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By World Series time of 1950 - this was the year Bobby Thompson hit his famous home
run at the end of the season, you will remember - Andy 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 didn‘t fight it As I have pointed out, there was always an
eighteen-year-old car thief or a firebug or some guy who‘d gotten his kicks handling little
children. After the day on the plate-shop 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 20s because he had a college education. Brooksie‘s
degree was in animal husbandry, true enough, but college educations in institutes of
lower learning like The Shank are so rare that it‘s 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 sixty-eight and arthritic when he tottered out of the main gate in his
Polish suit and his French shoes, his parole papers in one ‘and and a Greyhound bus ticket
in the other. He was crying "hen he left. Shawshank was his world. What lay beyond its
vails was as terrible to Brooks as the Western Seas had been to superstitious 13th-century
sailors. In prison, Brooksie had been a person of some importance. He was the head
librarian, in educated man. If he went to the Kittery library and asked or a job, they
wouldn‘t give him a library card. I heard he lied in a home for indigent old folks up
Freeport way in 1952, 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 Brooksie‘s job, and he was head librarian for twenty-three years. He
used the same force of will I‘d 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 Reader‘s Digest Condensed Books and National Geographies 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 humour as More Fuk-Boox Pleeze and Escape in 10 EZ Lesions. He got
sold of the things the prisoners seemed serious about. He wrote to three major book clubs
in New York and got two of them, The Literary Guild and The Book of the Month Club,
to send editions of all their major selections to us at a special cheap rate. He discovered a
hunger for information on such snail hobbies as soap-carving, woodworking, sleight of
hand, and card solitaire. He got all the books he could on such subjects. And those two
jailhouse staples, Erie Stanley Gardener and Louis L‘Amour. 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. Staminas 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 he‘d even throw a paternal arm around
Andy‘s shoulders or give him a goose. He didn‘t fool anybody. Andy Dufresne was no
one‘s mascot.
He told Andy that maybe he‘d 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 jumped-up 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 Thomastan 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, wasn‘t 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 believe you‘d do it with that same little grin on your face. You go on and
write your letters. I‘ll even mail them for you if you pay for the stamps.‘
Which Andy did. And he had the last laugh, although Stammas and Hadley weren‘t
around to see it Andy‘s requests for library funds were routinely turned down until 1960,
when he received a check for two hundred dollars - the 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 small-town 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 paint-locker to three rooms), and find just about anything you‘d want. And if you
couldn‘t find it, chances were good that Andy could get it for you.
Now you‘re 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
10 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; :
ne of them did so well he was able to take an early retirement two years later), and I‘ll be
damned if he didn‘t advise the warden himself, old Lemon Lips George Dunahy, on how
to go about setting up a tax-shelter for himself. That was just before Dunahy got the
bum‘s rush, and I believe he - ust have been dreaming about ail 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 prison‘s most valuable coin: simple goodwill.
Later on, after Greg Stammas took over the warden‘s office, Andy became even more
important - but if I tried to tell you the specifics of just how, I‘d 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 considerations - radios in their cells,
extraordinary visiting privileges, things like that - and 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 plate-shop
on Saturday forenoons, and you‘d know that fellow had an angel out there who‘d coughed
up a chuck of dough to make sure it happened. The way it usually works is that the angel
will pay the bribe to some middle-level screw, and the screw will spread the grease both
up and down the administrative ladder.
Then there was the discount auto repair service that laid Warden Dunahy low, It went
underground for a while 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, I‘m pretty sure, and the same was almost certainly true of
the companies whose equipment was bought and installed in the laundry and the licenceplate
shop and the stamping-mill 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 good-sized
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 a while. You can‘t just stuff it into your wallet and then shell out a bunch
of crumpled twenties and dog-eared 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 aren‘t convincing enough, you‘re
apt to wind up wearing a number yourself.
So there was a need for Andy‘s services. They took him out of the laundry and installed
him in the library, but if you wanted to look at it another way, 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, tax-free municipals, you name it.
He told me once about ten years after that day on the plate-shop 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 & missionary or a do-gooder.
‘Besides, Red,‘ he told me with that same half-grin, ‘what I‘m doing in here isn‘t all that
different from what I was doing outside. I‘ll 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 don‘t want to tell you your business, but they make me nervous.
