters meant to him, and he gave me a peculiar, surprised sortof look. ‘Why, they mean the same thing to me as they do to most cons, I guess,‘ he said.
‘Freedom. You look at those pretty women and you feel like you could almost ... not quitebut almost step right through and be beside them. Be free. I guess that‘s why I alwaysliked Raquel Welch the best It wasn‘t just her; it was that beach she was standing on.
Looked like she was down in Mexico somewhere. Someplace quiet, where a man wouldbe able to hear himself think. Didn‘t you ever feel that way about a picture, Red? Thatyou could almost step right through it?‘I said I‘d never really thought of it that way.
‘Maybe someday you‘ll see what I mean,‘ he said, and he was right Years later I sawexactly what he meant ... and when I did, the first thing I thought of was Normaden, andabout how he‘d said it was always cold in Andy‘s cell.
A terrible thing happened to Andy in late March or early April of 1963. I have told youthat he had something that most of the other prisoners, myself included, seemed to lack.
Call it a sense of equanimity, or a feeling of inner peace, maybe even a constant andunwavering faith that someday the long nightmare would end. Whatever you want to callit, Andy Dufresne always seemed to have his act together.
There was none of that sullen desperation about him that seems to afflict most lifers aftera while; you could never smell hopelessness on him. Until that late winter of ‘63.
We had another warden by then, a man named Samuel Norton. The Mather brothers,Cotton and Increase, would have felt right at home with Sam Norton. So far as I know, noone had ever seen him so much as crack a smile. He had a thirty-year pin from the BaptistAdvent Church of Eliot. His major innovation as the head of our happy family was tomake sure that each incoming prisoner had a New Testament. He had a small plaque onhis desk, gold letters inlaid in teakwood, which said CHRIST IS MY SAVIOUR. Asampler on the wall, made by his wife, read: HIS JUDGMENT COMETH AND THATRIGHT EARLY. This latter sentiment cut zero ice with most of us. We felt that thejudgment had already occurred, and we would be willing to testify with the best of themthat the rock would not hide us nor the dead tree give us shelter. He had a Bible quote forevery occasion, did Mr Sam Norton, and whenever you meet a man like that, my bestadvice to you would be to grin big and cover up your balls with both hands.
There were less infirmary cases than in the days of Greg Stammas, and so far as I knowthe moonlight burials ceased altogether, but this is not to say that Norton was not abeliever in punishment. Solitary was always well populated. Men lost their teeth not frombeatings but from bread and water diets. It began to be called grain and drain, as in Tm onthe Sam Norton grain and drain train, boys.‘The man was the foulest hypocrite that I ever saw in a high position. The rackets I toldyou about earlier continued to flourish, but Sam Norton added his own new wrinkles.
Andy knew about them all, and because we had gotten to be pretty good friends by thattime, he let me in on some of them. When Andy talked about them, an expression ofamused, disgusted wonder would come over his face, as if he was telling me about someugly, predatory species of bug that has, by its very ugliness and greed, somehow morecomic than terrible.
It was Warden Norton who instituted the ‘Inside-Out‘ programme you may have readabout some sixteen or seventeen years back; it was even written up in Newsweek. In thepress it sounded like a real advance in practical corrections and rehabilitation. There wereprisoners out cutting pulpwood, prisoners repairing bridges and causeways, prisonersconstructing potato cellars. Norton called it ‘Inside-Out‘ and was invited to explain it todamn near every Rotary and Kiwanis club in New England, especially after he got hispicture in Newsweek. The prisoners called it ‘road-ganging‘, but so far as I know, none ofthem were ever invited to express their views to the Kiwanians or the Loyal Order of theMoose.
Norton was right in there on every operation, thirty-year church-pin and all, from cuttingpulp to digging storm-drains to laying new culverts on state highways, there was Norton,skimming off the top. There were a hundred ways to do it -men, materials, you name it.
But he had it coming another way, as well. The construction businesses in the area weredeathly afraid of Norton‘s Inside-Out programme, because prison labour is slave labour,and you can‘t compete with that. So Sam Norton, he of the Testaments and the thirty-yearchurch-pin, was passed a good many thick envelopes under the table during his fifteenyeartenure as Shawshank‘s warden. And when an envelope was passed, he would eitheroverbid the project, not bid at all, or claim that ail his Inside-Outers were committedelsewhere. It has always been something of a wonder to me that Norton was never foundin the trunk of a Thunderbird parked off a highway somewhere down in Massachusettswith his hands tied behind his back and half a dozen bullets in his head.
