Was it true that Andy and Linda Dufresne had taken out a joint insurance
policy in early 1947? Yes, that was true. And if acquitted, wasn’t it true that Andy
stood to gain $50,000 in benefits? True. And wasn’t it true that he had gone up to
Glenn Quentin’s house with murder in his heart, and wasn’t it also true that he had
indeed committed murder twice over? No, it was not true. Then what did he think had
happened, since there had been no signs of robbery?
‘I have no way of knowing that, sir,’ Andy said quietly.
The case went to the jury at one p. m. on a snowy Wednesday afternoon. The
twelve jurymen and women came back at three-thirty. The bailiff said they would
have been back earlier, but they had held off in order to enjoy a nice chicken dinner
from Bentley’s Restaurant at the county’s expense. They found him guilty, and brother, if Maine had the death penalty, he would have done the airdance before that spring’s
crocuses poked their heads out of the dirt.
The DA had asked him what he thought had happened, and Andy slipped the
question -but he did have an idea, and I got it out of him late one evening in 1955. It had taken those seven years for us to progress from nodding acquaintances to fairly
close friends -but I never felt really close to Andy until 1960 or so, and I believe I was the only one who ever did get really close to him. Both being long-timers, we were in
the same cellblock from beginning to end, although I was halfway down the corridor
from him. ‘What do I think?’ He laughed–but there was no humour in the sound. ‘I
think there was a lot of bad luck floating around that night. More than could ever get together in the same short span of time again. I think it must have been some stranger, just passing through. Maybe someone who had a flat tire on that road after I went
home. Maybe a burglar. Maybe a psychopath. He killed them, that’s all. And I’m here.’
As simple as that. And he was condemned to spend the rest of his life in
Shawshank–or the part of it that mattered. Five years later he began to have parole
hearings, and he was turned down just as regular as clockwork in spite of being a
model prisoner. Getting a pass out of Shawshank when you’ve got murder stamped on
your admittance-slip is slow work, as slow as a river eroding a rock. Seven men sit on the board, two more than at most state prisons, and every one of those seven has an
ass as hard as the water drawn up from a mineral-spring well You can’t buy those
guys, you can’t no, you can’t cry for them. As far as the board concerned, money don’t talk, and nobody walks. For other reasons in Andy’s case as well… but that belongs a little further along in my story. There was a trustee, name of Kendricks, who was into me for some pretty heavy money back in the fifties, and it was four years before he
got it all paid off. Most of the interest he paid me was information–in my line of work, you’re dead if you can’t find ways of keeping your ear to the ground. This Kendricks,
for instance, had access to records I was never going to see running a stamper down in the goddam plate-shop. Kendricks told me that the parole board vote was 7-0 against
Andy Dufresne through 1957, 6-1 in ’58, 7-0 again in ’59, and 5-2 in ’60. After that I don’t know, but I do know that sixteen years later he was still in Cell 14 of Cellblock
5. By tben, 1976, he was fifty-eight. They probably would have gotten big-hearted and let him out around 1983. They give you fife, and that’s what they take–all of it
that counts, anyway. Maybe they set you loose someday, but… well, Listen: I knew
this guy, Sherwood Bolton, his name was, and he had this pigeon in his cell. From
1945 until 1953, when they let him out, he had that pigeon. He wasn’t any Birdman of