Reds, uppers, downers, nembutals - now they‘ve got these things they call Phase Fours. I
won‘t get anything like that. Never have.‘
‘No,‘ Andy said. ‘I don‘t like the pills either. Never have. But I‘m not much of a one for
cigarettes or booze, either. But I don‘t push the pills. I don‘t bring them in, and I don‘t sell
them once they are in. Mostly it‘s the screws who do that.‘
‘But-‘
‘Yeah, I know. There‘s a fine line there. What it comes down to, Red, is some people
refuse to get their hands dirty at all. That‘s 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 dollar - guns, switchblades, big H, what the
hell. You ever have a con come up to you and offer you a contract?‘
I nodded. It‘s happened a lot of times over the years. You‘re, after all, the man who can
get it. And they figure if you can get them a nine-bolt battery for their transistor radio or a
-anon of Luckies or a lid of reefer, you can put them in touch with a guy who‘ll use a
knife.
‘Sure you have,‘ Andy agreed. ‘But you don‘t do it. Because guys like us, Red, we know
there‘s a third choice. An alternative to staying simon-pure or bathing in the filth and the
slime. It‘s the alternative that grown-ups all over the world pick. You balance off your
walk through the hog-wallow 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 you‘re 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.‘
‘Don‘t you believe it,‘ he said, growing sombre. This is hell right here. Right here in The
Shank. They sell pills and I tell them what to do with the money. But I‘ve also got the
library, and I know of over two dozen guys who have used the books in here to help them
pass their high school equivalency tests. Maybe when they get out of here they‘ll be able
to crawl off the shitheap. When we needed that second room back in 1957,1 got it
Because they want to keep me happy. I work cheap. That‘s the trade-off.‘
‘And you‘ve got your own private quarters.‘
‘Sure. That‘s 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 college-age kid 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 didn‘t 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 he‘d said, they liked to keep him happy. He worked cheap.
Prison time is slow time, sometimes you‘d swear it‘s stop-time, but it passes. It passes.
George Dunahy departed the scene in a welter of newspaper headlines shouting
SCANDAL and NEST-FEATHERING. 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
forty-year-old man looking back at me. A kid had come in back in 1938, a kid with a big
mop of carrotty red hair, half-crazy with remorse, thinking about suicide. That kid was
gone. The red hair was half grey and starting to recede. There were crow‘s 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 half-breed Passamaquoddy, shared Andy‘s cell with him. Then everything just
started up again. Normaden was moved out, and Andy was living in solitary splendour
again. The names at the top change, but die 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 & harelip and a cleft palate; his words all came out
in a slush. ‘I liked it there. He never made fun. But he didn‘t want me there. I could tell.‘
Big shrug. ‘I was glad to go, me. Bad draught in that cell. All the time cold. He don‘t let
nobody touch his things. That‘s okay. Nice man, never made fun. But big draught.‘
Rita Hay worth hung in Andy‘s cell until 1955, if I remember right Then it was Marilyn
Monroe, that picture from The Seven Year Itch where she‘s standing over a subway
grating and the warm air is flipping her skirt up. Marilyn lasted until i960, 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 actress - might have been Hazel Court, but I‘m not sure. In 1966
that one came down and Raquel Welch went up for a record-breaking six-year
engagement in Andy‘s ceil. The last poster to hang there was a pretty country-rock 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 that‘s why I always
liked Raquel Welch the best It wasn‘t 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. Didn‘t you ever feel that way about a picture, Red? That
you could almost step right through it?‘
I said I‘d never really thought of it that way.
‘Maybe someday you‘ll 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 he‘d said it was always cold in Andy‘s 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
a while; 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 Mather brothers,
Cotton and Increase, would have felt right at home with Sam Norton. So far as I know, no
one had ever seen him so much as crack a smile. He had a thirty-year pin from the Baptist
Advent Church of Eliot. His major innovation as the head of our happy family was to
make sure that each incoming prisoner had a New Testament. He had a small plaque on
his desk, gold letters inlaid in teakwood, which said CHRIST IS MY SAVIOUR. A
sampler on the wall, made by his wife, read: HIS JUDGMENT COMETH AND THAT
RIGHT EARLY. This latter sentiment cut zero ice with most of us. We felt that the
judgment had already occurred, and we would be willing to testify with the best of them
that the rock would not hide us nor the dead tree give us shelter. He had a Bible quote for
every occasion, did Mr Sam Norton, and whenever you meet a man like that, my best
advice to you would be to grin big and cover up your balls with both hands.
