and forty days like ten. Sometimes you could hear rats in the ventilation system. In a situation like that, subdivisions of terrible tend to get lost.
If anything at all can be said in favour of solitary, it’s just that you get time to
think. Andy had twenty days in which to think while he enjoyed his grain and drain,
and when he got out he requested another meeting with the warden. Request denied.
Such a meeting, the warden told him, would be ‘counter-productive’. That’s another of
those phrases you have to master before you can go to work in the prisons and
corrections field.
Patiently, Andy renewed his request And renewed it And renewed it He had
changed, had Andy Dufresne. Suddenly, as that spring of 1963 bloomed around us,
there were lines in his face and sprigs of grey showing in his hair. He had lost that
little trace of a smile that always seemed to linger around his mouth. His eyes stared out into space more often, and you get to know that when a man stares that way, he is
counting up the years served, the months, the weeks, the days.
He renewed his request and renewed it He was patient He had nothing but
time. It got to be summer. In Washington, President Kennedy was promising a fresh
assault on poverty and on civil rights inequalities, not knowing he had only half a year to live. In Liverpool, a musical group called The Beatles was emerging as a force to
be reckoned with in British music, but I guess that no one Stateside had yet heard of
them. The Boston Red Sox, still four years away from what New England folks call The Miracle of ’67, were languishing in the cellar of the American League. All of
those things were going on out in a larger world where people walked free.
Norton saw him near the end of June, and this conversation I heard about from
Andy himself some seven years later.
‘If it’s the money, you don’t have to worry,’ Andy told Norton in a low voice.
‘Do you think I’d talk that up? I’d be cutting my own throat I’d be just as indictable as –
‘
That’s enough,’ Norton interrupted. His face was as long and cold as a slate
gravestone.
He leaned back in his office chair until the back of his head almost touched the
sampler reading HIS JUDGMENT COMETH AND THAT RIGHT EARLY.
‘But-‘
‘Don’t you ever mention money to me again,’ Norton said. ‘Not in this office,
not anywhere. Not unless you want to see that library turned back into a storage room
and paint-locker again. Do you understand?’
‘I was trying to set your mind at ease, that’s all.’
‘Well now, when I need a sorry son of a bitch like you to set my mind at ease,
I’ll retire. I agreed to this appointment because I got tired of being pestered, Dufresne.
I want it to stop. If you want to buy this particular Brooklyn Bridge, that’s your affair.
Don’t make it mine. I could hear crazy stories like yours twice a week if I wanted to
lay myself open to them. Every sinner in this place would be using me for a crying
towel. I had more respect for you. But this is the end. The end. Have we got an
understanding?’
‘Yes,’ Andy said. ‘But I’ll be hiring a lawyer, you know.’
‘What in God’s name for?’
‘I think we can put it together,’ Andy said. ‘With Tommy Williams and with
my testimony and corroborative testimony from records and employees at the country
club, I think we can put it together.’
‘Tommy Williams is no longer an inmate of this facility.’
‘What?’
‘He’s been transferred.’
‘Transferred where?’
‘Cashman.’
At that, Andy fell silent. He was an intelligent man, but it would have taken an
extraordinarily stupid man not to smelt deal all over that. Cashman was a minimum-
security prison far up north in Aroostook County. The inmates pick a lot of potatoes,
and that’s hard work, but they are paid a decent wage for their labour and they can
attend classes at CVI, a pretty decent vocational-technical institute, if they so desire.