soup on Sunday night You pissed in the bucket, and you held up the same bucket for
water when the gaoler came around at six in the morning. When it rained, you used lie
bucket to bail out your gaol-cell ... unless, that is, you wanted to drown like a rat in a
rainbarrel.
No one spent a long time 'in the hole', as it was called; thirty months was an unusually
long term, and so far as I've been able to tell, the longest term ever spent from which an
inmate actually emerged alive was served by the so-called Durham Boy', a fourteen-year-
old psychopath who castrated a schoolmate with a piece of rusty metal. He did seven
years, but of course he went in young and strong.
You have to remember that for a crime that was more serious than petty theft or
blasphemy or forgetting to put a snotrag in your pocket when out of doors on the
Sabbath, you were hung. For low crimes such as those just mentioned and for others like
them, you'd do your three or six or nine months in the hole and come out fishbelly white,
cringing from the wide-open spaces, your eyes half-blind, your teeth more than likely
rocking and rolling in their sockets from the scurvy, your feet crawling with fungus. Jolly
old Province of Maine. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.
Shawshank's Solitary Wing was nowhere as bad as that... I guess. Things come in three
major degrees in the human experience, I think. There's good, bad, and terrible. And as
you go down into progressive darkness towards terrible, it gets harder and harder to make
subdivisions.
To get to Solitary Wing you were led down twenty-three steps to a basement level where
the only sound was the drip of water. The only light was supplied by a series of dangling
sixty-watt bulbs. The cells were keg-shaped, like those wall-safes rich people sometimes
hide behind a picture. Like a safe, the round doorways were hinged, and solid instead of
barred. You get ventilation from above, but no light except for your own sixty-watt bulb,
which was turned off from a master-switch promptly at eight p.m., an hour before lights-
out in the rest of the prison. The wire wasn't in a wire mesh cage or anything like that.
The feeling was that if you wanted to exist down there in the dark, you were welcome to
it. Not many did ... but after eight, of course, you had no choice. You had a bunk bolted
to the wall and a can with no toilet seat. You had three ways to spend your time: sitting,
shitting, or sleeping. Big choice. Twenty days could get to seem like a year. Thirty days
could seem like two, and forty days like ten. Sometimes you could hear rats in the
ventilation system. In a situation like that, subdivisions of terrible tend to get lost.
If anything at all can be said in favour of solitary, it's just that you get time to think. Andy
had twenty days in which to think while he enjoyed his grain and drain, and when he got
out he requested another meeting with the warden. Request denied. Such a meeting, the
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warden told him, would be 'counter-productive'. That's another of those phrases you have
to master before you can go to work in the prisons and corrections field.
Patiently, Andy renewed his request And renewed it And renewed it He had changed, had
Andy Dufresne. Suddenly, as that spring of 1963 bloomed around us, there were lines in
his face and sprigs of grey showing in his hair. He had lost that little trace of a smile that
always seemed to linger around his mouth. His eyes stared out into space more often, and
you get to know that when a man stares that way, he is counting up the years served, the
months, the weeks, the days.
He renewed his request and renewed it He was patient He had nothing but time. It got to
be summer. In Washington, President Kennedy was promising a fresh assault on poverty
and on civil rights inequalities, not knowing he had only half a year to live. In Liverpool,
a musical group called The Beatles was emerging as a force to be reckoned with in
British music, but I guess that no one Stateside had yet heard of them. The Boston Red
Sox, still four years away from what New England folks call The Miracle of '67, were
languishing in the cellar of the American League. All of those things were going on out
in a larger world where people walked free.
Norton saw him near the end of June, and this conversation I heard about from Andy
himself some seven years later.
'If it's the money, you don't have to worry,' Andy told Norton in a low voice. 'Do you
think I'd talk that up? I'd be cutting my own throat I'd be just as indictable as -'
That's enough,' Norton interrupted. His face was as long and cold as a slate gravestone.
He leaned back in his office chair until the back of his head almost touched the sampler
reading HIS JUDGMENT COMETH AND THAT RIGHT EARLY.
'But-'
'Don't you ever mention money to me again,' Norton said. 'Not in this office, not
anywhere. Not unless you want to see that library turned back into a storage room and
paint-locker again. Do you understand?'
'I was trying to set your mind at ease, that's all.'
'Well now, when I need a sorry son of a bitch like you to set my mind at ease, I'll retire. I
agreed to this appointment because I got tired of being pestered, Dufresne. I want it to
stop. If you want to buy this particular Brooklyn Bridge, that's your affair. Don't make it
mine. I could hear crazy stories like yours twice a week if I wanted to lay myself open to
them. Every sinner in this place would be using me for a crying towel. I had more respect
for you. But this is the end. The end. Have we got an understanding?'
'Yes,' Andy said. 'But I'll be hiring a lawyer, you know.'
'What in God's name for?'
'I think we can put it together,' Andy said. 'With Tommy Williams and with my testimony
and corroborative testimony from records and employees at the country club, I think we
can put it together.'
'Tommy Williams is no longer an inmate of this facility.'
'What?'
'He's been transferred.'
'Transferred where?'
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'Cashman.'
At that, Andy fell silent. He was an intelligent man, but it would have taken an
extraordinarily stupid man not to smelt deal all over that. Cashman was a minimum-
security prison far up north in Aroostook County. The inmates pick a lot of potatoes, and
that's hard work, but they are paid a decent wage for their labour and they can attend
classes at CVI, a pretty decent vocational-technical institute, if they so desire. More
important to a fellow like Tommy, a fellow with a young wife and a child, Cashman had
a furlough programme ... which meant a chance to live like a normal man, at least on the
weekends. A chance to build a model plane with his kid, have sex with his wife, maybe
go on a picnic.