There were less infirmary cases than in the days of Greg Stammas, and so far as I know
the moonlight burials ceased altogether, but this is not to say that Norton was not a
believer in punishment. Solitary was always well populated. Men lost their teeth not from
beatings but from bread and water diets. It began to be called grain and drain, as in Tm on
the Sam Norton grain and drain train, boys.‘
The man was the foulest hypocrite that I ever saw in a high position. The rackets I told
you about earlier continued to flourish, but Sam Norton added his own new wrinkles.
Andy knew about them all, and because we had gotten to be pretty good friends by that
time, he let me in on some of them. When Andy talked about them, an expression of
amused, disgusted wonder would come over his face, as if he was telling me about some
ugly, predatory species of bug that has, by its very ugliness and greed, somehow more
comic than terrible.
It was Warden Norton who instituted the ‘Inside-Out‘ programme you may have read
about some sixteen or seventeen years back; it was even written up in Newsweek. In the
press it sounded like a real advance in practical corrections and rehabilitation. There were
prisoners out cutting pulpwood, prisoners repairing bridges and causeways, prisoners
constructing potato cellars. Norton called it ‘Inside-Out‘ and was invited to explain it to
damn near every Rotary and Kiwanis club in New England, especially after he got his
picture in Newsweek. The prisoners called it ‘road-ganging‘, but so far as I know, none of
them were ever invited to express their views to the Kiwanians or the Loyal Order of the
Moose.
Norton was right in there on every operation, thirty-year church-pin and all, from cutting
pulp to digging storm-drains to laying new culverts on state highways, there was Norton,
skimming off the top. There were a hundred ways to do it -men, materials, you name it.
But he had it coming another way, as well. The construction businesses in the area were
deathly afraid of Norton‘s Inside-Out programme, because prison labour is slave labour,
and you can‘t compete with that. So Sam Norton, he of the Testaments and the thirty-year
church-pin, was passed a good many thick envelopes under the table during his fifteenyear
tenure as Shawshank‘s warden. And when an envelope was passed, he would either
overbid the project, not bid at all, or claim that ail his Inside-Outers were committed
elsewhere. It has always been something of a wonder to me that Norton was never found
in the trunk of a Thunderbird parked off a highway somewhere down in Massachusetts
with his hands tied behind his back and half a dozen bullets in his head.
Anyway, as the old barrelhouse song says, My God, how the money rolled in. Norton
must have subscribed to the old Puritan notion that the best way to figure out which folks
God favours is by checking their bank accounts.
Andy Dufresne was his right hand in all of this, his silent partner. The prison library was
Andy‘s hostage to fortune. Norton knew it, and Norton used it. Andy told me that one of
Norton‘s favourite aphorisms was One hand washes the other. So Andy gave good advice
and made useful suggestions. I can‘t say for sure that he hand-tooled Norton‘s Inside-Out
programme, but I‘m damned sure he processed the money for the Jesus-shouting son of a
whore. He gave good advice, made useful suggestions, the money got spread around, and
... son of a bitch! The library would get a new set of automotive repair manuals, a fresh
set of Grolier Encyclopedias, books on how to prepare for the Scholastic Achievement
Tests. And, of course, more Erie Stanley Gardeners and more Louis L‘Amours.
And I‘m convinced that what happened happened because Norton just didn‘t want to lose
his good right hand. I‘ll go further: it happened because he was scared of what might
happen - what Andy might say against him - if Andy ever got clear of Shawshank State
Prison.
I got the story a chunk here and a chunk there over a space of seven years, some of it
from Andy - but not all. He never wanted to talk about that part of his life, and I don‘t
blame him. I got parts of it from maybe half a dozen different sources. I‘ve said once that
prisoners are nothing but slaves, but they have that slave habit of looking dumb and
keeping their ears open. I got it backwards and forwards and in the middle, but I‘ll give it
to you from point A to point Z, and maybe you‘ll understand why the man spent about ten
months in a bleak, depressed daze. See, I don‘t think he knew the truth until 1963, fifteen
years after he came into this sweet little hell-hole. Until he met Tommy Williams, I don‘t
think he knew how bad it could get.
