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, an 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