them, they were so pretty. There’s a crying shortage of pretty things in the slam, and the real pity of it is that a lot of men don’t even seem to miss them.
There were two pieces of quartz in that box, both of them carefully polished.
They had been chipped into driftwood shapes. There were little sparkles of iron
pyrites in them like flecks of gold. If they hadn’t been so heavy, they would have
served as a fine pair of men’s cufflinks–they were that close to being a matched set
How much work went into creating those two pieces? Hours and hours after lights out,
I knew that first the chipping and shaping, and then the almost endless polishing and
finishing with those rock-blankets. Looking at them, I felt the warmth that any man or woman feels when he or she is looking at something pretty, something that has been
worked and made–that’s the thing that really separates us from the animals, I think–
and I felt something else, too. A sense of awe for the man’s brute persistence. But I
never knew just how persistent Andy Dufresne could be until much later.
In May of 1950, the powers that be decided that the roof of the licence-plate
factory ought to be resurfaced with roofing tar. They wanted it done before it got too hot up there, and they sued for volunteers for the work, which was planned to take
about a week.
More than seventy men spoke up, because it was outside work and May is one
damn fine month for outside work. Nine or ten names were drawn out of a hat, and
two of them happened to be Andy’s and my own.
For the next week we’d be marched out to the exercise yard after breakfast,
with two guards up front and two more behind… plus all the guards in the towers
keeping a weather eye on the proceedings through their field-glasses for good
measure.
Four of us would be carrying a big extension ladder on those morning marches
-I always got a kick out of the way Dickie Betts, who was on that job, called that sort of ladder an extensible–and we’d put it up against the side of that low, lit building.
Then we’d start bucket-brigading hot buckets of tar up to the roof. Spill that shit on you and you’d jitterbug all the way to the infirmary.
There were six guards on the project, all of them picked on the basis of seniority. It was almost as good as a week’s vacation, because instead of sweating it
out in the laundry or the plate-shop or standing over a bunch of cons cutting pulp or
brush somewhere out in the willy wags, they were having a regular May holiday in
the sun, just sitting there with their backs up against the low parapet, shooting the bull back and forth.
They didn’t even have to keep more than half an eye on us, because the south
wall sentry post was close enough so that the fellows up there could have spit their
chews on us, if they’d wanted to. If anyone on the roof-sealing party had made one
funny move, it would take four seconds to cut him smack in two with .45 calibre
machine-gun bullets. So those screws just sat there and took their ease. All they
needed was a couple of six-packs buried in crushed ice, and they would have been the
lords of all creation. One of them was a fellow named Byron Hadley, and in that year
of 1950, he’d 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 prissy-
looking downcast Yankee named George Dunahy. He had a degree in penal
administration. No one liked him, as far as I could tell, except the people who had
gotten him his appointment. I heard that he wasn’t interested in anything but
compiling statistics for a book (which was later published by a small New England
outfit called Light Side Press, where he probably had to pay to have it done), who