Tommy Williams joined our happy little Shawshank family in November of 1962.
Tommy thought of himself as a native of Massachusetts, but he wasn‘t proud; in his
twenty-seven years he‘d done time all over New England. He was a professional thief,
and as you may have guessed, my own feeling was that he should have picked another
profession.
He was a married man, and his wife came to visit each and every week. She had an idea
that things might go better with Tommy - and consequently better with their three-yearold
mi and herself - if he got his high school degree. She talked him into it, and so
Tommy Williams started visiting the library on a regular basis.
For Andy, this was an old routine by then. He saw that Tommy got a series of high school
equivalency tests. Tommy would brush up on the subjects he had passed in high-school -
there weren‘t many - and then take the test Andy also saw that he was enrolled in a
number of correspondence courses covering the subjects he had failed in school or just
missed by dropping out
He probably wasn‘t the best student Andy ever took over the jumps, and I don‘t know if
he ever did get his high school diploma, but that forms no part of my story. The important
thing was that he came to like Andy Dufresne very much, as most people did after a
while.
On a couple of occasions he asked Andy ‘what a smart guy like you is doing in the joint‘ -
a question which is the rough equivalent of that one that goes ‘What‘s a nice girl like you
doing in a place like this?‘ But Andy wasn‘t the type to tell him; he would only smile and
turn the conversation into some other channel. Quite normally, Tommy asked someone
else, and when he finally got the story, I guess he also got the shock of his young life.
The person he asked was his partner on the laundry‘s steam ironer and folder. The
inmates call this device the mangier, because that‘s exactly what it will do to you if you
aren‘t paying attention and get your bad self caught in it. His j partner was Charlie
Lathrop, who had been in for about twelve years on a murder charge. He was more than
glad to reheat the details of the Dufresne murder trial for Tommy; it broke the monotony
of pulling freshly pressed bedsheets out of the machine and tucking them into the basket.
He was just getting to the jury waiting until after lunch to bring in their guilty verdict
when the trouble whistle went off and the mangle grated to a stop. They had been feeding
in freshly washed sheets from the Eliot Nursing Home at the far end; these were spat out
dry and neatly pressed at Tommy‘s and Charlie‘s end at the rate of one every five seconds.
Their job was to grab them, fold them, and slap them into the cart, which had already
been lined with brown paper.
But Tommy Williams was just standing there, staring at Charlie Lathrop, his mouth
unhinged all the way to his chest. He was standing in & drift of sheets that had come
through dean and which were now sopping up all the wet muck on the floor - and in a
laundry wetwash, there‘s plenty of muck.
So the head bull that day, Homer Jessup, comes rushing over, bellowing his head off and
on the prod for trouble. Tommy took no notice of him. He spoke to Charlie as if old
Homer, who had busted more heads than he could probably count, hadn‘t been there.
‘What did you say that golf pro‘s name was?‘
‘Quentin,‘ Charlie answered back, all confused and upset by now. He later said that the
kid was as white as a truce flag, *Glenn Quentin, I think. Something like that, anyway -‘
‘Here now, here now,‘ Homer Jessup roared, his neck as red as a rooster‘s comb. ‘Get
them sheets in cold water! Get quick! Get quick, by Jesus, you -‘
‘Glenn Quentin, oh my God,‘ Tommy Williams said, and that was all he got to say
because Homer Jessup, that least peaceable of men, brought his billy down behind his
ear. Tommy hit the floor so hard he broke off three of his front teeth. When he woke up
he was in solitary, and confined to same for a week, riding a boxcar on Sam Norton‘s
famous grain and drain train. Plus a black mark on his report card.
That was in early February in 1963, and Tommy Williams went around to six or seven
other long-timers after he got out of solitary and got pretty much the same story. I know;
I was one of them. But when I asked him why he wanted it, he just clammed up.
Then one day he went to the library and spilled one helluva big budget of information to
Andy Dufresne. And for the first and last time, at least since he had approached me about
the Rita Hayworth poster like a kid burying his first pack of Trojans, Andy lost his cool
... only this time he blew it entirely.
