with small businesses to pass on, or for people who come into one-time-only windfalls.
Like yourself.’
‘I think you’re lying,’ Hadley said, but he didn’t – you could see he didn’t. There was an
emotion dawning on his face, something that was grotesque overlying that long, ugly
countenence and that receding, sunburned brow. An almost obscene emotion when seen
on the features of Byron Hadley. It was hope.
‘No, I’m not lying. There’s no reason why you should take my word for it, either.
Engage a lawyer -‘
‘Ambulance-chasing highway-robbing cocksuckers!’Hadley cried.
Andy shrugged. “Then go to the IRS. They’ll tell you the same thing for free. Actually,
you don’t need me to tell you at all. You would have investigated the matter for yourself.’
‘You fucking-A. I don’t need any smart wife-killing banker to show me where the bear
shit in the buckwheat.’
‘You’ll need a tax lawyer or a banker to set up the gift for you and that will cost you
something,’ Andy said. ‘Or … if you were interested, I’d be glad to set it up for you nearly free of charge. The price would be three beers apiece for my co-workers -‘
‘Co-workers,’ Mert said, and let out a rusty guffaw. He slapped his knee. A real knee-
slapper was old Mert, and I hope he died of intestinal cancer in a part of the world were
morphine is as of yet undiscovered. ‘Co-workers, ain’t that cute? Co-workers! You ain’t
got any -‘
‘Shut your friggin’ trap,’ Hadley growled, and Mert shut.
Hadley looked at Andy again. ‘What was you saying?’
‘I was saying that I’d only ask three beers apiece for my co-workers, if that seems fair,’
Andy said. ‘I think a man feels more like a man when he’s working out of doors in the
springtime if he can have a bottle of suds. That’s only my opinion. It would go down
smooth, and I’m sure you’d have their gratitude.’
I have talked to some of the other men who were up there that day – Rennie Martin,
Logan St Pierre, and Paul Bonsaint were three of them – and we all saw the same thing
then …felt the same thing. Suddenly it was Andy who had the upper hand. It was Hadley
who had the gun on his hip and the billy in his hand, Hadley who had his friend Greg
Staminas behind him and the whole prison administration behind Stammas, the whole
power of the state behind that, but all at once in that golden sunshine it didn’t matter, and I felt my heart leap up in my chest as it never had since the truck drove me and four
others through the gate back in 1938 and I stepped out into the exercise yard.
Andy was looking at Hadley with those cold, clear, calm eyes, and it wasn’t just the
thirty-five thousand then, we all agreed on that. I’ve played it over and over in my mind
and I know. It was man against man, and Andy simply forced him, the way a strong man can force a weaker man’s wrist to the table in a game of Indian wrestling. There was no
reason, you see, why Hadley couldn’t’ve given Mert the nod at that very minute, pitched
Andy overside onto his head, and still taken Andy’s advice.
No reason. But he didn’t.
‘I could get you all a couple of beers if I wanted to,’ Hadley said. ‘A beer does taste good
while you’re workin’.’ The colossal prick even managed to sound magnanimous.
‘I’d just give you one piece of advice the IRS wouldn’t bother with,’ Andy said. His eyes
were fixed unwinkingly on Hadley’s. ‘Make the gift to your wife if you’re sure. If you
think there’s even a chance she might double-cross you or backshoot you, we could work
out something else -‘
‘Double-cross me?’ Hadley asked harshly. ‘Double-cross me! Mr Hotshot Banker, if she
ate her way through a boxcar of Ex-Lax, she wouldn’t dare fart unless I gave her the nod.’
Mert, Youngblood, and the other screws yucked it up dutifully. Andy never cracked a
smile.
‘I’ll write down the forms you need,’ he said. ‘You can get them at the post office, and
I’ll fill them out for your signature.’
That sounded suitably important, and Hadley’s chest swelled. Then he glared around at
the rest of us and hollered, “What are you jimmies starin’ at? Move your asses,
goddammit!’ He looked back at Andy. ‘You come over here with me, hotshot. And listen
to me well: if you’re Jewing me somehow, you’re gonna find yourself chasing your head
around Shower C before the week’s out.’
‘Yes, I understand that,’ Andy said softly.
And he did understand it. The way it turned out, he understood a lot more than I did –
more than any of us did.
That’s how, on the second-to-last day of the job, the convict crew that tarred the plate-
factory roof in 1950 ending up sitting in a row at ten o’clock on a spring morning,
drinking Black Label beer supplied by the hardest screw that ever walked a turn at
Shawshank Prison. That beer was piss-warm, but it was still the best I ever had in my life.
We sat and drank it and felt the sun on our shoulders, and not even the expression of half
amusement, half-contempt on Hadley’s face – as if he was watching apes drink beer
instead of men -could spoil it. It lasted twenty minutes, that beer-break, and for those twenty minutes we felt like free men. We could have been drinking beer and tarring the
roof of one of our own houses.
Only Andy didn’t drink. I already told you about his -linking habits. He sat hunkered
down in the shade, hands dangling between his knees, watching us and smiling a little. It’s
amazing how many men remember him that way, and amazing how many men were on
that work-crew when Andy Dufresne faced down Byron Hadley. I thought there were nine
or ten of us, but by 1955 there must have been two hundred of us, maybe more … if you
believed what you heard.
So, yeah – if you asked me to give you a flat-out answer to the question of whether I’m
trying to tell you about a man or a legend that got made up around the man, like a pearl
around a little piece of grit – I’d have to say that the answer lies somewhere in between.
All I know for sure is that Andy Dufresne wasn’t much like me or anyone else I ever knew
since I came inside. He brought in five hundred dollars jammed up his back porch, but
somehow that graymeat son of a bitch managed to bring in something else as well. A
sense of his own worth, maybe, or a feeling that he would be the winner in the end … or
maybe it was only a sense of freedom, even inside these goddamned grey walls. It was a
kind of inner light he carried around with him. I only knew him to lose that light once,
and that is also a part of this story.
By World Series time of 1950 – this was the year Bobby Thompson hit his famous
home run at the end of the season, you will remember – Andy was having no more trouble
from the sisters. Stammas and Hadley had passed the word. If Andy Dufresne came to
either of them or any of the other screws that formed a part of their coterie, and showed
so much as a single drop of blood in his underpants, every sister in Shawshank would go
to bed that night with a headache. They didn’t fight it As I have pointed out, there was
always an eighteen-year-old car thief or a firebug or some guy who’d gotten his kicks
handling little children. After the day on the plate-shop roof, Andy went his way and the
sisters went theirs.
He was working in the library then, under a tough old con named Brooks Hatlen. Hatlen
had gotten the job back in the late 20s because he had a college education. Brooksie’s
degree was in animal husbandry, true enough, but college educations in institutes of lower
learning like The Shank are so rare that it’s a case of beggars not being able to be
choosers.
In 1952 Brooksie, who had killed his wife and daughter after a losing streak at poker
back when Coolidge was President, was paroled. As usual, the state in all its wisdom had
let him go long after any chance he might have had to become a useful part of society was
gone. He was sixty-eight and arthritic when he tottered out of the main gate in his Polish
suit and his French shoes, his parole papers in one ‘and and a Greyhound bus ticket in the
other. He was crying »hen he left. Shawshank was his world. What lay beyond its vails