Anyway, as the old barrelhouse song says, My God, how the money rolled in. Nortonmust have subscribed to the old Puritan notion that the best way to figure out which folksGod favours is by checking their bank accounts.
Andy Dufresne was his right hand in all of this, his silent partner. The prison library wasAndy‘s hostage to fortune. Norton knew it, and Norton used it. Andy told me that one ofNorton‘s favourite aphorisms was One hand washes the other. So Andy gave good adviceand made useful suggestions. I can‘t say for sure that he hand-tooled Norton‘s Inside-Outprogramme, but I‘m damned sure he processed the money for the Jesus-shouting son of awhore. He gave good advice, made useful suggestions, the money got spread around, and... son of a bitch! The library would get a new set of automotive repair manuals, a freshset of Grolier Encyclopedias, books on how to prepare for the Scholastic AchievementTests. And, of course, more Erie Stanley Gardeners and more Louis L‘Amours.
And I‘m convinced that what happened happened because Norton just didn‘t want to losehis good right hand. I‘ll go further: it happened because he was scared of what mighthappen - what Andy might say against him - if Andy ever got clear of Shawshank StatePrison.
I got the story a chunk here and a chunk there over a space of seven years, some of itfrom Andy - but not all. He never wanted to talk about that part of his life, and I don‘tblame him. I got parts of it from maybe half a dozen different sources. I‘ve said once thatprisoners are nothing but slaves, but they have that slave habit of looking dumb andkeeping their ears open. I got it backwards and forwards and in the middle, but I‘ll give itto you from point A to point Z, and maybe you‘ll understand why the man spent about tenmonths in a bleak, depressed daze. See, I don‘t think he knew the truth until 1963, fifteenyears after he came into this sweet little hell-hole. Until he met Tommy Williams, I don‘tthink he knew how bad it could get.
Tommy Williams joined our happy little Shawshank family in November of 1962.
Tommy thought of himself as a native of Massachusetts, but he wasn‘t proud; in histwenty-seven years he‘d done time all over New England. He was a professional thief,and as you may have guessed, my own feeling was that he should have picked anotherprofession.
He was a married man, and his wife came to visit each and every week. She had an ideathat things might go better with Tommy - and consequently better with their three-yearoldmi and herself - if he got his high school degree. She talked him into it, and soTommy Williams started visiting the library on a regular basis.
For Andy, this was an old routine by then. He saw that Tommy got a series of high schoolequivalency tests. Tommy would brush up on the subjects he had passed in high-school -there weren‘t many - and then take the test Andy also saw that he was enrolled in anumber of correspondence courses covering the subjects he had failed in school or justmissed by dropping outHe probably wasn‘t the best student Andy ever took over the jumps, and I don‘t know ifhe ever did get his high school diploma, but that forms no part of my story. The importantthing was that he came to like Andy Dufresne very much, as most people did after awhile.
On a couple of occasions he asked Andy ‘what a smart guy like you is doing in the joint‘ -a question which is the rough equivalent of that one that goes ‘What‘s a nice girl like youdoing in a place like this?‘ But Andy wasn‘t the type to tell him; he would only smile andturn the conversation into some other channel. Quite normally, Tommy asked someoneelse, and when he finally got the story, I guess he also got the shock of his young life.
The person he asked was his partner on the laundry‘s steam ironer and folder. Theinmates call this device the mangier, because that‘s exactly what it will do to you if youaren‘t paying attention and get your bad self caught in it. His j partner was CharlieLathrop, who had been in for about twelve years on a murder charge. He was more thanglad to reheat the details of the Dufresne murder trial for Tommy; it broke the monotonyof pulling freshly pressed bedsheets out of the machine and tucking them into the basket.
He was just getting to the jury waiting until after lunch to bring in their guilty verdictwhen the trouble whistle went off and the mangle grated to a stop. They had been feedingin freshly washed sheets from the Eliot Nursing Home at the far end; these were spat outdry and neatly pressed at Tommy‘s and Charlie‘s end at the rate of one every five seconds.
Their job was to grab them, fold them, and slap them into the cart, which had alreadybeen lined with brown paper.
But Tommy Williams was just standing there, staring at Charlie Lathrop, his mouthunhinged all the way to his chest. He was standing in & drift of sheets that had comethrough dean and which were now sopping up all the wet muck on the floor - and in alaundry wetwash, there‘s plenty of muck.
So the head bull that day, Homer Jessup, comes rushing over, bellowing his head off andon the prod for trouble. Tommy took no notice of him. He spoke to Charlie as if oldHomer, who had busted more heads than he could probably count, hadn‘t been there.