I saw him later that day, and he looked like a man who has stepped on the business end of
a rake and given himself a good one, whap between the eyes. His hands were trembling,
and when I spoke to him, he didn‘t answer. Before that afternoon was out he had caught
up with Billy Hanlon, who was the head screw, and set up an appointment with Warden
Norton for the following day. He told me later that he didn‘t sleep a wink all that night; he
just listened to a cold winter wind howling outside, watched the searchlights go around
and around, putting long, moving shadows on the cement walls of the cage he had called
home since Harry Truman was President and tried to think it all out He said it was as if
Tommy had produced a key which fitted a cage in the back of his mind, a cage like his
own cell. Only instead of holding a man, that cage held a tiger, and that tiger‘s name was
Hope. Williams had produced the key that unlocked the cage and the tiger was out, 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 high-strung guy,‘ Tommy said. ‘A man like that should never want to
be a burglar, specially not with a gun. The slightest little noise, he‘d go three feet into the
air ... and come down shooting, more likely than not One night he almost strangled me
because some guy down the hall was whopping on his cell bars with a tin cup.
‘I did seven months with bun, until they let me walk free. I got time served and time off,
you understand. I can‘t say we talked because you didn‘t, you know, exactly hold a
conversation with El Blatch. He held a conversation with you. He talked all the time.
Never shut up. If you tried to get a word in, he‘d shake his fist at you and roll his eyes. It
gave me the cold chills whenever he done that. Big tall guy he was, mostly bald, with
these green eyes set way down deep in the sockets. Jeez, I hope I never see him again.
‘It was like a talkin‘ jag every night When he grew up, the orphanages he run away from,
the jobs he done, the women as fucked, the crap games he cleaned out I just let him run
an. My face ain‘t much, but I didn‘t want it, you know, rearranged for me.
‘According to him, he‘d burgled over two hundred joints. It was hard for me to believe, a
guy like him who went off like a firecracker every time someone cut a loud fart, but he
swore c was true. Now ... listen to me, Red. I know guys sometimes make things up after
they know a thing, but even before I knew about this golf pro guy, Quentin, I remember
thinking that if El Blatch ever burgled my house, and I found out about it later, I‘d have to
count myself just about the luckiest motherfucker going still to be alive. Can you imagine
him in some lady‘s bedroom, sifting through her jool‘ry box, and she coughs in her sleep
or turns over quick? It gives me the cold chills just to think of something like that, I
swear on my mother‘s name it does.
‘He said he‘d killed people, too. People that gave him shit. At least that‘s what he said.
And I believed him. He sure looked like a man that could do some killing. He was just so
fucking high-strung! Like a pistol with a sawed-off firing pin. I knew a guy who had a
Smith & Wesson Police Special with a sawed-off firing pin. It wasn‘t 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 record-player on
full volume and put it on top of one of the speakers. That‘s how El Blatch was. I can‘t
explain it any better. I just never doubted that he had greased some people.
‘So one night, just for something to say, I go: "Who‘d you kill?" Like a joke, you know.
So he laughs and says, "There‘s one guy doing time up Maine for these two people I
killed. It was this guy and the wife of the slob who‘s doing time. I was creeping their
place and the guy started to give me some shit."
‘I can‘t remember if he ever told me the woman‘s name or not,‘ Tommy went on. ‘Maybe
he did. But hi New England, Dufresne‘s like Smith or Jones in the rest of the country,
because there‘s so many Frogs up here. Dufresne, Lavesque, Ouelette, Poulin, who Can
remember Frog names? But he told me the guy‘s 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.
That‘s what El said. Maybe the guy just started to snore, that‘s what / say. Anyway, El
said Quentin was in the sack with some hotshot lawyer‘s 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 six-totwelve
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 on - the 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 Tommy‘s story, but aren‘t 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 aren‘t very educated could easily get mixed up.
And don‘t 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 Andy‘s 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, who‘s to say Blatch wasn‘t lying about that part of it? Maybe he didn‘t
want to admit killing two people for nothing. Third, maybe there were signs of burglary
and the cops either overlooked them - cops can be pretty dumb - or deliberately covered
them up so they wouldn‘t screw the DA‘s case. The guy was running for public office,
remember, and he needed a conviction to run on. An unsolved burglary-murder would
have done him no good at all.
But of the three, I like the middle one best. I‘ve known a few Elwood Blatches hi my time
at Shawshank - the trigger-pullers with the crazy eyes. Such fellows want you to think
they got away with die equivalent of the Hope Diamond on every caper, even if they got
caught with a two-dollar Timex and nine bucks on the one they‘re doing time for.
