he did it
At the far end of the pipe they found a set of muddy footprints leading out of the
sluggish, polluted creek the pipe fed into. Two miles from there a search party found his
prison uniform - that was a day later.
The story broke big in the papers, as you might guess, but no one within a fifteen-mile
radius of the prison stepped forward to report a stolen car, stolen clothes, or a naked man
in the moonlight There was not so much as a barking dog in a farmyard. He came out of
the sewerpipe and he disappeared like smoke.
But I am betting he disappeared in the direction of Buxton.
Three months after that memorable day, Warden Norton resigned. He was a broken man,
it gives me great pleasure to report The spring was gone from his step. On his last day he
shuffled out with his head down like an old con shuffling down to the infirmary for his
codeine pills. It was Gonyar who took over, and to Norton that must have seemed like the
unkindest cut of all. For all I know, Sam Norton is down there in Eliot now, attending
services at the Baptist church every Sunday, and wondering how the hell Andy Dufresne
ever could have gotten the better of him.
I could have told him; the answer to the question is simplicity itself. Some have got it,
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Sam. And some don't, and never will.
That's what I know; now I'm going to tell you what I think. 1 may have it wrong on some
of the specifics, but I'd be willing to bet my watch and chain that I've got the general
outline down pretty well. Because, with Andy being the sort of man that he was, there's
only one or two ways that it could have been. And every now and then, when I think it
out, I think of Normaden, that half-crazy Indian. 'Nice fella,' Normaden had said after
celling with Andy for six or eight months. 'I was glad to go, me. All the time cold. He
don't let nobody touch his things. That's okay. Nice man, never make fun. But big
draught.' Poor crazy Normaden. He knew more than ail the rest of us, and he knew it
sooner. And it was eight long months before Andy could get him out of there and have
the cell to himself again. If it hadn't been for the eight months Normaden had spent with
him after Warden Norton first came in, I do believe that Andy would have been free
before Nixon resigned.
I believe now that it began in 1949, way back then - not with the rock-hammer, but with
the Rita Hayworth poster. I told you how nervous he seemed when he asked for that,
nervous and filled with suppressed excitement. At the time I thought it was just
embarrassment, that Andy was the sort of guy who'd never want someone else to know
that he had feet of clay and wanted a woman ... even if it was only a fantasy-woman. But
I think now that I was wrong. I think now that Andy's excitement came from something
else altogether.
What was responsible for the hole that Warden Norton eventually found behind the
poster of a girl that hadn't even been born when that photo of Rita Hayworth was taken?
Andy Dufresne's perseverance and hard work, yeah - I don't take any of that away from
him. But there were two other elements in the equation: a lot of luck, and WPA concrete.
You don't need me to explain the luck, I guess. The WPA concrete I checked out for
myself. I invested some time and a couple of stamps and wrote first to the University of
Maine History Department and then to a fellow whose address they were able to give me.
This fellow had been foreman of the WPA project that built the Shawshank Max Security
Wing.
The wing, which contains Cellblocks 3,4, and 5, was built in the years 1934-37. Now,
most people don't think of cement and concrete as 'technological developments', the way
we think of cars and oil furnaces and rocket-ships, but they really are. There was no
modern cement until 1870 or so, and no modern concrete until after the turn of the
century. Mixing concrete is as delicate a business as making bread. You can get it too
watery or not watery enough. You can get the sand-mix too thick or too thin, and the
same is true of the gravel-mix. And back in 1934, the science of mixing the stuff was a
lot less sophisticated than it is today.
The walls of Cellblock 5 were solid enough, but they weren't exactly dry and toasty. As a
matter of fact, they were and are pretty damned dank. After a long wet spell they would
sweat and sometimes even drip. Cracks had a way of appearing, some an inch deep, and
were routinely mortared over.
Now here comes Andy Dufresne into Cellblock 5. He's a man who graduated from the
University of Maine's school of business, but he's also a man who took two or three
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geology courses along the way. Geology had, in fact, become his chief hobby. I imagine
it appealed to his patient, meticulous nature. A ten-thousand-year ice age here. A million
years of mountain-building there. Tectonic plates grinding against each other deep under
the earth's skin over the millennia. Pressure. Andy told me once that all of geology is the
study of pressure.
And time, of course.
He had time to study those walls. Plenty of time. When the cell door slams and the lights
go out, there's nothing else to look at.
First-timers usually had a hard time adjusting to the confinement of prison life. They get
screw-fever, they have to be hauled down to the infirmary and sedated couple of times
before they get on the beam. It's not unusual to hear some new member of our happy little
family bang on the bars of his cell and screaming to be let out ... before the cries have
gone on for long, the chant starts up along the cellblock: 'Fresh fish, hey little fishie, fresh
fish, fresh fish, got fresh fish today!'
Andy didn't flip out like that when he came to the Shank 1948, but that's not to say that
he didn't feel many of same things. He may have come close to madness; some and some
go sailing right over the edge. Old life blown away in the wink of an eye, indeterminate
nightmare stretching out ahead, a long season in hell.
So what did he do, I ask you? He searched almost desperately for something to divert his
restless mind. Oh. there are all sorts of ways to divert yourself, even in prison; it seems
like the human mind is full of an infinite number of possibilities when it comes to
diversion. I told you about the sculptor and his Three Ages of Jesus. There were coin
collectors who were always losing their collections to thieves, stamp collectors, one
fellow who had postcards from thirty-five different countries - and let me tell you, he
would have turned out your lights if he'd caught you diddling with his postcards.
Andy got interested in rocks. And the walls of his cell.