‘What did you say that golf pro‘s name was?‘‘Quentin,‘ Charlie answered back, all confused and upset by now. He later said that thekid was as white as a truce flag, *Glenn Quentin, I think. Something like that, anyway -‘‘Here now, here now,‘ Homer Jessup roared, his neck as red as a rooster‘s comb. ‘Getthem sheets in cold water! Get quick! Get quick, by Jesus, you -‘‘Glenn Quentin, oh my God,‘ Tommy Williams said, and that was all he got to saybecause Homer Jessup, that least peaceable of men, brought his billy down behind hisear. Tommy hit the floor so hard he broke off three of his front teeth. When he woke uphe was in solitary, and confined to same for a week, riding a boxcar on Sam Norton‘sfamous grain and drain train. Plus a black mark on his report card.
That was in early February in 1963, and Tommy Williams went around to six or sevenother long-timers after he got out of solitary and got pretty much the same story. I know;I was one of them. But when I asked him why he wanted it, he just clammed up.
Then one day he went to the library and spilled one helluva big budget of information toAndy Dufresne. And for the first and last time, at least since he had approached me aboutthe Rita Hayworth poster like a kid burying his first pack of Trojans, Andy lost his cool... only this time he blew it entirely.
I saw him later that day, and he looked like a man who has stepped on the business end ofa rake and given himself a good one, whap between the eyes. His hands were trembling,and when I spoke to him, he didn‘t answer. Before that afternoon was out he had caughtup with Billy Hanlon, who was the head screw, and set up an appointment with WardenNorton for the following day. He told me later that he didn‘t sleep a wink all that night; hejust listened to a cold winter wind howling outside, watched the searchlights go aroundand around, putting long, moving shadows on the cement walls of the cage he had calledhome since Harry Truman was President and tried to think it all out He said it was as ifTommy had produced a key which fitted a cage in the back of his mind, a cage like hisown cell. Only instead of holding a man, that cage held a tiger, and that tiger‘s name wasHope. Williams had produced the key that unlocked the cage and the tiger was out, willynilly,to roam his brain.
Four years before, Tommy Williams had been arrested in Rhode Island, driving a stolencar that was full of stolen merchandise. Tommy turned in his accomplice, the DA playedball, and he got a lighter sentence ... two to four, with time served. Eleven months afterbeginning his term, his old cellmate got a ticket out and Tommy got a new one, a mannamed Elwood Blatch. Blatch had been busted for burglary with a weapon and wasserving six to twelve.
‘I never seen such a high-strung guy,‘ Tommy said. ‘A man like that should never want tobe a burglar, specially not with a gun. The slightest little noise, he‘d go three feet into theair ... and come down shooting, more likely than not One night he almost strangled mebecause some guy down the hall was whopping on his cell bars with a tin cup.
‘I did seven months with bun, until they let me walk free. I got time served and time off,you understand. I can‘t say we talked because you didn‘t, you know, exactly hold aconversation with El Blatch. He held a conversation with you. He talked all the time.
Never shut up. If you tried to get a word in, he‘d shake his fist at you and roll his eyes. Itgave me the cold chills whenever he done that. Big tall guy he was, mostly bald, withthese green eyes set way down deep in the sockets. Jeez, I hope I never see him again.
‘It was like a talkin‘ jag every night When he grew up, the orphanages he run away from,the jobs he done, the women as fucked, the crap games he cleaned out I just let him runan. My face ain‘t much, but I didn‘t want it, you know, rearranged for me.
‘According to him, he‘d burgled over two hundred joints. It was hard for me to believe, aguy like him who went off like a firecracker every time someone cut a loud fart, but heswore c was true. Now ... listen to me, Red. I know guys sometimes make things up afterthey know a thing, but even before I knew about this golf pro guy, Quentin, I rememberthinking that if El Blatch ever burgled my house, and I found out about it later, I‘d have tocount myself just about the luckiest motherfucker going still to be alive. Can you imaginehim in some lady‘s bedroom, sifting through her jool‘ry box, and she coughs in her sleepor turns over quick? It gives me the cold chills just to think of something like that, Iswear on my mother‘s name it does.
‘He said he‘d killed people, too. People that gave him shit. At least that‘s what he said.
