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 I’m 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’ program 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