Seven men sit on the board, two more than at most state prisons, and every one of those seven has an ass as hard as the water drawn up from a mineralspring well. You cant buy those guys, you cant sweettalk them, you cant cry for them. As far as the board in here is concerned, money dont talk, and nobody walks. There were other reasons in Andys case as well ... but that belongs a little further along in my story. There was a trusty, name of Kendricks, who was into me for some pretty heavy money back in the fifties, and it was four years before he got it all paid off. Most of the interest he paid me was informationin my line of work, youre dead if you cant find ways of keeping your ear to the ground. This Kendricks, for instance, had access to records I was never going to see running a stamper down in the goddam plateshop. Kendricks told me that the parole board vote was 70 against Andy Dufresne through 1957, 61 in 58; 70 again in 59, and 52 in 60. After that I dont know, but I do know that sixteen years later he was still in Cell 14 of Cellblock 5. By then, 1975, he was fiftyseven. They probably would have gotten bighearted and let him out around 1983. They give you life, and thats what they takeall of it that counts, anyway. Maybe they set you loose someday, but ... well, listen I knew this guy, Sherwood Bolton, his name was, and he had this pigeon in his cell. From 1945 until 1953, when they let him out, he had that pigeon. He wasnt any Birdman of Alcatraz; he just had this pigeon. Jake, he called him. He set Jake free a day before he, Sherwood, that is, was to walk, and Jake flew away just as pretty as you could want. But about a week after Sherwood Bolton left our happy little family, a friend of mine called me over to the west comer of the exercise yard, where Sherwood used to hang out. A bird was lying there like a very small pile of dirty bedlinen. It looked starved. My friend said Isnt that Jake, Red? It was. That pigeon was just as dead as a turd. I remember the first time Andy Dufresne got in touch with me for something; I remember like it was yesterday. That wasnt the time he wanted Rita Hayworth, though. That came later. In the summer of 1948 he came around for something else. Most of my deals are done right there in the exercise yard, and thats where this one went down. Our yard is big, much bigger than most. Its a perfect square, ninety yards on a side. The north side is the outer wall, with a guardtower at either end. The guards up there are armed with binoculars and riot guns. The main gate is in that north side. The truck loadingbays are on the south side of the yard. There are five of them. Shawshank is a busy place during the workweekdeliveries in, deliveries out. We have the licenseplate factory, and a big industrial laundry that does all the prison wetwash, plus that of Kittery Receiving Hospital and the Eliot Nursing Home. Theres also a big automotive garage where mechanic inmates fix prison, state, and municipal vehiclesnot to mention the private cars of the screws, the administration offices ... and, on more than one occasion, those of the parole board. The east side is a thick stone wall full of tiny slit windows. Cellblock 5 is on the other side of that wall. The west side is Administration and the infirmary. Shawshank has never been as overcrowded as most prisons, and back in 48 it was only filled to something like twothirds capacity, but at any given time there might be eighty to a hundred and twenty cons on the yardplaying toss with a football or baseball, shooting craps, jawing at each other, making deals. On Sunday the place was even more crowded; on Sunday the place would have looked like a country holiday ... if there had been any women. It was on a Sunday that Andy first came to me. I had just finished talking to Elmore Armitage, a fellow who often came in handy to me, about a radio when Andy walked up. I knew who he was, of course; he had a reputation for being a snob and a cold fish. People were saying he was marked for trouble already. One of the people saying so was Bogs Diamond, a bad man to have on your case. Andy had no cellmate, and Id heard that was just the way he wanted it, although people were already saying he thought his shit smelled sweeter than the ordinary. But I dont have to listen to rumors about a man when I can judge him for myself. Hello, he said. Im Andy Dufresne. He offered his hand and I shook it. He wasnt a man to waste time being social; he got right to the point. I understand that youre a man who knows how to get things. I agreed that I was able to locate certain items from time to time. How do you do that? Andy asked. Sometimes, I said, things just seem to come into my hand. I cant explain it. Unless its because Im Irish. He smiled a little at that. I wonder if you could get me a rockhammer. What would that be, and why would you want it? Andy looked surprised. Do you make motivations a part of your business? With words like those I could understand how he had gotten a reputation for being the snobby sort, the kind of guy who likes to put on airsbut I sensed a tiny thread of humor in his question. Ill tell you, I said. If you wanted a toothbrush, I wouldnt ask questions. Id just quote you a price. Because a toothbrush, you see, is a nonlethal sort of an object. You have strong feelings about lethal objects? I do. An old frictiontaped baseball flew toward us and he turned, catquick, and picked it out of the air. It was a move Frank Malzone would have been proud of. Andy flicked the ball back to where it had come fromjust a quick and easylooking flick of the wrist, but that throw had some mustard on it, just the same. I could see a lot of people were watching us with one eye as they went about their business. Probably the guards in the tower were watching, too. I wont gild the lily; there are cons that swing weight in any prison, maybe four or five in a small one, maybe two or three dozen in a big one. At Shawshank I was one of those with some weight, and what I thought of Andy Dufresne would have a lot to do with how his time went. He probably knew it, too, but he wasnt kowtowing or sucking up to me, and I respected him for that. Fair enough. Ill tell you what it is and why I want it. A rockhammer looks like a miniature pickaxeabout so long. He held his hands about a foot apart, and that was when I first noticed how neatly kept his nails were. Its got a small sharp pick on one end and a flat, blunt hammerhead on the other. I want it because I like rocks. Rocks, I said. Squat down here a minute, he said. I humored him. We hunkered down on our haunches like Indians. Andy took a handful of exercise yard dirt and began to sift it between his neat hands, so it emerged in a fine cloud. Small pebbles were left over, one or two sparkly, the rest dull and plain. One of the dull ones was quartz, but it was only dull until youd rubbed it clean. Then it had a nice milky glow. Andy did the cleaning and then tossed it to me. I caught it and named it. Quartz, sure, he said. And look. Mica. Shale. Silted granite. Heres a piece of graded limestone, from when they cut this place out of the side of the hill. He tossed them away and dusted his hands. Im a rockhound. At least ... I was a rockhound. In my old life. Id like to be one again, on a limited scale. Sunday expeditions in the exercise yard? I asked, standing up. It was a silly idea, and yet ... seeing that little piece of quartz had given my heart a funny tweak. I dont know exactly why; just an association with the outside world, I suppose. You didnt think of such things in terms of the yard. Quartz was something you picked out of a small, quickrunning stream. Better to have Sunday expeditions here than no Sunday expeditions at all, he said. You could plant an item like that rockhammer in somebodys skull, I remarked. I have no enemies here, he said quietly. No? I smiled. Wait awhile. If theres trouble, I can handle it without using a rockhammer. Maybe you want to try an escape? Going under the wall? Because if you do He laughed politely. When I saw the rockhammer three weeks later, I understood why. You know, I said, if anyone sees you with it, theyll take it away. If they saw you with a spoon, theyd take it away. What are you going to do, just sit down here in the yard and start bangin away? Oh, I believe I can do a lot better than that. I nodded. That part of it really wasnt my business, anyway. A man engages my services to get him something. Whether he can keep it or not after I get it is his business. How much would an item like that go for? I asked. I was beginning to enjoy his quiet, lowkey style. When youve spent ten years in stir, as I had then, you can get awfully tired of the bellowers and the braggarts and the loudmouths. Yes, I think it would be fair to say I liked Andy from the first. Eight dollars in any rockandgem shop, he said, but I realize that in a business like yours you work on a costplus basis Cost plus ten per cent is my going rate, but I have to go up some on a dangerous item. For something like the gadget youre talking about, it takes a little more goosegrease to get the wheels turning. Lets say ten dollars. Ten it is. I looked at him, smiling a little. Have you got ten dollars? I do, he said quietly. A long time after, I discovered that he had better than five hundred. He had brought it in with him. When they check you in at this hotel, one of the bellhops is obliged to bend you over and take a look up your worksbut there are a lot of works, and, not to put too fine a point on it, a man who is really determined can get a fairly large item quite a ways up themfar enough to be out of sight, unless the bellhop you happen to draw is in the mood to pull on a rubber glove and go prospecting. Thats fine, I said. You ought to know what I expect if you get caught with what I get you. I suppose I should, he said, and I could tell by the slight change in his gray eyes that he knew exactly what I was going to say. It was a slight lightening, a gleam of his special ironic humor. If you get caught, youll say you found it. Thats