And I believed him. He sure looked like a man that could do some killing. He was just sofucking high-strung! Like a pistol with a sawed-off firing pin. I knew a guy who had aSmith & Wesson Police Special with a sawed-off firing pin. It wasn‘t no good fornothing, except maybe for something to jaw about. The pull on that gun was so light thatit would fire if this guy, Johnny Callahan, his name was, if he turned his record-player onfull volume and put it on top of one of the speakers. That‘s how El Blatch was. I can‘texplain it any better. I just never doubted that he had greased some people.
‘So one night, just for something to say, I go: "Who‘d you kill?" Like a joke, you know.
So he laughs and says, "There‘s one guy doing time up Maine for these two people Ikilled. It was this guy and the wife of the slob who‘s doing time. I was creeping theirplace and the guy started to give me some shit."‘I can‘t remember if he ever told me the woman‘s name or not,‘ Tommy went on. ‘Maybehe did. But hi New England, Dufresne‘s like Smith or Jones in the rest of the country,because there‘s so many Frogs up here. Dufresne, Lavesque, Ouelette, Poulin, who Canremember Frog names? But he told me the guy‘s name. He said the guy was GlennQuentin and he was a prick, a big rich prick, a golf pro. El said he thought the guy mighthave cash in the house, maybe as much as five thousand dollars. That was a lot of moneyback then, he says to me. So I go, "When was that?" And he goes, "After the war. Justafter the war."‘So he went in and he did the joint and they woke up and the guy gave him some trouble.
That‘s what El said. Maybe the guy just started to snore, that‘s what / say. Anyway, Elsaid Quentin was in the sack with some hotshot lawyer‘s wife and they sent the lawyer upto Shawshank State Prison. Then he laughs this big laugh. Holy Christ, I was never soglad of anything as I was when I got my walking papers from that place.‘I guess you can see why Andy went a little wonky when Tommy told him that story, andwhy he wanted to see the warden right away. Elwood Blatch had been serving a six-totwelverap when Tommy knew him four years before. By the time Andy heard all of this,in 1963, he might be on the verge of getting out ... or already out. So those were the twoprongs of the spit Andy was roasting on - the idea that Blatch might still be in on onehand, and the very real possibility that he might be gone like the wind on the other.
There were inconsistencies in Tommy‘s story, but aren‘t there always in real life? Blatchtold Tommy the man who got sent up was a hotshot lawyer, and Andy was a banker, butthose are two professions that people who aren‘t very educated could easily get mixed up.
And don‘t forget that twelve years had gone by between the time Blatch was reading theclippings about the trial and the time he told the tale to Tommy Williams. He also toldTommy he got better than a thousand dollars from a footlocker Quentin had in his closet,but the police said at Andy‘s trial that there had been no sign of burglary. I have a fewideas about that. First, if you take the cash and the man it belonged to is dead, how areyou going to know anything was stolen, unless someone else can tell you it was there tostart with? Second, who‘s to say Blatch wasn‘t lying about that part of it? Maybe he didn‘twant to admit killing two people for nothing. Third, maybe there were signs of burglaryand the cops either overlooked them - cops can be pretty dumb - or deliberately coveredthem up so they wouldn‘t screw the DA‘s case. The guy was running for public office,remember, and he needed a conviction to run on. An unsolved burglary-murder wouldhave done him no good at all.
But of the three, I like the middle one best. I‘ve known a few Elwood Blatches hi my timeat Shawshank - the trigger-pullers with the crazy eyes. Such fellows want you to thinkthey got away with die equivalent of the Hope Diamond on every caper, even if they gotcaught with a two-dollar Timex and nine bucks on the one they‘re doing time for.
And there was one thing in Tommy‘s story that convinced Andy beyond a shadow of adoubt. Blatch hadn‘t hit Quentin at random. He had called Quentin ‘a big rich prick‘, andhe had known Quentin was a golf pro. Well, Andy and his wife had been going out to thatcountry club for drinks and dinner once or twice a week for a couple of years, and Andyhad done a considerable amount of drinking there once he found out about his wife‘saffair. There was a marina with the country club, and for a while in 1947 there had been apart-time grease-and-gas jockey working there who matched Tommy‘s description ofElwood Blatch. A big tall man, mostly bald, with deep-set green eyes. A man who had anunpleasant way of looking at you, as though he was sizing you up. He wasn‘t there long,Andy said. Either he quit or Briggs, the fellow in charge of the marina, fired him. But hewasn‘t a man you forgot He was too striking for that.