And there was one thing in Tommy‘s story that convinced Andy beyond a shadow of a
doubt. Blatch hadn‘t 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 wife‘s
affair. There was a marina with the country club, and for a while in 1947 there had been a
part-time grease-and-gas jockey working there who matched Tommy‘s description of
Elwood Blatch. A big tall man, mostly bald, with deep-set green eyes. A man who had an
unpleasant way of looking at you, as though he was sizing you up. He wasn‘t there long,
Andy said. Either he quit or Briggs, the fellow in charge of the marina, fired him. But he
wasn‘t a man you forgot He was too striking for that.
So Andy went to see Warden Norton on a rainy, windy day with big grey clouds
scudding across the sky above the grey walls, a day when the last of the snow was
starting to melt away and show lifeless patches of last year‘s grass in the fields beyond
the prison. The warden has a good-sized office in the administration wing, and behind the
warden‘s desk there‘s a door which connects with the assistant warden‘s office. The
assistant warden was out that day, but a trustee was there. He was a half-lame fellow
whose real name I have forgotten; all the inmates, me included, called him Chester, after
Marshall Dillon‘s sidekick. Chester was supposed to be watering the plants and dusting
and waxing the floor. My guess is that the plants went thirsty that day and the only
waxing that was done happened because of Chester‘s dirty ear polishing the keyhole plate
of that connecting door.
He heard the warden‘s 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 Andy‘s
voice it was so changed. ‘Warden ... there‘s something ... something‘s happened to me
that‘s ... that‘s so ... so ... I hardly know where to begin.‘
‘Well, why don‘t you just begin at the beginning?‘ the warden said, probably in his
sweetest let‘s-all-turn-to-the-23rd-psalm-and-read-in-unison voice. ‘That usually works
the best.‘
And so Andy did. He began by refreshing Norton of 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 Tommy‘s name, which you may think wasn‘t so wise in light of later
developments, but I‘d 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 thirty-year pin gleaming mellowly.
‘Yes,‘ he said finally. That‘s the damnedest story I ever heard. But I‘ll tell you what
surprises me most about it, Dufresne.‘
‘What‘s that, sir?‘
‘That you were taken in by it.‘
‘Sir? I don‘t understand what you mean.‘ And Chester said that Andy Dufresne, who had
faced down Byron Hadley on the plate-shop roof thirteen years before, was almost
floundering for words.
‘Well now,‘ Norton said. ‘It‘s 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 it‘s quite natural of him to want to ... cheer you up, let‘s say. Quite natural. He‘s a
young man, not terribly bright Not surprising he didn‘t realize what a state it would put
you into. Now what I suggest is -‘
‘Don‘t you think I thought of that?‘ Andy asked. ‘But I‘d never told Tommy about the man
working down at the marina. I never told anyone that - it never even crossed my mind!
But Tommy‘s description of his cellmate and that man ... they‘re identical!‘
‘Well now, 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
penalogy and corrections business, and they use them all they can.
"That‘s not it at all. Sir.‘
"That‘s your slant on it,‘ Norton said, ‘but mine differs. And let‘s remember that I have
only your word that there was such a man working at the Falmouth Country Club back
then.‘
‘No, sir,‘ Andy broke in again. ‘No, that isn‘t true. Because-‘
‘Anyway,‘ Norton overrode him, expansive and loud, ‘let‘s just look at it from the other
end of the telescope, shall we? Suppose -just suppose, now - that there really was a fellow
named Elwood Blotch.‘
‘Blatch,‘ Andy said tightly.
‘Blatch, by all means. And let‘s say he was Thomas Williams‘s cellmate in Rhode Island.
The chances are excellent that he has been released by now. Excellent. Why, we don‘t
even know how much time he might have done there before he ended up with Williams,
do we? Only that he was doing a six-to-twelve.‘
‘No. We don‘t know how much time he‘d done. But Tommy said he was a bad actor, a
cut-up. I think there‘s a fair chance that he may still be in. Even if he‘s 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, it‘s a chance, isn‘t it?‘
‘Yes, of course it is. So just for a moment, Dufresne, let‘s assume that Blatch exists and
that he is still safely 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, roil his eyes, and say "I did it! I did it! By all means add a life term onto my
burglary charge!"?‘

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