about the long and short of it. Theyll put you in solitary for three or four weeks ... plus, of course, youll lose your toy and youll get a black mark on your record. If you give them my name, you and I will never do business again. Not for so much as a pair of shoelaces or a bag of Bugler. And Ill send some fellows around to lump you up. I dont like violence, but youll understand my position. I cant allow it to get around that I cant handle myself. That would surely finish me. Yes. I suppose it would. I understand, and you dont need to worry. I never worry, I said. In a place like this theres no percentage in it. He nodded and walked away. Three days later he walked up beside me in the exercise yard during the laundrys morning break. He didnt speak or even look my way, but pressed a picture of the Hon. Alexander Hamilton into my hand as neatly as a good magician does a cardtrick. He was a man who adapted fast. I got him his rockhammer. I had it in my cell for one night, and it was just as he described it. It was no tool for escape (it would have taken a man just about six hundred years to tunnel under the wall using that rockhammer, I figured), but I still felt some misgivings. If you planted that pickaxe end in a mans head, he would surely never listen to Fibber McGee and Molly on the radio again. And Andy had already begun having trouble with the sisters. I hoped it wasnt them he was wanting the rockhammer for. In the end, I trusted my judgment. Early the next morning, twenty minutes before the wakeup horn went off, I slipped the rockhammer and a package of Camels to Ernie, the old trusty who swept the Cellblock 5 corridors until he was let free in 1956. He slipped it into his tunic without a word, and I didnt see the rockhammer again for nineteen years, and by then it was damned near worn away to nothing. The following Sunday Andy walked over to me in the exercise yard again. He was nothing to look at that day, I can tell you. His lower lip was swelled up so big it looked like a summer sausage, his right eye was swollen halfshut, and there was an ugly washboard scrape across one cheek. He was having his troubles with the sisters, all right, but he never mentioned them. Thanks for the tool, he said, and walked away. I watched him curiously. He walked a few steps, saw something in the dirt, bent over, and picked it up. It was a small rock. Prison fatigues, except for those worn by mechanics when theyre on the job, have no pockets. But there are ways to get around that. The little pebble disappeared up Andys sleeve and didnt come down. I admired that ... and I admired him. In spite of the problems he was having, he was going on with his life. There are thousands who dont or wont or cant, and plenty of them arent in prison, either. And I noticed that, although his face looked as if a twister had happened to it, his hands were still neat and clean, the nails wellkept. I didnt see much of him over the next six months; Andy spent a lot of that time in solitary. A few words about the sisters. In a lot of pens they are known as bull queers or jailhouse susiesjust lately the term in fashion is killer queens. But in Shawshank they were always the sisters. I dont know why, but other than the name I guess there was no difference. It comes as no surprise to most these days that theres a lot of buggery going on inside the wattsexcept to some of the new fish, maybe, who have the misfortune to be young, slim, goodlooking, and unwarybut homosexuality, like straight sex, comes in a hundred different shapes and forms. There are men who cant stand to be without sex of some kind and turn to another man to keep from going crazy. Usually what follows is an arrangement between two fundamentally heterosexual men, although Ive sometimes wondered if they are quite as heterosexual as they thought they were going to be when they get back to their wives or their girlfriends. There are also men who get turned in prison. In the current parlance they go gay, or come out of the closet. Mostly (but not always) they play the female, and their favors are competed for fiercely. And then there are the sisters. They are to prison society what the rapist is to the society outside the walls. Theyre usually longtimers, doing hard bullets for brutal crimes. Their prey is the young, the weak, and the inexperienced ... or, as in the case of Andy Dufresne, the weaklooking. Their hunting grounds are the showers, the cramped, tunnellike areaway behind the industrial washers in the laundry, sometimes the infirmary. On more than one occasion rape has occurred in the closetsized projection booth behind the auditorium. Most often what the sisters take by force they could have had for free, if they wanted it that way; those who have been turned always seem to have crushes on one sister or another, like teenage girls with their Sinatras, Presleys, or Redfords. But for the sisters, the joy has always been in taking it by force ... and I guess it always will be. Because of his small size and fair good looks (and maybe also because of that very quality of selfpossession I had admired), the sisters were after Andy from the day he walked in. If this was some kind of fairy story, Id tell you that Andy fought the good fight until they left him alone. I wish I could say that, but I cant. Prison is no fairytale world. The first time for him was in the shower less than three days after he joined our happy Shawshank family. Just a lot of slap and tickle that time, I understand. They like to size you up before they make their real move, like jackals finding out if the prey is as weak and hamstrung as it looks. Andy punched back and bloodied the lip of a big, hulking sister named Bogs Diamondgone these many years since to who knows where. A guard broke it up before it could go any further, but Bogs promised to get himand Bogs did. The second time was behind the washers in the laundry. A lot has gone on in that long, dusty, and narrow space over the years; the guards know about it and just let it be. Its dim and littered with bags of washing and bleaching compound, drums of Hexlite catalyst, as harmless as salt if your hands are dry, murderous as battery acid if theyre wet. The guards dont like to go back there. Theres no room to maneuver, and one of the first things they teach them when they come to work in a place like this is to never let the cons get you in a place where you cant back up. Bogs wasnt there that day, but Henley Backus, who had been washroom foreman down there since 1922, told me that four of his friends were. Andy held them at bay for awhile with a scoop of Hexlite, threatening to throw it in their eyes if they came any closer, but he tripped trying to back around one of the big Washex fourpockets. That was all it took. They were on him. I guess the phrase gangrape is one that doesnt change much from one generation to the next. Thats what they did to him, those four sisters. They bent him over a gearbox and one of them held a Phillips screwdriver to his temple while they gave him the business. It rips you up some, but not badam I speaking from personal experience, you ask?I only wish I werent. You bleed for awhile. If you dont want some clown asking you if you just started your period, you wad up a bunch of toilet paper and keep it down the back of your underwear until it stops. The bleeding really is like a menstrual flow; it keeps up for two, maybe three days, a slow trickle. Then it stops. No harm done, unless theyve done something even more unnatural to you. No physical harm donebut rape is rape, and eventually you have to look at your face in the mirror again and decide what to make of yourself. Andy went through that alone, the way he went through everything alone in those days. He must have come to the conclusion that others before him had come to, namely, that there are only two ways to deal with the sisters fight them and get taken, or just get taken. He decided to fight. When Bogs and two of his buddies came after him a week or so after the laundry incident (I heard ya got broke in, Bogs said, according to Ernie, who was around at the time), Andy slugged it out with them. He broke the nose of a fellow named Rooster MacBride, a heavygutted farmer who was in for beating his stepdaughter to death. Rooster died in here, Im happy to add. They took him, all three of them. When it was done, Rooster and the other eggit might have been Pete Verness, but Im not completely sureforced Andy down to his knees. Bogs Diamond stepped in front of him. He had a pearlhandled razor in those days with the words Diamond Pearl engraved on both sides of the grip. He opened it and said, Im gonna open my fly now, mister man, and youre going to swallow what I give you to swallow. And when you done swallowed mine, youre gonna swallow Roosters. I guess you done broke his nose and I think he ought to have something to pay for it. Andy said, Anything of yours that you stick in my mouth, youre going to lose it. Bogs looked at Andy like he was crazy, Ernie said. No, he told Andy, talking to him slowly, like Andy was a stupid kid. You didnt understand what I said. You do anything like that and Ill put all eight inches of this steel into your ear. Get it? I understood what you said. I dont think you understood me. Im going to bite whatever you stick into my mouth. You can put that razor into my brain, I guess, but you should know that a sudden serious brain injury causes the victim to simultaneously urinate, defecate ... and bite down. He looked up at Bogs smiling that little smile of his, old Ernie said, as if the three of them had been discussing stocks and bonds with him instead of throwing it to him just as hard as they could. Just as if he was wearing one of his threepiece bankers suits instead of kneeling on a dirty broomcloset floor with his pants around his ankles and blood trickling down the insides of his thighs. In fact, he went on, I understand that the bitereflex is sometimes so strong that the victims jaws have to be pried open with a crowbar or a jackhandle. Bogs didnt put anything in