chasing your head around Shower C before the week’s 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 did–more than any of us did.
That’s how, on the second-to-last day of the job, the convict crew that tarred
the plate-factory roof in 1950 ending up sitting in a row at ten o’clock on a spring
morning, drinking Black Label beer supplied by the hardest screw that ever walked a
turn at Shawshank Prison. That beer was piss-warm, 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 half amusement, half-contempt on Hadley’s face–as if he was watching
apes drink beer instead of men -could spoil it. It lasted twenty minutes, that beer-
break, 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 didn’t drink. I already told you about his drinking habits. He sat
hunkered down in the shade, hands dangling between his knees, watching us and
smiling a little. It’s amazing how many men remember him that way, and amazing
how many men were on that work-crew 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, yeah–if you asked me to give you a flat-out answer to the question of
whether I’m 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 grit–I’d have to say that the answer lies somewhere in between.
All I know for sure is that Andy Dufresne wasn’t 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 grey 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 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 when he left. Shawshank was his