Norton had almost surely dangled all of that under Tommy's nose with only one string
attached: not one more word about Elwood Blatch, not now, not ever. Or you'll end up
doing hard time in Thomaston down there on scenic Route 1 with the real hard guys, and
instead of having sex with your wife you'll be having it with some old bull queer.
'But why?' Andy said. 'Why would -'
'As a favour to you,' Norton said calmly, 'I checked with Rhode Island. They did have an
inmate named Elwood Blatch. He was given what they call a PP - provisional parole,
another one of these crazy liberal programmes to put criminals out on the streets. He's
since disappeared.'
Andy said: 'The warden down there ... is he a friend of yours?'
Sam Norton gave Andy a smile as cold as a deacon's watchchain. 'We are acquainted,' he
said.
' Why?' Andy repeated. 'Can't you tell me why you did it? You knew I wasn't going to
talk about ... about anything you might have had going. You knew that. So why?
'Because people like you make me sick,' Norton said deliberately. 'I like you right where
you are, Mr Dufresne, and as long as I am warden here at Shawshank, you are going to be
right here. You see, you used to think that you were better than anyone else. I have gotten
pretty good at seeing that on a man's face. I marked it on yours the first time I walked
into the library. It might as well have been written on your forehead in capital letters.
That look is gone now, and I like that just fine. It is not just that you are a useful vessel,
never think that. It is simply that men like you need to learn humility. Why, you used to
walk around that exercise yard as if it was a living room and you were at one of those
cocktail parties where the hellhound walk around coveting each others' wives and
husbands and getting swinishly drunk. But you don't walk around that way anymore. And
I'll be watching to see if you should start to walk that way again. Over a period of years,
I'll be watching you with great pleasure. Now get the hell out of here.'
'Okay. But all the extracurricular activities stop now, Norton. The investment
counselling, the scams, the free tax advice. It all stops. Get H & R Block to tell you how
to declare your extortionate income.'
Warden Norton's face first went brick-red ... and then all the colour fell out of it 'You're
going back into solitary for that Thirty days. Bread and water. Another black mark. And
while you're in, think about this: if anything that's been going on should stop, the library
goes. I will make it my personal business to see that it goes back to what it was before
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you came here. And I will make your life... very hard. Very difficult You'll do the hardest
time it's possible to do. You'll lose that one-bunk Hilton down in Cellblock 5, for starters,
and you'll lose those rocks on the windowsill, and you'll lose any protection the guards
have given you against the sodomites. You will... lose everything. Clear?'
I guess it was clear enough.
Time continued to pass - the oldest trick in the world, and maybe the only one that really
is magic. But Andy Dufresne had changed. He had grown harder. That's the only way I
can think of to put it He went on doing Warden Norton's dirty work and he held onto the
library, so outwardly things were about the same. He continued to have his birthday
drinks and his New Year's Eve drinks; he continued to share out the rest of each bottle. I
got him fresh rock-polishing cloths from time to time, and in 1967 I got him a new rock-
hammer - the one I'd gotten him nineteen years ago had plumb worn out Nineteen years!
When you say it sudden like that, those three syllables sound like the thud and double-
locking of a tomb door. The rock-hammer, which had been a ten-dollar item back then,
went for twenty-two by '67. He and I had a sad little grin over that
Andy continued to shape and polish the rocks he found in the exercise yard, but the yard
was smaller by then; half of what had been there in 1950 had been asphalted over in
1962. Nonetheless, he found enough to keep him occupied, I guess. When he had finished
with each rock he would put it carefully on his window ledge, which faced east He told
me he liked to look at them in the sun, the pieces of the planet he had taken up from the
dirt and shaped. Schists, quartzes, granites. Funny little mica sculptures that were held
together with airplane glue. Various sedimentary conglomerates that were polished and
cut in such a way that you could see why Andy called them 'millennium sandwiches' - the
layers of different material that had built up over a period of decades and centuries.
Andy would give his stones and his rock-sculptures away from time to time in order to
make room for new ones. He gave me the greatest number, I think - counting the stones
that looked like matched cufflinks, I had five. There was one of the mica sculptures I told
you about, carefully crafted to look like a man throwing a javelin, and two of the
sedimentary conglomerates, all the levels showing in smoothly polished cross-section.
I've still got them, and I take them down every so often and think about what a man can
do, if he has time enough and the will to use it, a drop at a time.
So, on the outside, at least, things were about the same. If Norton had wanted to break
Andy as badly as he had said, he would have had to look below the surface to see the
change. But if he had seen how different Andy had become, I think Norton would have
been well-satisfied with the four years following his clash with Andy.
He had told Andy that Andy walked around the exercise yard as if he were at a cocktail
party. That isn't the way I would have put it, but I know what he meant. It goes back to
what I said about Andy wearing his freedom like an invisible coat, about how he never
really developed a prison mentality. His eyes never got that dull look. He never
developed the walk that men get when the day is over and they are going back to their
cells for another endless night - that flat-footed, hump-shouldered walk. Andy walked
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with his shoulders squared and his step was always light, as if he was heading home to a
good home-cooked meal and a good woman instead of to a tasteless mess of soggy
vegetables, lumpy mashed potato, and a slice or two of that fatty, gristly stuff most of the
cons called mystery meat ... that, and a picture of Raquel Welch on the wall.
But for those four years, although he never became exactly like the others, he did become
silent, introspective, and brooding. Who could blame him? So maybe it was Warden
Norton who was pleased ... at least, for a while.
His dark mood broke around the time of the 1967 World Series. That was the dream year,