Andys mouth that night in late February of 1948, and neither did Rooster MacBride, and so far as I know, no one else ever did, either. What the three of them did was to beat Andy within an inch of his life, and all four of them ended up doing a jolt in solitary. Andy and Rooster MacBride went by way of the infirmary. How many times did that particular crew have at him? I dont know. I think Rooster lost his taste fairly early onbeing in nosesplints for a month can do that to a fellowand Bogs Diamond left off that summer, all at once. That was a strange thing. Bogs was found in his cell, badly beaten, one morning in early June, when he didnt show up in the breakfast nosecount. He wouldnt say who had done it, or how they had gotten to him, but being in my business, I know that a screw can be bribed to do almost anything except get a gun for an inmate. They didnt make big salaries then, and they dont now. And in those days there was no electronic locking system, no closedcircuit TV, no masterswitches which controlled whole areas of the prison. Back in 1948, each cellblock had its own turnkey. A guard could have been bribed real easy to let someonemaybe two or three someonesinto the block, and, yes, even into Diamonds cell. Of course a job like that would have cost a lot of money. Not by outside standards, no. Prison economics are on a smaller scale. When youve been in here awhile, a dollar bill in your hand looks like a twenty did outside. My guess is that, if Bogs was done, it cost someone a serious piece of changefifteen bucks, well say, for the turnkey, and two or three apiece for each of the lumpup guys. Im not saying it was Andy Dufresne, but I do know that he brought in five hundred dollars when he came, and he was a banker in the straight worlda man who understands better than the rest of us the ways in which money can become power. And I know this after the beatingthe three broken ribs, the hemorrhaged eye, the sprained back, and the dislocated hipBogs Diamond left Andy alone. In fact, after that he left everyone pretty much alone. He got to be like a high wind in the summertime, all bluster and no bite. You could say, in fact, that he turned into a weak sister. That was the end of Bogs Diamond, a man who might eventually have killed Andy if Andy hadnt taken steps to prevent it (if it was him who took the steps). But it wasnt the end of Andys troubles with the sisters. There was a little hiatus, and then it began again, although not so hard or so often. Jackals like easy prey, and there were easier pickings around than Andy Dufresne. He always fought them, thats what I remember. He knew, I guess, that if you let them have at you even once without fighting, it got that much easier to let them have their way without fighting next time. So Andy would turn up with bruises on his face every once in awhile, and there was the matter of the two broken fingers six or eight months after Diamonds beating. Oh yesand sometime in late 1949, the man landed in the infirmary with a broken cheekbone that was probably the result of someone swinging a nice chunk of pipe with the businessend wrapped in flannel. He always fought back, and as a result, he did his time in solitary. But I dont think solitary was the hardship for Andy that it was for some men. He got along with himself. The sisters was something he adjusted himself toand then, in 1950, it stopped almost completely. That is a part of my story that Ill get to in due time. In the fall of 1948, Andy met me one morning in the exercise yard and asked me if I could get him half a dozen rockblankets. What the hell are those? I asked. He told me that was just what rockhounds called them; they were polishing cloths about the size of dishtowels. They were heavily padded, with a smooth side and a rough sidethe smooth side like finegrained sandpaper, the rough side almost as abrasive as industrial steel wool (Andy also kept a box of that in his cell, although he didnt get it from meI imagine he kited it from the prison laundry). I told him I thought we could do business on those, and I ended up getting them from the very same rockandgem shop where Id arranged to get the rockhammer. This time I charged Andy my usual ten per cent and not a penny more. I didnt see anything lethal or even dangerous in a dozen 7 x 7 squares of padded cloth. Rockblankets, indeed. It was about five months later that Andy asked if I could get him Rita Hayworth. That conversation took place in the auditorium, during a movieshow. Nowadays we get the movieshows once or twice a week, but back then the shows were a monthly event. Usually the movies we got had a morally uplifting message to them, and this one, The Lost Weekend, was no different. The moral was that its dangerous to drink. It was a moral we could take some comfort in. Andy maneuvered to get next to me, and about halfway through the show he leaned a little closer and asked if I could get him Rita Hayworth. Ill tell you the truth, it kind of tickled me. He was usually cool, calm, and collected, but that night he was jumpy as hell, almost embarrassed, as if he was asking me to get him a load of Trojans or one of those sheepskinlined gadgets that are supposed to enhance your solitary pleasure, as the magazines put it. He seemed overcharged, a man on the verge of blowing his radiator. I can get her, I said. No sweat, calm down. You want the big one or the little one? At that time Rita was my best girl (a few years before it had been Betty Grable) and she came in two sizes. For a buck you could get the little Rita. For twofifty you could have the big Rita, four feet high and all woman. The big one, he said, not looking at me. I tell you, he was a hot sketch that night. He was blushing just like a kid trying to get into a kootch show with his big brothers draftcard. Can you do it? Take it easy, sure I can. Does a bear shit in the woods? The audience was applauding and catcalling as the bugs came out of the walls to get Ray Milland, who was having a bad case of the DTs. How soon? A week. Maybe less. Okay. But he sounded disappointed, as if he had been hoping I had one stuffed down my pants right then. How much? I quoted him the wholesale price. I could afford to give him this one at cost; hed been a good customer, what with his rockhammer and his rockblankets. Furthermore, hed been a good boyon more than one night when he was having his problems with Bogs, Rooster, and the rest, I wondered how long it would be before he used the rockhammer to crack someones head open. Posters are a big part of my business, just behind the booze and cigarettes, usually half a step ahead of the reefer. In the sixties the business exploded in every direction, with a lot of people wanting funky hangups like Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, that Easy Rider poster. But mostly its girls; one pinup queen after another. A few days after Andy spoke to me, a laundry driver I did business with back then brought in better than sixty posters, most of them Rita Hayworths. You may even remember the picture; I sure do. Rita is dressedsort ofin a bathing suit, one hand behind her head, her eyes halfclosed, those full, sulky red lips parted. They called it Rita Hayworth, but they might as well have called it Woman in Heat. The prison administration knows about the black market, in case you were wondering. Sure they do. They probably know almost as much about my business as I do myself. They live with it because they know that a prison is like a big pressurecooker, and there have to be vents somewhere to let off some steam. They make the occasional bust, and Ive done time in solitary a time or three over the years, but when its something like posters, they wink. Live and let live. And when a big Rita Hayworth went up in some fishies cell, the assumption was that it came in the mail from a friend or a relative. Of course all the carepackages from friends and relatives are opened and the contents inventoried, but who goes back and rechecks the inventory sheets for something as harmless as a Rita Hayworth or an Ava Gardner pinup? When youre in a pressurecooker you learn to live and let live or somebody will carve you a brandnew mouth just above the Adams apple. You learn to make allowances. It was Ernie again who took the poster up to Andys cell, 14, from my own, 6. And it was Ernie who brought back the note, written in Andys careful hand, just one word Thanks. A little while later, as they filed us out for morning chow, I glanced into his cell and saw Rita over his bunk in all her swimsuited glory, one hand behind her head, her eyes halfclosed, those soft, satiny lips parted. It was over his bunk where he could look at her nights, after lightsout, in the glow of the arc sodiums in the exercise yard. But in the bright morning sunlight, there were dark slashes across her facethe shadow of the bars on his single slit window. Now Im going to tell you what happened in midMay of 1950 that finally ended Andys threeyear series of skirmishes with the sisters. It was also the incident which eventually got him out of the laundry and into the library, where he filled out his worktime until he left our happy little family earlier this year. You may have noticed how much of what Ive told you already is hearsaysomeone saw something and told me and I told you. Well, in some cases Ive simplified it even more than it really was, and have repeated (or will repeat) fourthor fifthhand information. Thats the way it is here. The grapevine is very real, and you have to use it if youre going to stay ahead. Also, of course, you have to know how to pick out the grains of truth from the chaff of lies, rumors, and wishithadbeens. You may also have gotten the idea that Im describing someone whos more legend than man, and I would have to agree that theres some truth to that. To us longtimers who knew Andy over a space of years, there was an element of fantasy to him, a sense, almost, of mythmagic, if you get what I mean. That story I passed on about Andy refusing to give Bogs Diamond a headjob is part of that myth, and how he kept on fighting the sisters is part of it, and how he got the library job is part of it, too ... but with one important difference I was there and I saw what happened, and I swear on my mothers name that its all true. The oath of a convicted murderer may not be worth much, but believe this I dont lie. Andy and I were on fair speaking terms by then. The guy fascinated me. Looking back to the poster episode, I see theres one thing I neglected to tell you, and maybe I should. Five weeks after he hung Rita up (Id 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 pushbroom. 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 didnt even dare touch them, they were so pretty. Theres a crying shortage of pretty things in the slam, and the real pity of it is that a lot of men dont 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 hadnt been so heavy, they would have served as a fine pair of mens cufflinksthey were that close to being a matched set. How much work went into creating those two pieces? Hours and hours after lightsout, I knew that.


