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, no
one had ever seen him so much as crack a smile. He had a thirty-year pin from the Baptist
Advent Church of Eliot. His major innovation as the head of our happy family was to
make sure that each incoming prisoner had a New Testament. He had a small plaque on
his desk, gold letters inlaid in teakwood, which said CHRIST IS MY SAVIOUR. A
sampler on the wall, made by his wife, read: HIS JUDGMENT COMETH AND THAT
RIGHT EARLY. This latter sentiment cut zero ice with most of us. We felt that the
judgment had already occurred, and we would be willing to testify with the best of them
that the rock would not hide us nor the dead tree give us shelter. He had a Bible quote for
every occasion, did Mr Sam Norton, and whenever you meet a man like that, my best
advice 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 know
the moonlight burials ceased altogether, but this is not to say that Norton was not a
believer in punishment. Solitary was always well populated. Men lost their teeth not from
beatings but from bread and water diets. It began to be called grain and drain, as in Tm on
the Sam Norton grain and drain train, boys.'
The man was the foulest hypocrite that I ever saw in a high position. The rackets I told
you 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 that
time, he let me in on some of them. When Andy talked about them, an expression of
amused, disgusted wonder would come over his face, as if he was telling me about some
ugly, predatory species of bug that has, by its very ugliness and greed, somehow more
comic than terrible.
It was Warden Norton who instituted the 'Inside-Out' programme you may have read
about some sixteen or seventeen years back; it was even written up in Newsweek. In the
press it sounded like a real advance in practical corrections and rehabilitation. There were
prisoners out cutting pulpwood, prisoners repairing bridges and causeways, prisoners
constructing potato cellars. Norton called it 'Inside-Out' and was invited to explain it to
damn near every Rotary and Kiwanis club in New England, especially after he got his
picture in Newsweek. The prisoners called it 'road-ganging', but so far as I know, none of
them were ever invited to express their views to the Kiwanians or the Loyal Order of the
Moose.
Norton was right in there on every operation, thirty-year church-pin and all, from cutting
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pulp to digging storm-drains to laying new culverts on state highways, there was Norton,
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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 were
deathly 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-year
church-pin, was passed a good many thick envelopes under the table during his fifteen-
year tenure as Shawshank's warden. And when an envelope was passed, he would either
overbid the project, not bid at all, or claim that ail his Inside-Outers were committed
elsewhere. It has always been something of a wonder to me that Norton was never found
in the trunk of a Thunderbird parked off a highway somewhere down in Massachusetts
with 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. Norton
must have subscribed to the old Puritan notion that the best way to figure out which folks
God favours is by checking their bank accounts.
Andy Dufresne was his right hand in all of this, his silent partner. The prison library was
Andy's hostage to fortune. Norton knew it, and Norton used it. Andy told me that one of
Norton's favourite aphorisms was One hand washes the other. So Andy gave good advice
and made useful suggestions. I can't say for sure that he hand-tooled Norton's Inside-Out
programme, but I'm damned sure he processed the money for the Jesus-shouting son of a
whore. 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 fresh
set of Grolier Encyclopedias, books on how to prepare for the Scholastic Achievement
Tests. 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 lose
his good right hand. I'll go further: it happened because he was scared of what might
happen - what Andy might say against him - if Andy ever got clear of Shawshank State
Prison.
I got the story a chunk here and a chunk there over a space of seven years, some of it
from Andy - but not all. He never wanted to talk about that part of his life, and I don't
blame him. I got parts of it from maybe half a dozen different sources. I've said once that
prisoners are nothing but slaves, but they have that slave habit of looking dumb and
keeping their ears open. I got it backwards and forwards and in the middle, but I'll give it
to you from point A to point Z, and maybe you'll understand why the man spent about ten
months in a bleak, depressed daze. See, I don't think he knew the truth until 1963, fifteen
years after he came into this sweet little hell-hole. Until he met Tommy Williams, I don't
think 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 his
twenty-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 another
profession.