So Andy went to see Warden Norton on a rainy, windy day with big grey cloudsscudding across the sky above the grey walls, a day when the last of the snow wasstarting to melt away and show lifeless patches of last year‘s grass in the fields beyondthe prison. The warden has a good-sized office in the administration wing, and behind thewarden‘s desk there‘s a door which connects with the assistant warden‘s office. Theassistant warden was out that day, but a trustee was there. He was a half-lame fellowwhose real name I have forgotten; all the inmates, me included, called him Chester, afterMarshall Dillon‘s sidekick. Chester was supposed to be watering the plants and dustingand waxing the floor. My guess is that the plants went thirsty that day and the onlywaxing that was done happened because of Chester‘s dirty ear polishing the keyhole plateof that connecting door.
He heard the warden‘s main door open and close and then Norton saying, ‘Good morning,Dufresne, how can I help you?‘‘Warden,‘ Andy began, and old Chester told us that he could hardly recognize Andy‘svoice it was so changed. ‘Warden ... there‘s something ... something‘s happened to methat‘s ... that‘s so ... so ... I hardly know where to begin.‘‘Well, why don‘t you just begin at the beginning?‘ the warden said, probably in hissweetest let‘s-all-turn-to-the-23rd-psalm-and-read-in-unison voice. ‘That usually worksthe best.‘And so Andy did. He began by refreshing Norton of the details of the crime he had beenimprisoned for. Then he told the warden exactly what Tommy Williams had told him. Healso gave out Tommy‘s name, which you may think wasn‘t so wise in light of laterdevelopments, but I‘d just ask you what else he could have done, if his story was to haveany credibility at all.
When he had finished, Norton was completely silent for some time. I can just see him,probably tipped back in his office chair under the picture of Governor Reed hanging onthe wall, his fingers steepled, his liver lips pursed, his brow wrinkled into ladder rungshalfway to the crown of his head, his thirty-year pin gleaming mellowly.
‘Yes,‘ he said finally. That‘s the damnedest story I ever heard. But I‘ll tell you whatsurprises me most about it, Dufresne.‘‘What‘s that, sir?‘‘That you were taken in by it.‘‘Sir? I don‘t understand what you mean.‘ And Chester said that Andy Dufresne, who hadfaced down Byron Hadley on the plate-shop roof thirteen years before, was almostfloundering for words.
‘Well now,‘ Norton said. ‘It‘s pretty obvious to me that this young fellow Williams isimpressed with you. Quite taken with you, as a matter of fact He hears your tale of woe,and it‘s quite natural of him to want to ... cheer you up, let‘s say. Quite natural. He‘s ayoung man, not terribly bright Not surprising he didn‘t realize what a state it would putyou into. Now what I suggest is -‘‘Don‘t you think I thought of that?‘ Andy asked. ‘But I‘d never told Tommy about the manworking down at the marina. I never told anyone that - it never even crossed my mind!
But Tommy‘s description of his cellmate and that man ... they‘re identical!‘‘Well now, you may be indulging in a little selective perception there,‘ Norton said with achuckle. Phrases like that, selective perception, are required learning for people in thepenalogy and corrections business, and they use them all they can.
"That‘s not it at all. Sir.‘"That‘s your slant on it,‘ Norton said, ‘but mine differs. And let‘s remember that I haveonly your word that there was such a man working at the Falmouth Country Club backthen.‘‘No, sir,‘ Andy broke in again. ‘No, that isn‘t true. Because-‘‘Anyway,‘ Norton overrode him, expansive and loud, ‘let‘s just look at it from the otherend of the telescope, shall we? Suppose -just suppose, now - that there really was a fellownamed Elwood Blotch.‘‘Blatch,‘ Andy said tightly.
‘Blatch, by all means. And let‘s say he was Thomas Williams‘s cellmate in Rhode Island.
The chances are excellent that he has been released by now. Excellent. Why, we don‘teven know how much time he might have done there before he ended up with Williams,do we? Only that he was doing a six-to-twelve.‘‘No. We don‘t know how much time he‘d done. But Tommy said he was a bad actor, acut-up. I think there‘s a fair chance that he may still be in. Even if he‘s been released, theprison will have a record of his last known address, the names of his relatives -‘‘And both would almost certainly be dead ends.‘Andy was silent for a moment, and then he burst out: ‘Well, it‘s a chance, isn‘t it?‘‘Yes, of course it is. So just for a moment, Dufresne, let‘s assume that Blatch exists andthat he is still safely ensconced in the Rhode Island State Penitentiary. Now what is hegoing to say if we bring this kettle of fish to him in a bucket? Is he going to fall down onhis knees, roil his eyes, and say "I did it! I did it! By all means add a life term onto myburglary charge!"?‘ |