First the chipping and shaping, and then the almost endless polishing and finishing with those rockblankets. 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 madethats the thing that really separates us from the animals, I thinkand I felt something else, too. A sense of awe for the mans 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 licenseplate factory ought to be resurfaced with roofing tar. They wanted it done before it got too hot up there, and they asked 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 Andys and my own. For the next week wed 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 fieldglasses for good measure. Four of us would be carrying a big extension ladder on those morning marchesI always got a kick out of the way Dickie Betts, who was on that job, called that sort of ladder an extensibleand wed put it up against the side of that low, flat building. Then wed start bucketbrigading hot buckets of tar up to the roof. Spill that shit on you and youd 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 weeks vacation, because instead of sweating it out in the laundry or the plateshop or standing over a bunch of cons cutting pulp or brush somewhere out in the willywags, 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 didnt even have to keep more than half an eye on us, because the south wall sentry post was close enough so that the fellows up there could have spit their chews on us, if theyd wanted to. If anyone on the roofsealing party had made one funny move, it would take four seconds to cut him smack in two with .45caliber machinegun bullets. So those screws just sat there and took their ease. All they needed was a couple of sixpacks 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 that year of 1950, hed been at Shawshank longer than I had. Longer than the last two wardens put together, as a matter of fact. The fellow running the show in 1950 was a prissylooking downeast 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 was only interested in three things 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), which team won the intramural baseball championship each September, and getting a deathpenalty law passed in Maine. A regular bear for the deathpenalty was George Dunahy. He was fired off the job in 1953, when it came out he was running a discount autorepair service down in the prison garage and splitting the profits with Byron Hadley and Greg Stammas. Hadley and Stammas came out of that one okaythey were old hands at keeping their asses coveredbut 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 couldnt quite manage it. During Stammass 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, coldhearted 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 tall, shambling man with thinning red hair. He sunburned easily and he talked loud and if you didnt move fast enough to suit him, hed 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 stylehe was a thankless man with not a good word for anyone, a man who was 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 happensthey 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 cant, or wont. 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 thats 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, hed think about vinegar. If you told him his wife had always been faithful to him, hed 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 Hadleys older brother had gone off to Texas some fourteen years ago and the rest of the family hadnt 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 longdistance from Austin. It seemed that Hadleys brother had died four months ago, and a rich man at that (Its frigging incredible how lucky some assholes can get, this paragon of gratitude on the plateshop roof said). The money had come as a result of oil and oilleases, and there was close to a million dollars. No, Hadley wasnt a millionairethat might have made even him happy, at least for awhilebut the brother had left a pretty damned decent bequest of thirtyfive 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. Theyll 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 got your goddam kids pestering you to take em for a ride with the top down And to drive it, if theyre old enough, Mert said. Old Mert Entwhistle knew which side his bread was buttered on, and he didnt say what must have been as obvious to him as to the rest of us If that moneys worrying you so bad, Byron old kid old sock, Ill just take it off your hands. After all, what are friends for? Thats 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 dont have enough left over to pay the overdraft, you got to pay out of your own pocket, or maybe even borrow it from one of those kikey loan agencies. And they audit you anyway, you know. It dont 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 its purple, and you end up getting the short end. Christ. He lapsed into a morose silence, thinking of what terrible bad luck hed had to inherit that thirtyfive thousand dollars. 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 holstered. 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 both. 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 was 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 it doesnt kill you it will paralyze you long enough to forget whatever cute move it was that you had planned. Boy, Hadley said, Ill give you just one chance to pick up that Padd. And then youre 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 hadnt 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 youre asked (and then you always tell them just what they want to hear and shut up again). Black man, white man, red man, yellow man, in prison it doesnt matter because weve got our own brand of equality. In prison every cons a nigger and you have to get used to the idea if you intend to survive men like Hadley and Greg Stammas, who really would kill you just as soon as look at you. When youre in stir you belong to the State and if you forget it, woe is you. Ive known men whove lost eyes, men whove 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 charleyhorse both of his legs and leave him writhing on the cement. You could buy a lug like that 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 out onto the roof as if nothing at all was happening. Like everyone else, I look after my own ass first. I have to. Its cracked already, and in Shawshank there have always been Hadleys willing 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. Hadleys face was as red as the side of a firebarn. Your only problem, he said, is going to be how many bones you still got unbroken. You can count them in the infirmary. Come on, Mert. Were 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 81433SHNK, 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 didnt resist. His eyes never left Hadleys red, horsey face. If youve got your thumb on her, Mr. Hadley, he said in that same calm, composed voice, theres not a reason why you shouldnt have every cent of that money. Final score, Mr. Byron Hadley thirtyfive thousand, Uncle Sam zip. Mert started to drag him toward the edge. Hadley just stood there. For a moment Andy was like a rope between them in a tugofwar game. Then Hadley said, Hold on one second, Mert. What do you mean, boy? I mean, if youve got your thumb on your wife, you can give it to her, Andy said. You better start making sense, boy, or youre going over. The IRS allows you a onetimeonly gift to your spouse, Andy said. Its good up to sixty thousand dollars. Hadley was now looking at Andy as if he had been poleaxed. Naw, that aint right, he said. Tax free? Tax free, Andy said. IRS cant touch one cent. How would you know a thing like that? Tim Youngblood said He used to be a banker, Byron. I spose he might Shut ya head, Trout, Hadley said without looking at him. Tim Youngblood flushed and shut up. Some of the guards called him Trout because of his thick lips and buggy eyes. Hadley kept looking at Andy. Youre the smart banker who shot his wife. Why should I believe a smart banker like you? So I can wind up in here breaking rocks right alongside you? Youd like that, wouldnt you? Andy said quietly If you went to jail for tax evasion, youd go to a federal penitentiary, not Shawshank. But you wont. The taxfree gift to the spouse is a perfectly legal loophole. Ive done dozens ... no, hundreds of them. Its meant primarily for people with small businesses to pass on, for people who come into onetimeonly windfalls. Like yourself. I think youre lying, Hadley said, but he didntyou could see he didnt. There was an emotion dawning on his face, something that was grotesque overlying that long, ugly countenance and that receding, sunburned brow. An almost obscene emotion when seen on the features of Byron Hadley. It was hope. No, Im not lying. Theres no reason why you should take my word for it, either. Engage a lawyer Ambulancechasing highwayrobbing cocksuckers! Hadley cried. Andy shrugged. Then go to the IRS. Theyll tell