He was a married man, and his wife came to visit each and every week. She had an idea
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that things might go better with Tommy - and consequently better with their three-year-
old mi and herself - if he got his high school degree. She talked him into it, and so
Tommy 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 school
equivalency 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 a
number of correspondence courses covering the subjects he had failed in school or just
missed by dropping out
He probably wasn't the best student Andy ever took over the jumps, and I don't know if
he ever did get his high school diploma, but that forms no part of my story. The important
thing was that he came to like Andy Dufresne very much, as most people did after a
while.
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 you
doing in a place like this?' But Andy wasn't the type to tell him; he would only smile and
turn the conversation into some other channel. Quite normally, Tommy asked someone
else, 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. The
inmates call this device the mangier, because that's exactly what it will do to you if you
aren't paying attention and get your bad self caught in it. His j partner was Charlie
Lathrop, who had been in for about twelve years on a murder charge. He was more than
glad to reheat the details of the Dufresne murder trial for Tommy; it broke the monotony
of 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 verdict
when the trouble whistle went off and the mangle grated to a stop. They had been feeding
in freshly washed sheets from the Eliot Nursing Home at the far end; these were spat out
dry 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 already
been lined with brown paper.
But Tommy Williams was just standing there, staring at Charlie Lathrop, his mouth
unhinged all the way to his chest. He was standing in & drift of sheets that had come
through dean and which were now sopping up all the wet muck on the floor - and in a
laundry wetwash, there's plenty of muck.
So the head bull that day, Homer Jessup, comes rushing over, bellowing his head off and
on the prod for trouble. Tommy took no notice of him. He spoke to Charlie as if old
Homer, 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 the
kid 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. 'Get
them 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 say
because Homer Jessup, that least peaceable of men, brought his billy down behind his
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ear. Tommy hit the floor so hard he broke off three of his front teeth. When he woke up
he was in solitary, and confined to same for a week, riding a boxcar on Sam Norton's
famous 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 seven
other 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 to
Andy Dufresne. And for the first and last time, at least since he had approached me about
the 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 of
a 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 caught
up with Billy Hanlon, who was the head screw, and set up an appointment with Warden
Norton for the following day. He told me later that he didn't sleep a wink all that night; he
just listened to a cold winter wind howling outside, watched the searchlights go around
and around, putting long, moving shadows on the cement walls of the cage he had called
home since Harry Truman was President and tried to think it all out He said it was as if
Tommy had produced a key which fitted a cage in the back of his mind, a cage like his
own cell. Only instead of holding a man, that cage held a tiger, and that tiger's name was
Hope. Williams had produced the key that unlocked the cage and the tiger was out, willy-
nilly, to roam his brain.
Four years before, Tommy Williams had been arrested in Rhode Island, driving a stolen
car that was full of stolen merchandise. Tommy turned in his accomplice, the DA played
ball, and he got a lighter sentence ... two to four, with time served. Eleven months after
beginning his term, his old cellmate got a ticket out and Tommy got a new one, a man
named Elwood Blatch. Blatch had been busted for burglary with a weapon and was
serving six to twelve.
'I never seen such a high-strung guy,' Tommy said. 'A man like that should never want to
be a burglar, specially not with a gun. The slightest little noise, he'd go three feet into the
air ... and come down shooting, more likely than not One night he almost strangled me
because 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 a
conversation 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. It
gave me the cold chills whenever he done that. Big tall guy he was, mostly bald, with
these 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 run
an. 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, a
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guy like him who went off like a firecracker every time someone cut a loud fart, but he
swore c was true. Now ... listen to me, Red. I know guys sometimes make things up after
they know a thing, but even before I knew about this golf pro guy, Quentin, I remember
thinking that if El Blatch ever burgled my house, and I found out about it later, I'd have to
count myself just about the luckiest motherfucker going still to be alive. Can you imagine
him in some lady's bedroom, sifting through her jool'ry box, and she coughs in her sleep