I think that his initial intention might have been to do no more than to carve his initials
into the wall where the poster of Rita Hayworth would soon be hanging. His initials, or
maybe a few lines from some poem. Instead, what he found was that interestingly weak
concrete. Maybe he started to carve his initials and a big chunk of the wall fell out I can
see him, lying there on his bunk, looking at that broken chunk of concrete, turning it over
in his hands. Never mind the wreck of your whole life, never mind that you got railroaded
into this place by a whole trainload of bad luck. Let's forget all that and look at this piece
of concrete.
Some months further along he might have decided it would
be fun to see how much of that wall he could take out. But you can't just start digging
into your wall and then, when the weekly inspection (or one of the surprise inspections
that are always turning up interesting caches of booze, drugs, dirty pictures, and
weapons) comes around, say to the guard: This? Just excavating a little hole in my cell
wall. Not to worry, my good man.'
No, he couldn't have that So he came to me and asked if I could get him a Rita Hayworth
poster. Not a little one but a big one.
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And, of course, he had the rock-hammer. I remember thinking when I got him that gadget
back in '48 that it would take a man six hundred years to burrow through the wall with it
True enough. But Andy went right through the wall -even with the soft concrete, it took
him two rock-hammers and twenty-seven years to hack a hole big enough to get his slim
body through four feet of it
Of course he lost most of one of those years to Normaden, and he could only work at
night, preferably late at night, when almost everybody is asleep - including the guards
who work the night shift. But I suspect the thing which slowed him down the most was
getting rid of the wall as he took it out He could muffle the sound of his work by
wrapping the head of his hammer in rock-polishing cloths, but what to do with the
pulverized concrete and the occasional chunks that came out whole?
I think he must have broken up the chunks into pebbles and...
I remembered the Sunday after I had gotten him the rock-hammer. I remember watching
him walk across the exercise yard, his face puffy from his latest go-round with the sisters.
I saw him stoop, pick up a pebble ... and it disappeared up his sleeve. That inside sleeve-
pocket is an old prison trick. Up your sleeve or just inside the cuff of your pants. And I
have another memory, very strong but unfocused, maybe something I saw more than
once. This memory is of Andy Dufresne walking across the exercise yard on a hot
summer day when the air was utterly still. Still, yeah ... except for the little breeze that
seemed to be blowing sand around Andy Dufresne's feet.
So maybe he had a couple of cheaters in his pants below the knees. You loaded the
cheaters up with fill and then just strolled around, your hands in your pockets, and when
you feel safe and unobserved, you gave the pockets a little twitch. The pockets, of course,
are attached by string or strong thread to the cheaters. The fill goes cascading out of your
pantslegs as you walk. The World War II POWS who were trying to tunnel out used the
dodge.
The years went past and Andy brought his wall out to the exercise yard cupful by cupful.
He played the game with administrator after administrator, and they thought it was
because he wanted to keep the library growing. I have no doubt that was part of it, but the
main thing Andy wanted was to keep cell 14 in Cellblock 5 a single occupancy.
I doubt if he had any real plans or hopes of breaking out, at least not at first. He probably
assumed the wall was ten feet of solid concrete, and that if he succeeded in boring all the
way through it, he'd come out thirty feet over the exercise yard. But like I say, I don't
think he was worried overmuch about breaking through. His assumption could have run
this way: I'm only making a foot of progress every seven years or so; therefore, it would
take me seventy years to break through; that would make me one hundred and seven
years old.
Here's a second assumption I would have made, had I been Andy: that eventually I would
be caught and get a lot of solitary time, not to mention a very large black mark on my
record. After all, there was the regular weekly inspection and a surprise toss - which
usually came at night - every second week or so. He must have decided that things
couldn't go on for long. Sooner or later, some screw was going to peek behind Rita
Hayworth just to make sure Andy didn't have a sharpened spoon-handle or some
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marijuana reefers Scotch-taped to the wall.
And his response to that second assumption must have been to hell with it. Maybe he
even made a game out of it. How far in can I get before they find out? Prison is a goddam
boring place, and the chance or being surprised by an unscheduled inspection in the
middle of the night while he had his poster unstuck probably added some spice to his life
during the early years.
And I do believe it would have been impossible for him to get away just on dumb luck.
Not for twenty-seven years. Nevertheless, I have to believe that for the first two years -
until mid-May of 1950, when he helped Byron Hadley get around the tax on his windfall
inheritance - that's exactly what he did get by on.
Or maybe he had something more than dumb luck going for him even back then. He had
money, and he might have been slipping someone a little squeeze every week to take it
easy on him. Most guards will go along with that if the price is right; it's money in their
pockets and the prisoner gets to keep his whack-off pictures or his tailormade cigarettes.
Also, Andy was a model prisoner - quiet, well-spoken, respectful, non-violent. It's the
crazies and the stampeders that get their cells turned upside-down at least once every six
months, their mattresses unzipped, their pillows taken away and cut open, the outflow
pipe from their toilets carefully probed.
Then, in 1950, Andy became something more than a model prisoner. In 1950, he became
a valuable commodity, a murderer who did tax returns as well as H & R Block. He gave
gratis estate-planning advice, set up tax-shelters, filled out loan applications (sometimes
creatively). I can remember him sitting behind his desk in the library, patiently going
over a car-loan agreement paragraph by paragraph with a screwhead who wanted to buy a
used DeSoto, telling the guy what was good about the agreement and what was bad about
it, explaining to him that it was possible to shop for a loan and not get hit quite so bad,
steering him away from the finance companies which in those days were sometimes little
better than legal loan-sharks. When he'd finished, the screwhead started to put out his
hand ... and then drew it back to himself quickly. He'd forgotten for a moment, you see,
that he was dealing with a mascot, not a man.
Andy kept up on the tax laws and the changes in the stock market, and so his usefulness
