the poster episode, I see there's one thing I neglected to tell you, and maybe I should.
Five weeks after he hung Rita up (I'd forgotten all about it by then, and had gone on to
other deals), Ernie passed a small white box through the bars of my cell.
'From Dufresne,' he said, low, and never missed a stroke with his push-broom.
Thanks, Ernie,' I said, and slipped him half a pack of Camels.
Now what the hell was this, I was wondering as I slipped the cover from the box. There
was a lot of white cotton inside, and below that...
I looked for a long time. For a few minutes it was like I didn't even dare touch them, they
were so pretty. There's a crying shortage of pretty things in the slam, and the real pity of
it is that a lot of men don't even seem to miss them.
There were two pieces of quartz in that box, both of them carefully polished. They had
been chipped into driftwood shapes. There were little sparkles of iron pyrites in them like
flecks of gold. If they hadn't been so heavy, they would have served as a fine pair of
men's cufflinks - they were that close to being a matched set
How much work went into creating those two pieces? Hours and hours after lights out, I
knew that First the chipping and shaping, and then the almost endless polishing and
finishing with those rock-blankets. Looking at them, I felt the warmth that any man or
woman feels when he or she is looking at something pretty, something that has been
worked and made - that's the thing that really separates us from the animals, I think - and
I felt something else, too. A sense of awe for the man's brute persistence. But I never
knew just how persistent Andy Dufresne could be until much later.
In May of 1950, the powers that be decided that the roof of the licence-plate factory
ought to be resurfaced with roofing tar. They wanted it done before it got too hot up
there, and they sued for volunteers for the work, which was planned to take about a week.
More than seventy men spoke up, because it was outside work and May is one damn fine
month for outside work. Nine or ten names were drawn out of a hat, and two of them
happened to be Andy's and my own.
For the next week we'd be marched out to the exercise yard after breakfast, with two
guards up front and two more
behind ... plus all the guards in the towers keeping a weather
eye on the proceedings through their field-glasses for good
measure.
Four of us would be carrying a big extension ladder on those morning marches -1 always
got a kick out of the way Dickie Betts, who was on that job, called that sort of ladder an
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extensible - and we'd put it up against the side of that low, lit building. Then we'd start
bucket-brigading hot buckets of tar up to the roof. Spill that shit on you and you'd
jitterbug all the way to the infirmary.
There were six guards on the project, all of them picked on the basis of seniority. It was
almost as good as a week's vacation, because instead of sweating it out in the laundry or
the plate-shop or standing over a bunch of cons cutting pulp or brush somewhere out in
the willy wags, they were having a regular May holiday in the sun, just sitting there with
their backs up against the low parapet, shooting the bull back and forth.
They didn't even have to keep more than half an eye on us, because the south wall sentry
post was close enough so that rte fellows up there could have spit their chews on us, if
ihsy'd wanted to. If anyone on the roof-sealing party had made one funny move, it would
take four seconds to cut him smack in two with .45 calibre machine-gun bullets. So those
screws just sat there and took their ease. All they needed was a couple of six-packs
buried in crushed ice, and they would have been the lords of all creation.
One of them was a fellow named Byron Hadley, and in :hat year of 1950, he'd been at
Shawshank longer than I had. Longer than the last two wardens put together, as a matter
of "act. The fellow running the show in 1950 was a prissy-looking downcast Yankee
named George Dunahy. He had a degree in penal administration. No one liked him, as far
as I could tell, except the people who had gotten him his appointment. I heard that he
wasn't interested in anything but compiling statistics for a book (which was later
published by a small New England outfit called Light Side Press, where he probably had
to pay to have it done), who won the intramural baseball championship each September,
and getting a death-penalty law passed in Maine. A regular bear for the death-penalty was
George Dunahy. He was fired off the job in 1953, when it came out he was running a
discount auto repair service down in the prison garage and splitting the profits with Byron
Hadley and Greg Stammas. Hadley and Stammas came out of that one okay - they were
old hands at keeping their asses covered - but Dunahy took a walk. No one was sorry to
see him go, but nobody was exactly pleased to see Greg Stammas step into his shoes,
either. He was a short man with a tight, hard gut and the coldest brown eyes you ever
saw. He always had a painful, pursed little grin on his face, as if he had to go to the
bathroom and couldn't quite manage it. During Stammas's tenure as warden there was a
lot of brutality at Shawshank, and although I have no proof, I believe there were maybe
half a dozen moonlight burials in the stand of scrub forest that lies east of the prison.
Dunahy was bad, but Greg Stammas was a cruel, wretched, cold-hearted man.
He and Byron Hadley were good friends. As warden, George Dunahy was nothing but a
posturing figurehead; it was Stammas, and through him, Hadley, who actually
administered the prison.
Hadley was a tail, shambling man with thinning red hair. He sunburned easily and he
talked loud and if you didn't move fast enough to suit him, he'd clout you with his stick.
On that day, our third on the roof, he was talking to another guard named Mert
Entwhistle.
Hadley had gotten some amazingly good news, so he was griping about it. That was his
style - he was a thankless man with not a good word for anyone, a man who was
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convinced that the whole world was against him. The world had cheated him out of the
best years of his life, and the world would be more than happy to cheat him out of the
rest. I have seen some screws that I thought were almost saintly, and I think I know why
that happens - they are able to see the difference between their own lives, poor and
struggling as they might be, and the lives of the men they are paid by the state to watch
over. These guards are able to formulate a comparison concerning pain. Others can't, or
won't.
