was as terrible to Brooks as the Western Seas had been to superstitious 13th-century
sailors. In prison, Brooksie had been a person of some importance. He was the head
librarian, in educated man. If he went to the Kittery library and asked or a job, they
wouldn’t give him a library card. I heard he lied in a home for indigent old folks up
Freeport way in 1952, and at that he lasted about six months longer than I thought he
would. Yeah, I guess the state got its own back on Brooksie, all right. They trained him to
like it inside the shithouse and then they threw him out.
Andy succeeded to Brooksie’s job, and he was head librarian for twenty-three years. He
used the same force of will I’d seen him use on Byron Hadley to get what he wanted for
the library, and I saw him gradually turn one small room (which still smelled of
turpentine because it had been a paint closet until 1922 and had never been properly
aired) lined with Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and National Geographies into the best prison library in New England.
He did it a step at a time. He put a suggestion box by the door and patiently weeded out
such attempts at humour as More Fuk-Boox Pleeze and Escape in 10 EZ Lesions. He got sold of the things the prisoners seemed serious about. He wrote to three major book clubs in New York and got two of them, The Literary Guild and The Book of the Month Club,
to send editions of all their major selections to us at a special cheap rate. He discovered a
hunger for information on such snail hobbies as soap-carving, woodworking, sleight of
hand, and card solitaire. He got all the books he could on such subjects. And those two
jailhouse staples, Erie Stanley Gardener and Louis L’Amour. Cons never seem to get enough of the courtroom or the open range. And yes, he did keep a box of fairly spicy
paperbacks under the checkout desk, loaning them out carefully and making sure they
always got back. Even so, each new acquisition of that type was quickly read to tatters.
He began to write to the state senate in Augusta in 1954. Staminas was warden by then,
and he used to pretend Andy was some sort of mascot He was always in the library,
shooting the bull with Andy, and sometimes he’d even throw a paternal arm around
Andy’s shoulders or give him a goose. He didn’t fool anybody. Andy Dufresne was no
one’s mascot.
He told Andy that maybe he’d been a banker on the outside, but that part of his life was
receding rapidly into his past and he had better get a hold on the facts of prison life. As
far as that bunch of jumped-up Republican Rotarians in Augusta was concerned, there
were only three viable expenditures of the taxpayers’ money in the field of prisons and
corrections. Number one was more walls, number two was more bars, and number three
was more guards. As far as the state senate was concerned, Stammas explained, the folks
in Thomastan and Shawshank and Pittsfield and South Portland were the scum of the
earth. They were there to do hard time, and by God and Sonny Jesus, it was hard time
they were going to do. And if there were a few weevils in the bread, wasn’t that just too
fucking bad?
Andy smiled his small, composed smile and asked Stammas what would happen to a
block of concrete if a drop of water fell on it once every year for a million years. Stammas
laughed and clapped Andy on the back. ‘You got no million years, old horse, but if you
did, I believe you’d do it with that same little grin on your face. You go on and write your
letters. I’ll even mail them for you if you pay for the stamps.’
Which Andy did. And he had the last laugh, although Stammas and Hadley weren’t
around to see it Andy’s requests for library funds were routinely turned down until 1960,
when he received a check for two hundred dollars – the senate probably appropriated it in
hopes that he would shut up and go away. Vain hope. Andy felt that he had finally gotten
one foot in the door and he simply redoubled his efforts; two letters a week instead of
one. In 1962 he got four hundred dollars, and for the rest of the decade the library
received seven hundred dollars a year like clockwork. By 1971 that had risen to an even
thousand. Not much stacked up against what your average small-town library receives, I
guess, but a thousand bucks can buy a lot of recycled Perry Mason stories and Jake Logan
Westerns. By the time Andy left, you could go into the library (expanded from its original
paint-locker to three rooms), and find just about anything you’d want. And if you couldn’t
find it, chances were good that Andy could get it for you.
Now you’re asking yourself if all this came about just because Andy told Byron Hadley
how to save the taxes on his windfall inheritance. The answer is yes … and no. You can
probably figure out what happened for yourself.
Word got around that Shawshank was housing its very own pet financial wizard. In the
late spring and the summer of 1950, Andy set up two trust funds for guards who wanted
10 assure a college education for their kids, he advised a couple of others who wanted to
take small fliers in common stock (and they did pretty damn well, as things turned out; :
ne of them did so well he was able to take an early retirement two years later), and I’ll be
damned if he didn’t advise the warden himself, old Lemon Lips George Dunahy, on how
to go about setting up a tax-shelter for himself. That was just before Dunahy got the
bum’s rush, and I believe he – ust have been dreaming about ail the millions his book was
going to make him. By April of 1951, Andy was doing the tax returns for half the screws
at Shawshank, and by 1952, he was doing almost all of them. He was paid in what may be
a prison’s most valuable coin: simple goodwill.
Later on, after Greg Stammas took over the warden’s office, Andy became even more
important – but if I tried to tell you the specifics of just how, I’d be guessing. There are
some things I know about and others I can only guess at. I know that there were some
prisoners who received all sorts of special considerations – radios in their cells,
extraordinary visiting privileges, things like that – and there were people on the outside
who were paying for them to have those privileges. Such people are known as ‘angels’ by
the prisoners. All at once some fellow would be excused from working in the plate-shop
on Saturday forenoons, and you’d know that fellow had an angel out there who’d coughed
up a chuck of dough to make sure it happened. The way it usually works is that the angel
will pay the bribe to some middle-level screw, and the screw will spread the grease both up and down the administrative ladder.
Then there was the discount auto repair service that laid Warden Dunahy low, It went
underground for a while and then emerged stronger than ever in the late fifties. And some
of the contractors that worked at the prison from time to time were paying kickbacks to
the top administration officials, I’m pretty sure, and the same was almost certainly true of
the companies whose equipment was bought and installed in the laundry and the licence-
plate shop and the stamping-mill that was built in 1963.
By the late sixties there was also a booming trade in pills, and the same administrative
crowd was involved in turning a buck on that All of it added up to a pretty good-sized
river of illicit income. Not like the pile of clandestine bucks that must fly around a really
big prison like Attica or San Quentin, but not peanuts, either. And money itself becomes a
problem after a while. You can’t just stuff it into your wallet and then shell out a bunch of
crumpled twenties and dog-eared tens when you want a pool built in your back yard or an
addition put on your house. Once you get past a certain point, you have to explain where
that money came from … and if your explanations aren’t convincing enough, you’re apt to
wind up wearing a number yourself.
So there was a need for Andy’s services. They took him out of the laundry and installed
him in the library, but if you wanted to look at it another way, they never took him out of
the laundry at all. They just set him to work washing dirty money instead of dirty sheets.