won the intramural baseball championship each September, and getting a death-
penalty law passed in Maine. A regular bear for the death-penalty was George
Dunahy. He was fired off the job in 1953, when it came out he was running a discount
auto repair service down in the prison garage and splitting the profits with Byron
Hadley and Greg Stammas. Hadley and Stammas came out of that one okay–they
were old hands at keeping their asses covered–but Dunahy took a walk. No one was
sorry to see him go, but nobody was exactly pleased to see Greg Stammas step into
his shoes, either. He was a short man with a tight, hard gut and the coldest brown eyes you ever saw. He always had a painful, pursed little grin on his face, as if he had to go to the bathroom and couldn’t quite manage it. During Stammas’s tenure as warden
there was a lot of brutality at Shawshank, and although I have no proof, I believe there were maybe half a dozen moonlight burials in the stand of scrub forest that lies east of the prison. Dunahy was bad, but Greg Stammas was a cruel, wretched, cold-hearted
man. He and Byron Hadley were good friends. As warden, George Dunahy was
nothing but a posturing figurehead; it was Stammas, and through him, Hadley, who
actually administered the prison.
Hadley was a tall, shambling man with thinning red hair. He sunburned easily
and he talked loud and if you didn’t move fast enough to suit him, he’d clout you with his stick. On that day, our third on the roof, he was talking to another guard named
Mert Entwhistle.
Hadley had gotten some amazingly good news, so he was griping about it.
That was his style–he was a thankless man with not a good word for anyone, a man
who was convinced that the whole world was against him. The world had cheated him
out of the best years of his life, and the world would be more than happy to cheat him out of the rest. I have seen some screws that I thought were almost saintly, and I think I know why that happens–they are able to see the difference between their own lives,
poor and struggling as they might be, and the lives of the men they are paid by the
state to watch over. These guards are able to formulate a comparison concerning pain.
Others can’t, or won’t.
For Byron Hadley there was no basis of comparison. He could sit there, cool and at his ease under the warm May sun and find the gall to mourn his own good luck
while less than ten feet away a bunch of men were working and sweating and burning
their hands on great big buckets filled with bubbling tar, men who had to work so
hard in their ordinary round of days that this looked like a respite. You may remember the old question, the one that’s supposed to define your outlook on life when you
answer it. For Byron Hadley the answer would always be half empty, the glass is half
empty. Forever and ever, amen. If you gave him a cool drink of apple cider, he’d think about vinegar. If you told him his wife had always been faithful to him, he’d tell you it was because she was so damn ugly. So there he sat, talking to Mert Entwhistle loud
enough for all of us to hear, his broad white forehead already starting to redden with the sun. He had one hand thrown back over the low parapet surrounding the roof. The
other was on the butt of his .38. We all got the story along with Mert. It seemed that Hadley’s older brother had gone off to Texas some fourteen years ago and the rest of
the family hadn’t heard from the son of a bitch since. They had all assumed he was
dead, and good riddance. Then, a week and a half ago, a lawyer had called them long-
distance from Austin. It seemed that Hadley’s brother had died four months ago, and a
rich man at that (‘It’s frigging incredible how lucky some assholes can get,’ this