For Byron Hadley there was no basis of comparison. He could sit there, cool and at his
ease under the warm May sun and find the gall to mourn his own good luck while less
than ten feet away a bunch of men were working and sweating and burning their hands on
great big buckets filled with bubbling tar, men who had to work so hard in their ordinary
round of days that this looked like a respite. You may remember the old question, the one
that's supposed to define your outlook on life when you answer it. For Byron Hadley the
answer would always be half empty, the glass is half empty. Forever and ever, amen. If
you gave him a cool drink of apple cider, he'd think about vinegar. If you told him his
wife had always been faithful to him, he'd tell you it was because she was so damn ugly.
So there he sat, talking to Mert Entwhistle loud enough for all of us to hear, his broad
white forehead already starting to redden with the sun. He had one hand thrown back
over the low parapet surrounding the roof. The other was on the butt of his .38.
We all got the story along with Mert. It seemed that Hadley's older brother had gone off
to Texas some fourteen years ago and the rest of the family hadn't heard from the son of a
bitch since. They had all assumed he was dead, and good riddance. Then, a week and a
half ago, a lawyer had called them long-distance from Austin. It seemed that Hadley's
brother had died four months ago, and a rich man at that ('It's frigging incredible how
lucky some assholes can get,' this paragon of gratitude on the plate-shop roof said). The
money had come as a result of oil and oil-leases, and there was close to a million dollars.
No, Hadley wasn't a millionaire - that might have made even him happy, at least for a
while - but the brother had left a pretty damned decent bequest of thirty-five thousand
dollars to each surviving member of his family back in Maine, if they could be found.
Not bad. Like getting lucky and winning a sweepstakes.
But to Byron Hadley the glass was always half-empty. He spent most of the morning
bitching to Mert about the bite that the goddam government was going to take out of his
windfall. "They'll leave me about enough to buy a new car with,' he allowed, 'and then
what happens? You have to pay the damn taxes on the car, and the repairs and
maintenance, you get your goddam kids pestering you to take 'em for a ride with the top
down -'
'And to drive it, if they're old enough,' Mert said. Old Mert Entwhistle knew which side
his bread was buttered on, and he didn't say what must have been as obvious to him as to
the rest of us: If that money's worrying you so bad, Byron old kid old sock, I'll just take it
off your hands. After all, what are friends for?
That's right, wanting to drive it, wanting to learn to drive on it, for Chrissake,' Byron said
with a shudder. 'Then what happens at the end of the year? If you figured the tax wrong
and you don't have enough left over to pay the overdraft, you got to pay out of your own
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pocket, or maybe even borrow it from one of those kikey loan agencies. And they audit
you anyway, you know. It don't matter. And when the government audits you, they
always take more. Who can fight Uncle Sam? He puts his hand inside your shirt and
squeezes your tit until it's purple, and you end up getting the short end. Christ.'
He lapsed into a morose silence, thinking of what terrible bad luck he'd had to inherit that
$35,000. Andy Dufresne had been spreading tar with a big Padd brush less than fifteen
feet away and now he tossed it into his pail and walked over to where Mert and Hadley
were sitting.
We all tightened up, and I saw one of the other screws, Tim Youngblood, drag his hand
down to where his pistol was bolstered. One of the fellows in the sentry tower struck his
partner on the arm and they both turned, too. For one moment I thought Andy was going
to get shot, or clubbed, or Then he said, very softly, to Hadley: 'Do you trust your wife?'
Hadley just stared at him. He was starting to get red in the face, and I knew that was a
bad sign. In about three seconds he as going to pull his billy and give Andy the butt end
of it right in the solar plexus, where that big bundle of nerves is. A hard enough hit there
can kill you, but they always go for it. If itdoesn't kill you it will paralyze you long
enough to forget whatever cute move it was that you had planned.
"Boy," Hadley said, I'll give you just one chance to pick up that Padd. And then you're
goin' off this roof on your head.'
Andy just looked at him, very calm and still. His eyes were like ice. It was as if he hadn't
heard. And I found myself wanting to tell him how it was, to give him the crash course.
The crash course is you never let on that you hear the guards talking, you never try to
horn in on their conversation unless you're asked (and then you always tell them just what
they wanting to hear and shut up again). Black man, white man, red man., yellow man, in
prison it doesn't matter because we've got our own brand of equality. In prison every
con's a nigger and you have to get used to the idea if you intend to survive men like
Hadley and Greg Staminas, who really would kill you. just as soon as look at you. When
you're in stir you belong to the state and if you forget it, woe is you. I've known men
who've lost eyes, men who've lost toes and fingers; I knew one man who lost the tip of
his penis and counted himself lucky that was all he lost. I wanted to tell Andy that it was
already too late. He could go back and pick up his brush and there would still be some
big lug waiting for him in the showers that night, ready to charlie-horse both of his legs
and leave him writhing on the cement. You could buy a lug like rat for a pack of
cigarettes or three Baby Ruths. Most of all, I wanted to tell him not to make it any worse
than it already was.
What I did was to keep on running tar onto the roof as if niching at all was happening.
Like everyone else, I look after n? own ass first. I have to. It's cracked already, and in
Shawshank there have always been Hadleys wiling to finish the job of breaking it.
Andy said, 'Maybe I put it wrong. Whether you trust her or not is immaterial. The
problem is whether or not you believe she would ever go behind your back, try to
hamstring you.'
Hadley got up. Mert got up. Tim Youngblood got up. Hadley's face was as red as the side
of a firebarn. 'Your only, problem,' he said, 'is going to be how many bones you still get
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unbroken. You can count them in the infirmary. Come on, Mert We're throwing this
sucker over the side.'
Tim Youngblood drew his gun. The rest of us kept tarring like mad. The sun beat down.
They were going to do it; Hadley and Mert were simply going to pitch him over the side.
Terrible accident Dufresne, prisoner 81433-SHNK, was taking a couple of empties down
and slipped on the ladder. Too bad.
They laid hold of him, Mert on the right arm, Hadley on the left. Andy didn't resist. His