you the same thing for free. Actually, you dont need me to tell you at all. You would have investigated the matter for yourself. Youre fuckingA. I dont need any smart wifekilling banker to show me where the bear shit in the buckwheat. Youll need a tax lawyer or a banker to set up the gift for you and that will cost you something, Andy said. Or ... if you were interested, Id be glad to set it up for you nearly free of charge. The price would be three beers apiece for my coworkers Coworkers, Mert said, and let out a rusty guffaw. He slapped his knee. A real kneeslapper was old Mert, and I hope he died of intestinal cancer in a part of the world where morphine is as of yet undiscovered. Coworkers, aint that cute? Coworkers? You aint got any Shut your friggin trap, Hadley growled, and Mert shut. Hadley looked at Andy again. What was you sayin? I was saying that Id only ask three beers apiece for my coworkers, if that seems fair, Andy said. I think a man feels more like a man when hes working out of doors in the springtime if he can have a bottle of suds. Thats only my opinion. It would go down smooth, and Im sure youd have their gratitude. I have talked to some of the other men who were up there that dayRennie Martin, Logan St. Pierre, and Paul Bonsaint were three of themand we all saw the same thing then ... felt the same thing. Suddenly it was Andy who had the upper hand. It was Hadley who had the gun on his hip and the billy in his hand, Hadley who had his friend Greg Stammas behind him and the whole prison administration behind Stammas, the whole power of the State behind that, but all at once in that golden sunshine it didnt matter, and I felt my heart leap up in my chest as it never had since the truck drove me and four others through the gate back in 1938 and I stepped out into the exercise yard. Andy was looking at Hadley with those cold, clear, calm eyes, and it wasnt just the thirtyfive thousand then, we all agreed on that. Ive played it over and over in my mind and I know. It was man against man, and Andy simply forced him, the way a strong man can force a weaker mans wrist to the table in a game of Indian rasseling. There was no reason, you see, why Hadley couldntve given Mert the nod at that very minute, pitched Andy overside onto his head, and still taken Andys advice. No reason. But he didnt. I could get you all a couple of beers if I wanted to, Hadley said. A beer does taste good while youre workin. The colossal prick even managed to sound magnanimous. Id just give you one piece of advice the IRS wouldnt bother with, Andy said. His eyes were fixed unwinkingly on Hadleys. Make this gift to your wife if youre sure. If you think theres even a chance she might doublecross you or backshoot you, we could work out something else Doublecross me? Hadley asked harshly. Doublecross me? Mr. Hotshot Banker, if she ate her way through a boxcar of ExLax, she wouldnt dare fart unless I gave her the nod. Mert, Youngblood, and the other screws yucked it up dutifully. Andy never cracked a smile. Ill write down the forms you need, he said. You can get them at the post office, and Ill fill them out for your signature. That sounded suitably important, and Hadleys chest swelled. Then he glared around at the rest of us and hollered, What are you jimmies starin at? Move your asses, goddammit! He looked back at Andy. You come over here with me, hotshot. And listen to me well if youre jewing me somehow, youre gonna find yourself chasing your own head around Shower C before the weeks out. Yes, I understand that, Andy said softly. And he did understand it. The way it turned out, he understood a lot more than I didmore than any of us did. Thats how, on the secondtolast day of the job, the convict crew that tarred the platefactory roof in 1950 ended up sitting in a row at ten oclock on a spring morning, drinking Black Label beer supplied by the hardest screw that ever walked a turn at Shawshank State Prison. That beer was pisswarm, but it was still the best I ever had in my life. We sat and drank it and felt the sun on our shoulders, and not even the expression of halfamusement, halfcontempt on Hadleys faceas if he were watching apes drink beer instead of mencould spoil it. It lasted twenty minutes, that beerbreak, and for those twenty minutes we felt like free men. We could have been drinking beer and tarring the roof of one of our own houses. Only Andy didnt drink. I already told you about his drinking habit. He sat hunkered down in the shade, hands dangling between his knees, watching us and smiling a little. Its amazing how many men remember him that way, and amazing how many men were on that workcrew when Andy Dufresne faced down Byron Hadley. I thought there were nine or ten of us, but by 1955 there must have been two hundred of us, maybe more ... if you believed what you heard. So yeahif you asked me to give you a flatout answer to the question of whether Im trying to tell you about a man or a legend that got made up around the man, like a pearl around a little piece of gritId have to say that the answer lies somewhere in between. All I know for sure is that Andy Dufresne wasnt much like me or anyone else I ever knew since I came inside. He brought in five hundred dollars jammed up his back porch, but somehow that graymeat son of a bitch managed to bring in something else as well. A sense of his own worth, maybe, or a feeling that he would be the winner in the end ... or maybe it was only a sense of freedom, even inside these goddamned gray walls. It was a kind of inner light he carried around with him. I only knew him to lose that light once, and that is also a part of this story. By World Series time of 1950this was the year the Philadelphia Whiz Kids dropped four straight, you will rememberAndy was having no more trouble from the sisters. Stammas and Hadley had passed the word. If Andy Dufresne came to either of them, or any of the other screws that formed a part of their coterie, and showed so much as a single drop of blood in his underpants, every sister in Shawshank would go to bed that night with a headache. They didnt fight it. As I have pointed out, there was always an eighteenyearold car thief or a firebug or some guy whod gotten his kicks handling little children. After the day on the plateshop roof, Andy went his way and the sisters went theirs. He was working in the library then, under a tough old con named Brooks Hatlen. Hatlen had gotten the job back in the late twenties because he had a college education. Brooksies degree was in animal husbandry, true enough, but college educations in institutes of lower learning like The Shank are so rare that its a case of beggars not being able to be choosers. In 1952 Brooksie, who had killed his wife and daughter after a losing streak at poker back when Coolidge was President, was paroled. As usual, the State in all its wisdom had let him go long after any chance he might have had to become a useful part of society was gone. He was sixtyeight and arthritic when he tottered out of the main gate in his Polish suit and his French shoes, his parole papers in one hand and a Greyhound bus ticket in the other. He was crying when he left. Shawshank was his world. What lay beyond its walls was as terrible to Brooks as the Western Seas had been to superstitious fifteenthcentury sailors. In prison, Brooksie had been a person of some importance. He was the librarian, an educated man. If he went to the Kittery library and asked for a job, they wouldnt even give him a library card. I heard he died in a home for indigent old folks up Freeport way in 1953, and at that he lasted about six months longer than I thought he would. Yeah, I guess the State got its own back on Brooksie, all right. They trained him to like it inside the shithouse and then they threw him out. Andy succeeded to Brooksies job, and he was librarian for twentythree years. He used the same force of will Id seen him use on Byron Hadley to get what he wanted for the library, and I saw him gradually turn one small room (which still smelled of turpentine because it had been a paint closet until 1922 and had never been properly aired) lined with Readers Digest Condensed Books and National Geographics into the best prison library in New England. He did it a step at a time. He put a suggestion box by the door and patiently weeded out such attempts at humor as More FukBoox Pleeze and Excape in 10 EZ Lesions. He got hold of the things the prisoners seemed serious about. He wrote to the major book clubs in New York and got two of them, The Literary Guild and The BookoftheMonth Club, to send editions of all their major selections to us at a special cheap rate. He discovered a hunger for information on such small hobbies as soapcarving, woodworking, sleight of hand, and card solitaire. He got all the books he could on such subjects. And those two jailhouse staples, Erle Stanley Gardner and Louis LAmour. Cons never seem to get enough of the courtroom or the open range. And yes, he did keep a box of fairly spicy paperbacks under the checkout desk, loaning them out carefully and making sure they always 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. Stammas 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 hed even throw a paternal arm around Andys shoulders or give him a goose. He didnt fool anybody. Andy Dufresne was no ones mascot. He told Andy that maybe hed been a banker on the outside, but that part of his life was receding rapidly into his past and he had better get a hold on the facts of prison life. As far as that bunch of jumpedup Republican Rotarians in Augusta was concerned, there were only three viable expenditures of the taxpayers money in the field of prisons and corrections. Number one was more walls, number two was more bars, and number three was more guards. As far as the State Senate was concerned, Stammas explained, the folks in Thomaston and Shawshank and Pittsfield and South Portland were the scum of the earth. They were there to do hard time, and by God and Sonny Jesus, it was hard time they were going to do. And if