the warden; Chester said you could hear him even after the door was shut: ‘It’s my life!
It’s my life, don’t you understand it’s my life?’
Twenty days on the grain and drain train for Andy down there in solitary. It
was his second jolt in solitary, and his dust-up with Norton was his first real black
mark since he had joined our happy little family.
I’ll tell you a little bit about Shawshank’s solitary while we’re on the subject It’s
something of a throwback to those hardy pioneer days of the early-to-mid-1700s in
Maine. In.. those days no one wasted much time with such things as penalogy’ and
‘rehabilitation’ and ‘selective perception’. In, those days, you were taken care of in terms of absolute black and white. You were either guilty or innocent. If you were
guilty, you were either hung or put in gaol. And if you were sentenced to gaol, you
did not go to an institution. No, you dug your own gaol with a spade provided to you
by the Province of Maine. You dug it as wide and as deep as you could during the
period between sunup and sundown. Then, they gave you a couple of skins and a
bucket, and down you went Once down, the gaoler would bar the top of your hole,
throw down some grain or maybe a piece of maggoty meat once or twice a week, and
maybe there would be a dipperful; barley soup on Sunday night You pissed in the
bucket, and you held up the same bucket for water when the gaoler came around at six in the morning. When it rained, you used the bucket to bail out your gaol-cell… unless, that is, you wanted to drown like a rat in a rainbarrel.
No one spent a long time ‘in the hole’, as it was called; thirty months was an
unusually long term, and so far as I’ve been able to tell, the longest term ever spent from which an inmate actually emerged alive was served by the so-called Durham
Boy’, a fourteen-year-old psychopath who castrated a schoolmate with a piece of rusty
metal. He did seven years, but of course he went in young and strong.
You have to remember that for a crime that was more serious than petty theft
or blasphemy or forgetting to put a snotrag in your pocket when out of doors on the
Sabbath, you were hung. For low crimes such as those just mentioned and for others
like them, you’d do your three or six or nine months in the hole and come out
fishbelly white, cringing from the wide-open spaces, your eyes half-blind, your teeth
more than likely rocking and rolling in their sockets from the scurvy, your feet
crawling with fungus. Jolly old Province of Maine. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.
Shawshank’s Solitary Wing was nowhere as bad as that… I guess. Things
come in three major degrees in the human experience, I think. There’s good, bad, and
terrible. And as you go down into progressive darkness towards terrible, it gets harder and harder to make subdivisions.
To get to Solitary Wing you were led down twenty-three steps to a basement
level where the only sound was the drip of water. The only light was supplied by a
series of dangling sixty-watt bulbs. The cells were keg-shaped, like those wall-safes
rich people sometimes hide behind a picture. Like a safe, the round doorways were
hinged, and solid instead of barred. You get ventilation from above, but no light
except for your own sixty-watt bulb, which was turned off from a master-switch
promptly at eight p. m., an hour before lights-out in the rest of the prison. The wire wasn’t in a wire mesh cage or anything like that. The feeling was that if you wanted to exist down there in the dark, you were welcome to it. Not many did… but after eight, of course, you had no choice. You had a bunk bolted to the wall and a can with no
toilet seat. You had three ways to spend your time: sitting, shitting, or sleeping. Big choice. Twenty days could get to seem like a year. Thirty days could seem like two,