Hayworth was taken?
Andy Dufresne’s perseverance and hard work, yeah–I don’t take any of that
away from him. But there were two other elements in the equation: a lot of luck, and
WPA concrete.
You don’t need me to explain the luck, I guess. The WPA concrete I checked
out for myself. I invested some time and a couple of stamps and wrote first to the
University of Maine History Department and then to a fellow whose address they
were able to give me.
This fellow had been foreman of the WPA project that built the Shawshank
Max Security Wing.
The wing, which contains Cellblocks 3, 4, and 5, was built in the years 1934-
37. Now, most people don’t think of cement and concrete as ‘technological
developments’, the way we think of cars and oil furnaces and rocket-ships, but they
really are. There was no modern cement until 1870 or so, and no modern concrete
until after the turn of the century. Mixing concrete is as delicate a business as making bread. You can get it too watery or not watery enough. You can get the sand-mix too
thick or too thin, and the same is true of the gravel-mix. And back in 1934, the science of mixing the stuff was a lot less sophisticated than it is today.
The walls of Cellblock 5 were solid enough, but they weren’t exactly dry and
toasty. As a matter of fact, they were and are pretty damned dank. After a long wet
spell they would sweat and sometimes even drip. Cracks had a way of appearing,
some an inch deep, and were routinely mortared over.
Now here comes Andy Dufresne into Cellblock 5. He’s a man who graduated from the University of Maine’s school of business, but he’s also a man who took two
or three geology courses along the way. Geology had, in fact, become his chief hobby.
I imagine it appealed to his patient, meticulous nature. A ten-thousand-year ice age
here. A million years of mountain-building there. Tectonic plates grinding against
each other deep under the earth’s skin over the millennia. Pressure. Andy told me once that all of geology is the study of pressure.
And time, of course.
He had time to study those walls. Plenty of time. When the cell door slams and
the lights go out, there’s nothing else to look at.
First-timers usually had a hard time adjusting to the confinement of prison life.
They get screw-fever, they have to be hauled down to the infirmary and sedated
couple of times before they get on the beam. It’s not unusual to hear some new
member of our happy little family bang on the bars of his cell and screaming to be let out… before the cries have gone on for long, the chant starts up along the cellblock:
‘Fresh fish, hey little fishie, fresh fish, fresh fish, got fresh fish today!’
Andy didn’t flip out like that when he came to the Shank in 1948, but that’s not
to say that he didn’t feel many of same things. He may have come close to madness;
some and some go sailing right over the edge. Old life blown away in the wink of an
eye, indeterminate nightmare stretching out ahead, a long season in hell.
So what did he do, I ask you? He searched almost desperately for something to
divert his restless mind. Oh. There are all sorts of ways to divert yourself, even in
prison; it seems like the human mind is full of an infinite number of possibilities when it comes to diversion. I told you about the sculptor and his Three Ages of Jesus. There were coin collectors who were always losing their collections to thieves, stamp
collectors, one fellow who had postcards from thirty-five different countries–and let me tell you, he would have turned out your lights if he’d caught you diddling with his postcards.
Andy got interested in rocks. And the walls of his cell.
I think that his initial intention might have been to do no more than to carve
his initials into the wall where the poster of Rita Hayworth would soon be hanging.
His initials, or maybe a few lines from some poem. Instead, what he found was that