there were a few weevils in the bread, wasnt that just too fucking bad? Andy smiled his small, composed smile and asked Stammas what would happen to a block 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 bleeve youd do it with that same little grin on your face. You go on and write your letters. Ill even mail them for you if you pay for the stamps. Which Andy did. And he had the last laugh, although Stammas and Hadley werent around to see it. Andys requests for library funds were routinely turned down until 1960, when he received a check for two hundred dollarsthe Senate probably appropriated it in hopes that he would shut up and go away. Vain hope. Andy felt that he had finally gotten one foot in the door and he simply redoubled his efforts; two letters a week instead of one. In 1962 he got four hundred dollars, and for the rest of the decade the library received seven hundred dollars a year like clockwork. By 1971 that had risen to an even thousand. Not much stacked up against what your average smalltown library receives, I guess, but a thousand bucks can buy a lot of recycled Perry Mason stories and Jake Logan Westerns. By the time Andy left, you could go into the library (expanded from its original paintlocker to three rooms), and find just about anything youd want. And if you couldnt find it, chances were good that Andy could get it for you. Now youre asking yourself if all this came about just because Andy told Byron Hadley how to save the taxes on his windfall inheritance. The answer is yes ... and no. You can probably figure out what happened for yourself. Word got around that Shawshank was housing its very own pet financial wizard. In the late spring and the summer of 1950, Andy set up two trust funds for guards who wanted to assure a college education for their kids, he advised a couple of others who wanted to take small fliers in common stock (and they did pretty damn well, as things turned out; one of them did so well he was able to take an early retirement two years later), and Ill be damned if he didnt advise the warden himself, old Lemon Lips George Dunahy, on how to go about setting up a taxshelter for himself. That was just before Dunahy got the bums rush, and I believe he must have been dreaming about all the millions his book was going to make him. By April of 1951, Andy was doing the tax returns for half the screws at Shawshank, and by 1952, he was doing almost all of them. He was paid in what may be a prisons most valuable coin simple good will. Later on, after Greg Stammas took over the wardens office, Andy became even more importantbut if I tried to tell you the specifics of just how, Id be guessing. There are some things I know about and others I can only guess at. I know that there were some prisoners who received all sorts of special considerationsradios in their cells, extraordinary visiting privileges, things like thatand there were people on the outside who were paying for them to have those privileges. Such people are known as angels by the prisoners. All at once some fellow would be excused from working in the plateshop on Saturday forenoons, and youd know that fellow had an angel out there whod coughed up a chunk of dough to make sure it happened. The way it usually works is that the angel will pay the bribe to some middlelevel screw, and the screw will spread the grease both up and down the administrative ladder. Then there was the discount autorepair service that laid Warden Dunahy low. It went underground for awhile and then emerged stronger than ever in the late fifties. And some of the contractors that worked at the prison from time to time were paying kickbacks to the top administration officials, Im pretty sure, and the same was almost certainly true of the companies whose equipment was bought and installed in the laundry and the licenseplate shop and the stampingmill that was built in 1963. By the late sixties there was also a booming trade in pills, and the same administrative crowd was involved in turning a buck on that. All of it added up to a pretty goodsized river of illicit income. Not like the pile of clandestine bucks that must fly around a really big prison like Attica or San Quentin, but not peanuts, either. And money itself becomes a problem after awhile. You cant just stuff it into your wallet and then shell out a bunch of crumpled twenties and dogeared tens when you want a pool built in your back yard or an addition put on your house. Once you get past a certain point, you have to explain where that money came from ... and if your explanations arent convincing enough, youre apt to wind up wearing a number yourself. So there was a need for Andys services. They took him out of the laundry and installed him in the library, but if you wanted to look at it another away, they never took him out of the laundry at all. They just set him to work washing dirty money instead of dirty sheets. He funnelled it into stocks, bonds, taxfree municipals, you name it. He told me once about ten years after that day on the plateshop roof that his feelings about what he was doing were pretty clear, and that his conscience was relatively untroubled. The rackets would have gone on with him or without him. He had not asked to be sent to Shawshank, he went on; he was an innocent man who had been victimized by colossal bad luck, not a missionary or a dogooder. Besides, Red, he told me with that same halfgrin, what Im doing in here isnt all that different from what I was doing outside. Ill hand you a pretty cynical axiom the amount of expert financial help an individual or company needs rises in direct proportion to how many people that person or business is screwing. The people who run this place are stupid, brutal monsters for the most part. The people who run the straight world are brutal and monstrous, but they happen not to be quite as stupid, because the standard of competence out there is a little higher. Not much, but a little. But the pills, I said. I dont want to tell you your business, but they make me nervous. Reds, uppers, downers, Nembutalsnow theyve got these things they call Phase Fours. I wont get anything like that. Never have. No, Andy said. I dont like the pills, either. Never have. But Im not much of a one for cigarettes or booze, either. But I dont push the pills. I dont bring them in, and I dont sell them once they are in. Mostly its the screws who do that. But Yeah, I know. Theres a fine line there. What it comes down to, Red, is some people refuse to get their hands dirty at all. Thats called sainthood, and the pigeons land on your shoulders and crap all over your shirt. The other extreme is to take a bath in the dirt and deal any goddamned thing that will turn a dollarguns, switchblades, big H, what the hell. You ever have a con come up to you and offer you a contract? I nodded. Its happened a lot of times over the years. You are, after all, the man who can get it.


And they figure if you can get them batteries for their transistor radios or cartons of Luckies or lids of reefer, you can put them in touch with a guy wholl use a knife. Sure you have, Andy agreed. But you dont do it. Because guys like us, Red, we know theres a third choice. An alternative to staying simonpure or bathing in the filth and the slime. Its the alternative that grownups all over the world pick. You balance off your walk through the hogwallow against what it gains you. You choose the lesser of two evils and try to keep your good intentions in front of you. And I guess you judge how well youre 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 toddle right off to hell on that road. Dont you believe it, he said, growing somber. This is hell right here. Right here in The Shank. They sell pills and I tell them what to do with the money. But Ive also got the library, and I know of over two dozen guys who have used the books in there to help them pass their high school equivalency tests. Maybe when they get out of here theyll be able to crawl off the shitheap. When we needed that second room back in 1957, I got it. Because they want to keep me happy. I work cheap. Thats the tradeoff. And youve got your own private quarters. Sure. Thats the way I like it. The prison population had risen slowly all through the fifties, and it damn near exploded in the sixties, what with every collegekid in America wanting to try dope and the perfectly ridiculous penalties for the use of a little reefer. But in all that time Andy never had a cellmate, except for a big, silent Indian named Normaden (like all Indians in The Shank, he was called Chief), and Normaden didnt last long. A lot of the other longtimers thought Andy was crazy, but Andy just smiled. He lived alone and he liked it that way... and as hed said, they liked to keep him happy. He worked cheap. Prison time is slow time, sometimes youd swear its stoptime, but it passes. It passes. George Dunahy departed the scene in a welter of newspaper headlines shouting SCANDAL and NESTFEATHERING. Stammas succeeded him, and for the next six years Shawshank was a kind of living hell. During the reign of Greg Stammas, the beds in 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 a fortyyearold man looking back at me. A kid had come in back in 1938, a kid with a big mop of carroty red hair, halfcrazy with remorse, thinking about suicide. That kid was gone. The red hair was going gray and starting to recede. There were crows tracks around the eyes. On that day I could see an old man inside, waiting his time to come out. It scared me. Nobody wants to grow old in stir. Stammas went early in 1959. There had been several investigative reporters sniffing around, and one of them even did four months under an assumed name, for a crime made up out of whole cloth. They were getting ready to drag out SCANDAL and NESTFEATHERING again, but before they could bring the hammer down on him, Stammas ran. I can understand that; boy, can I ever. If he had been tried and convicted, he could have ended up right in here. If so, he might have lasted all of five hours. Byron Hadley had 