I’ve told you as well as I can how it is to be an institutional man. At first you
can’t stand those four walls, then you get so you can abide them, then you get so you
accept them… and then, as your body and your mind and your spirit adjust to life on
an HO scale, you get to love them. You are told when to eat, when you can write
letters, when you can smoke. If you’re at work in the laundry or the plate-shop, you’re assigned five minutes of each hour when you can go to the bathroom. For thirty-five
years, my time was twenty-five minutes after the hour, and after thirty-five years,
that’s the only time I ever felt the need to take a piss or have a crap: twenty-five
minutes past the hour. And if for some reason I couldn’t go, the need would pass at
thirty after, and come back at twenty-five past the next hour.
I think Andy may have been wrestling with that tiger–that institutional
syndrome–and also with the bulking fears that all of it might have been for nothing.
How many nights must he have lain awake under his poster, thinking about that sewer
line, knowing that the one chance was all he’d ever get? The blueprints might have
told him how big the pipe’s bore was, but a blueprint couldn’t tell him what it would
be like inside that pipe–if he would be able to breathe without choking, if the rats
were big enough and mean enough to fight instead of retreating… and a blueprint
couldn’t’ve told him what he’d find at the end of the pipe, when and if he got there.
Here’s a joke even funnier than the parole would have been: Andy breaks into the
sewer line, crawls through five hundred yards of choking, shit-smelling darkness, and comes up against a heavy-gauge mesh screen at the end of it all. Ha, ha, very funny.
That would have been on his mind. And if the long shot actually came in and
he was able to get out, would he be able to get some civilian clothes and get away
from the vicinity of the prison undetected? Last of all, suppose he got out of the pipe, got away from Shawshank before the alarm was raised, got to Buxton, overturned the
right rock… and found nothing beneath? Not necessarily something so dramatic as
arriving at the right field and discovering that a high-rise apartment building had been erected on the spot, or that it had turned into a supermarket parking lot. It could have been that some little kid who liked rocks noticed that piece of volcanic glass, turned it over, saw the deposit-box key, and took both it and the rock back to his room as
souvenirs. Maybe a November hunter kicked the rock, left the key exposed, and a
squirrel or a crow with a liking for bright shiny things had taken it away. Maybe there had been spring floods one year, breaching the wall, washing the key away. Maybe
anything.
So I think–wild guess or not–that Andy just froze in place for a while. After
all, you can’t lose if you don’t bet. What did he have to lose, you ask? His library, for one thing. The poison peace of institutional life, for another. Any future chance to
grab his safe identity. But he finally did it, just as I have told you. He tried… and, my!
Didn’t he succeed in spectacular fashion? You tell me!
But did he get away, you ask? What happened after? What happened when he
got to that meadow and turned over the rock… always assuming the rock was still
there?
I can’t describe that scene for you, because this institutional man is still in this
institution, and expects to be for years to come.
But I’ll tell you this. Very late in the summer of 1975, on 15 September to be
exact, I got a postcard which had been mailed from the tiny town of McNary, Texas.
That town is on the American side of the border, directly across from El Porvenir. The message side of the card was totally blank. But I know. I know it in my heart as surely as I know that we’re all going to die someday.