coldly self-possessed young man in the neat double-breasted three-piece woollen suit
ever getting falling-down drunk over his wife’s sleazy little affair with some small-
town golf pro. I believed it because I had a chance to watch Andy that those six men
and six women didn’t have. Andy Dufresne took just four drinks a year all the time I
knew him. He would meet me in the exercise yard every year about a week before his
birthday and then again about two weeks before Christmas. On each occasion he
would arrange for a bottle of Jack Daniels. He bought it the way most cons arrange to
buy their stuff-the slave’s wages they pay in here, plus a little of his own. Up until 1965 what you got for your time was a dime an hour. In ’65 they raised it all the way
up to a quarter. My commission on liquor was and is ten per cent, and when you add on that surcharge to the price of a fine sippin’ whiskey like the Black Jack, you get an idea of how many hours of Andy Dufresne’s sweat in the prison laundry was going to
buy his four drinks a year.
On the morning of his birthday, 20 September, he would have himself a big
knock, and then he’d have another that night after lights out. The following day he’d
give the rest of the bottle back to me, and I would share it around. As for the other
bottle, he dealt himself one drink Christmas night and another on New Year’s Eve.
Then that one would also come to me with instructions to pass it on. Four drinks a
year -and that is the behaviour of a man who has been bitten hard by the bottle. Hard
enough to draw blood. He told the jury that on the night of the 10th he had been so
drunk he could only remember what had happened in little isolated snatches. He had
gotten drunk that afternoon–‘I took on a double helping of Dutch courage’ is how he
put it -before taking on Linda.
After she left to meet Quentin, he remembered deciding to confront them. On
the way to Quentin’s bungalow, he swung into the country club for a couple of quick
ones. He could not, he said, remember telling the bartender he could ‘read about the
rest of it in the papers’, or saying anything to him at all. He remembered buying beer in the Handy-Pik, but not the dishtowels. ‘Why would I want dishtowels?’ he asked,
and one of the papers reported that three of the lady jurors shuddered.
Later, much later, he speculated to me about the clerk who had testified on the
subject of those dishtoweis, and I think it’s worth jotting down what he said. ‘Suppose that, during their search for witnesses,’ Andy said one day in the yard, ‘they stumble on this fellow who sold me the beer that night. By then three days have gone by. The
facts of the case have been broadsided in all the papers. Maybe they ganged up on the
guy, five or six cops, plus the dick from the attorney general’s office, plus the DA’s assistant. Memory is a pretty subjective thing, Red. They could have started out with
“Isn’t it possible that he purchased four or five dishtowels?” and worked their way up from there. If enough people want you to remember something, that can be a pretty
powerful persuader.’ I agreed that it could.
‘But there’s one even more powerful,’ Andy went on in that musing way of his.
‘I think it’s at least possible that he convinced himself. It was the limelight. Reporters asking him questions, his picture in the papers… all topped, of course, by his star turn in court. I’m not saying that he deliberately falsified his story, or perjured himself. I think it’s possible that lie could have passed a lie detector test with flying colours, or sworn on his mother’s sacred name that I bought those dishtowels. But still… memory
is such a goddam subjective thing.
‘I know this much: even though my own lawyer thought I had to be lying
about half my story, he never bought that business about the dishtowels. It’s crazy on the face of it. I was pig-drunk, too drunk to have been thinking about muffling the