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 was appointed, and a new assistant warden, and a new chief of guards. For the next eight months or so, Andy was just another con again. It was during that period that Normaden, the big halfbreed Passamaquoddy, shared Andys cell with him. Then everything just started up again. Normaden was moved out, and Andy was living in solitary splendor again. The names at the top change, but the rackets never do. I talked to Normaden once about Andy. Nice fella, Normaden said. It was hard to make out anything he said because he had a harelip and a cleft palate; his words all came out in a slush. I liked it there. He never made fun. But he didnt want me there. I could tell. Big shrug. I was glad to go, me. Bad draft in that cell. All the time cold. He dont let nobody touch his things. Thats okay. Nice man, never made fun. But big draft. Rita Hayworth hung in Andys cell until 1955, if I remember right. Then it was Marilyn Monroe, that picture from The SevenYear Itch where shes standing over a subway grating and the warm air is flipping her skirt up. Marilyn lasted until 1960, and she was considerably 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 was replaced with an English actressmight have been Hazel Court, but Im not sure. In 1966 that one came down and Raquel Welch went up for a recordbreaking sixyear engagement in Andys cell. The last poster to hang there was a pretty countryrock singer whose name was Linda Ronstadt. I asked him once what the posters meant to him, and he gave me a peculiar, surprised sort of 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 quite but almost... step right through and be beside them. Be free. I guess thats why I always liked Raquel Welch the best. It wasnt just her; it was that beach she was standing on. Looked like she was down in Mexico somewhere. Someplace quiet, where a man would be able to hear himself think. Didnt you ever feel that way about a picture, Red? That you could almost step right through it? I said Id never really thought of it that way. Maybe someday youll see what I mean, he said, and he was right. Years later I saw exactly what he meant . . . and when I did, the first thing I thought of was Normaden, and about how hed said it was always cold in Andys cell. A terrible thing happened to Andy in late March or early April of 1963. I have told you that 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 and unwavering faith that someday the long nightmare would end. Whatever you want to call it, Andy Dufresne always seemed to have his act together. There was none of that sullen desperation about him that seems to afflict most lifers after awhile; 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 Mathers, 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 thirtyyear 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 SAVIOR. 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 Im 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 were telling me about some ugly, predatory species of bug that was, by its very ugliness and greed, somehow more comic than terrible. It was Warden Norton who instituted the InsideOut program 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 InsideOut 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 roadganging, but so far as I know, none of them were ever invited to express their views to the Kiwanians or the Loyal Order of Moose. Norton was right in there on every operation, thirtyyear churchpin and all; from cutting pulp to digging stormdrains to laying new culverts under state highways, there was Norton, skimming off the top. There were a hundred ways to do itmen, materials, you name it. But he had it coming another way, as well. The construction businesses in the area were deathly afraid of Nortons InsideOut program, because prison labor is slave labor, and you cant compete with that. So Sam Norton, he of the Testaments and the thirtyyear churchpin, was passed a good many thick envelopes under the table during his sixteenyear tenure as Shawshanks warden. And when an envelope was passed, he would either overbid the project, not bid at all, or claim that all his InsideOuters 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 favors is by checking their bank accounts. Andy Dufresne was his right hand in all of this, his silent partner. The prison library was Andys hostage to fortune. Norton knew it, and Norton used it. Andy told me that one of Nortons favorite aphorisms was One hand washes the other. So Andy gave good advice and made useful suggestions. I cant say for sure that he handtooled Nortons InsideOut program, but Im damned sure he processed the money for the Jesusshouting 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 Erle Stanley Gardners and more Louis LAmours. And Im convinced that what happened happened because Norton just didnt want to lose his good right hand. Ill go further it happened because he was scared of what might happenwhat Andy might say against himif 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 Andybut not all. He never wanted to talk about that part of his life, and I dont blame him. I got parts of it from maybe half a dozen different sources. Ive 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 Ill give it to you from point A to point Z, and maybe youll understand why the man spent about ten months in a bleak, depressed daze. See, I dont think he knew the truth until 1963, fifteen years after he came into this sweet little hellhole. Until he met Tommy Williams, I dont 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 wasnt proud; in his twentyseven years hed 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 that things might go better with Tommyand consequently better with their threeyearold son and herselfif 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 schoolthere werent manyand 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 wasnt the best student Andy ever took over the jumps, and I dont 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 awhile. On a couple of occasions he asked Andy what a smart guy like you is doing in the jointa question which is the rough equivalent of that one that goes Whats a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? But Andy wasnt 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 laundrys steam ironer and folder. The inmates call this device the mangler, because thats exactly what it will do to you if you arent paying attention and get your bad self caught in it. His 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 Tommys and Charlies 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 clean 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 a drift of sheets that had come through clean and which were now sopping up all the wet muck on the floorand in a laundry wetwash, theres 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, hadnt been there. What did you say that golf pros 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 roosters 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 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 Nortons famous grain and drain train. Plus a black mark on his report card. That was in early February of 1963, and Tommy Williams went around to six or seven other longtimers 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 buying 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 didnt 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 didnt 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 fit 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 tigers name was Hope. 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 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 highstrung guy, Tommy told me. A man like that should never want to be a burglar, specially not with a gun. The slightest little noise, hed 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 him, until they let me walk free. I got time served and time off, you understand. I cant say we talked because you didnt, 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, hed 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. Where he grew up, the orphanages he run away from, the jobs he done, the women he fucked, the crap games he cleaned out. I just let him run on. My face aint much, but I didnt want it, you know, rearranged for me. According to him, hed burgled over two hundred joints. It was hard for me to believe, a guy like him who went off like a firecracker every time someone cut a loud fart, but he swore it 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, Id have to count myself just about the luckiest motherfucker going still to be alive. Can you imagine him in some ladys bedroom, sifting through her joolry box, and she coughs in her sleep or turns over quick? It gives me the cold chills just to think of something like that, I swear on my mothers name it does. He said hed killed people, too. People that gave him shit. At least thats what he said. And I believed him. He sure looked like a man that could do some killing. He was just so fucking highstrung! Like a pistol with a sawedoff firing pin. I knew a guy who had a Smith and Wesson Police Special with a sawedoff firing pin. It wasnt no good for nothing, except maybe for something to jaw about. The pull on that gun was so light that it would fire if this guy, Johnny Callahan, his name was, if he turned his recordplayer on full volume and put it on top of one of the speakers. Thats how El Blatch was. I cant explain it any better. I just never doubted that he had greased some people. So one night, just for something to say, I go Whod you kill? Like a joke, you know. So he laughs and says Theres one guy doing time upMaine for these two people I killed. It was this guy and the wife of the slob whos doing the time. I was creeping their place and the guy started to give me some shit. I cant remember if he ever told me the womans name or not, Tommy went on. Maybe he did. But in New England, Dufresnes like Smith or Jones in the rest of the country, because theres so many Frogs up here. Dufresne, Lavesque, Ouelette, Poulin, who can remember Frog names? But he told me the guys name. He said the guy was Glenn Quentin and he was a prick, a big rich prick, a golf pro. El said he thought the guy might have cash in the house, maybe as much as five thousand dollars. That was a lot of money back then, he says to me. So I go When was that? And he goes After the war. Just after the war. So he went in and he did the joint and they woke up and the guy gave him some trouble. Thats what El said. Maybe the guy just started to snore, thats what I say. Anyway, El said Quentin was in the sack with some hotshot lawyers wife and they sent the lawyer up to Shawshank State Prison. Then he laughs this big laugh. Holy Christ, I was never so glad 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, and why he wanted to see the warden right away. Elwood Blatch had been serving a sixtotwelve rap 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 two prongs of the spit Andy was roasting onthe idea that Blatch might still be in on one hand, and the very real possibility that he might be gone like the wind on the other. There were inconsistencies in Tommys story, but arent there always in real life? Blatch told Tommy the man who got sent up was a hotshot lawyer, and Andy was a banker, but those are two professions that people who arent very educated could easily get mixed up. And dont forget that twelve years had gone by between the time Blatch was reading the clippings about the trial and the time he told the tale to Tommy Williams. He also told Tommy he got better than a thousand dollars from a footlocker Quentin had in his closet, but the police said at Andys trial that there had been no sign of burglary. I have a few ideas about that. First, if you take the cash and the man it belonged to is dead, how are you going to know anything was stolen, unless someone else can tell you it was there to start with? Second, whos to say Blatch wasnt lying about that part of it? Maybe he didnt want to admit killing two people for nothing. Third, maybe there were signs of burglary and the cops either overlooked themcops can be pretty dumbor deliberately covered them up so they wouldnt screw the DAs case. The guy was running for public office, remember, and he needed a conviction to run on. An unsolved burglarymurder would have done him no good at all. But of the three, I like the middle one best. Ive known a few Elwood Blatches in my time at Shawshankthe triggerpullers with the crazy eyes. Such fellows want you to think they got away with the equivalent of the Hope Diamond on every caper, even if they got caught with a twodollar Timex and nine bucks on the one theyre doing time for. And there was one thing in Tommys story that convinced Andy beyond a shadow of a doubt. Blatch hadnt hit Quentin at random. He had called Quentin a big rich prick, and he had known Quentin was a golf pro. Well, Andy and his wife had been going out to that country club for drinks and dinner once or twice a week for a couple of years, and Andy had done a considerable amount of drinking there once he found out about his wifes affair. There was a marina with the country club, and for awhile in 1947 there had been a parttime greaseandgas jockey working there who matched Tommys description of Elwood Blatch. A big tall man, mostly bald, with deepset green eyes. A man who had an unpleasant way of looking at you, as though he was sizing you up. He wasnt there long, Andy said. Either he quit or Briggs, the fellow in charge of the marina, fired him. But he wasnt a man you forgot. He was too striking for that. So Andy went to see Warden Norton on a rainy, windy day with big gray clouds scudding across the sky above the gray walls, a day when the last of the snow was starting to melt away and show lifeless patches of last years grass in the fields beyond the prison. The warden has a goodsized office in the Administration Wing, and behind the wardens desk theres a door which connects with the assistant wardens office. The assistant warden was out that day, but a trusty was there. He was a halflame fellow whose real name I have forgotten; all the inmates, me included, called him Chester, after Marshal Dillons sidekick. Chester was supposed to be watering the plants and waxing the floor. My guess is that the plants went thirsty that day and the only waxing that was done happened because of Chesters dirty ear polishing the keyhole plate of that connecting door. He heard the wardens 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 Andys voice it was so changed. Warden... theres something... somethings happened to me thats ... thats so ... so ... I hardly know where to begin. Well, why dont you just begin at the beginning? the warden said, probably in his sweetest letsallturntotheTwentythirdPsalmandreadinunison voice. That usually works the best. And so Andy did. He began by refreshing Norton on the details of the crime he had been imprisoned for. Then he told the warden exactly what Tommy Williams had told him. He also gave out Tommys name, which you may think wasnt so wise in light of later developments, but Id just ask you what else he could have done, if his story was to have any 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 on the wall, his fingers steepled, his liver lips pursed, his brow wrinkled into ladder rungs halfway to the crown of his head, his thirtyyear pin gleaming mellowly. Yes, he said finally. Thats the damnedest story I ever heard. But Ill tell you what surprises me most about it, Dufresne. Whats that, sir? That you were taken in by it. Sir? I dont understand what you mean. And Chester said that Andy Dufresne, who had faced down Byron Hadley on the plateshop roof thirteen years before, was almost floundering for words. Wellnow, Norton said. Its pretty obvious to me that this young fellow Williams is impressed with you. Quite taken with you, as a matter of fact. He hears your tale of woe, and its quite natural of him to want to ... cheer you up, lets say. Quite natural. Hes a young man, not terribly bright. Not surprising he didnt realize what a state it would put you into. Now what I suggest is Dont you think I thought of that? Andy asked. But Id never told Tommy about the man working down at the marina. I never told anyone thatit never even crossed my mind! But Tommys description of his cellmate and that man ... theyre identical! Wellnow, you may be indulging in a little selective perception there, Norton said with a chuckle. Phrases like that, selective perception, are required learning for people in the penology and corrections business, and they use them all they can. Thats not it all. Sir. Thats your slant on it, Norton said, but mine differs. And lets remember that I have only your word that there was such a man working at the Falmouth Hills Country Club back then. No, sir, Andy broke in again. No, that isnt true. Because Anyway, Norton overrode him, expansive and loud, lets just look at it from the other end of the telescope, shall we? Supposejust suppose, nowthat there really was a fellow named Elwood Blotch. Blatch, Andy said tightly. Blatch, by all means. And lets say he was Thomas Williamss cellmate in Rhode Island. The chances are excellent that he has been released by now. Excellent. Why, we dont even know how much time he might have done there before he ended up with Williams, do we? Only that he was doing a sixtotwelve. No. We dont know how much time hed done. But Tommy said he was a bad actor, a cutup. I think theres a fair chance that he may still be in. Even if hes been released, the prison 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, its a chance, isnt it? Yes, of course it is. So just for a moment, Dufresne, lets assume that Blatch exists and that he is still ensconced in the Rhode Island State Penitentiary. Now what is he going to say if we bring this kettle of fish to him in a bucket? Is he going to fall down on his knees, roll his eyes, and say I did it! I did it! By all means add a life term onto my charge!? How can you be so obtuse? Andy said, so low that Chester could barely hear. But he heard the warden just fine. What? What did you call me? Obtuse! Andy cried. Is it deliberate? Dufresne, youve taken five minutes of my timeno, sevenand I have a very busy schedule today. So I believe well just declare this little meeting closed and The country club will have all the old timecards, dont you realize that? Andy shouted. Theyll have taxforms and Wtwos and unemployment compensation forms, all with his name on them! There will be employees there now that were there then, maybe Briggs himself! Its been fifteen years, not forever! Theyll remember him! They will remember Blatch! If Ive got Tommy to testify to what Blatch told him, and Briggs to testify that Blatch was there, actually working at the country club, I can get a new trial! I can Guard! Guard! Take this man away! Whats the matter with you? Andy said, and Chester told me he was very nearly screaming by then. Its my life, my chance to get out, dont you see that? And you wont make a single longdistance call to at least verify Tommys story? Listen, Ill pay for the call! Ill pay for Then there was a sound of thrashing as the guards grabbed him and started to drag him out. Solitary, Warden Norton said dryly. He was probably fingering his thirtyyear pin as he said it. Bread and water. And so they dragged Andy away, totally out of control now, still screaming at the warden; Chester said you could hear him even after the door was shut Its my life! Its my life, dont you understand its my life? Twenty days on the grain and drain train for Andy down there in solitary. It was his second jolt in solitary, and his dustup with Norton was his first real black mark since he had joined our happy family. Ill tell you a little bit about Shawshanks solitary while were on the subject. Its something of a throwback to those hardy pioneer days of the early to mid1700s in Maine. In those days no one wasted much time with such things as penology and rehabilitation and selective perception.