about how he’d said it was always cold in Andy’s cell.
A terrible thing happened to Andy in late March or early April of 1963. I have told you
that he had something that most of the other prisoners, myself included, seemed to lack.
Call it a sense of equanimity, or a feeling of inner peace, maybe even a constant and
unwavering faith that someday the long nightmare would end. Whatever you want to call
it, Andy Dufresne always seemed to have his act together.
There was none of that sullen desperation about him that seems to afflict most lifers
after a while; you could never smell hopelessness on him. Until that late winter of ’63.
We had another warden by then, a man named Samuel Norton. The Mather brothers,
Cotton and Increase, would have felt right at home with Sam Norton. So far as I know, no
one had ever seen him so much as crack a smile. He had a thirty-year pin from the Baptist
Advent Church of Eliot. His major innovation as the head of our happy family was to
make sure that each incoming prisoner had a New Testament. He had a small plaque on
his desk, gold letters inlaid in teakwood, which said CHRIST IS MY SAVIOUR. A
sampler on the wall, made by his wife, read: HIS JUDGMENT COMETH AND THAT
RIGHT EARLY. This latter sentiment cut zero ice with most of us. We felt that the
judgment had already occurred, and we would be willing to testify with the best of them
that the rock would not hide us nor the dead tree give us shelter. He had a Bible quote for
every occasion, did Mr Sam Norton, and whenever you meet a man like that, my best
advice to you would be to grin big and cover up your balls with both hands.
There were less infirmary cases than in the days of Greg Stammas, and so far as I know
the moonlight burials ceased altogether, but this is not to say that Norton was not a
believer in punishment. Solitary was always well populated. Men lost their teeth not from
beatings but from bread and water diets. It began to be called grain and drain, as in Tm on
the Sam Norton grain and drain train, boys.’
The man was the foulest hypocrite that I ever saw in a high position. The rackets I told
you about earlier continued to flourish, but Sam Norton added his own new wrinkles.
Andy knew about them all, and because we had gotten to be pretty good friends by that
time, he let me in on some of them. When Andy talked about them, an expression of
amused, disgusted wonder would come over his face, as if he was telling me about some
ugly, predatory species of bug that has, by its very ugliness and greed, somehow more
comic than terrible.
It was Warden Norton who instituted the ‘Inside-Out’ programme you may have read
about some sixteen or seventeen years back; it was even written up in Newsweek. In the
press it sounded like a real advance in practical corrections and rehabilitation. There were
prisoners out cutting pulpwood, prisoners repairing bridges and causeways, prisoners
constructing potato cellars. Norton called it ‘Inside-Out’ and was invited to explain it to
damn near every Rotary and Kiwanis club in New England, especially after he got his
picture in Newsweek. The prisoners called it ‘road-ganging’, but so far as I know, none of them were ever invited to express their views to the Kiwanians or the Loyal Order of the
Moose.
Norton was right in there on every operation, thirty-year church-pin and all, from
cutting pulp to digging storm-drains to laying new culverts on state highways, there was
Norton, skimming off the top. There were a hundred ways to do it -men, materials, you
name it. But he had it coming another way, as well. The construction businesses in the
area were deathly afraid of Norton’s Inside-Out programme, because prison labour is
slave labour, and you can’t compete with that. So Sam Norton, he of the Testaments and
the thirty-year church-pin, was passed a good many thick envelopes under the table
during his fifteen-year tenure as Shawshank’s warden. And when an envelope was passed,
he would either overbid the project, not bid at all, or claim that ail his Inside-Outers were committed elsewhere. It has always been something of a wonder to me that Norton was
never found in the trunk of a Thunderbird parked off a highway somewhere down in
Massachusetts with his hands tied behind his back and half a dozen bullets in his head.
Anyway, as the old barrelhouse song says, My God, how the money rolled in. Norton
must have subscribed to the old Puritan notion that the best way to figure out which folks
God favours is by checking their bank accounts.
Andy Dufresne was his right hand in all of this, his silent partner. The prison library
was Andy’s hostage to fortune. Norton knew it, and Norton used it. Andy told me that one
of Norton’s favourite aphorisms was One hand washes the other. So Andy gave good
advice and made useful suggestions. I can’t say for sure that he hand-tooled Norton’s
Inside-Out programme, but I’m damned sure he processed the money for the Jesus-
shouting son of a whore. He gave good advice, made useful suggestions, the money got
spread around, and … son of a bitch! The library would get a new set of automotive repair
manuals, a fresh set of Grolier Encyclopedias, books on how to prepare for the Scholastic Achievement Tests. And, of course, more Erie Stanley Gardeners and more Louis
L’Amours.
And I’m convinced that what happened happened because Norton just didn’t want to
lose his good right hand. I’ll go further: it happened because he was scared of what might
happen – what Andy might say against him – if Andy ever got clear of Shawshank State
Prison.
I got the story a chunk here and a chunk there over a space of seven years, some of it
from Andy – but not all. He never wanted to talk about that part of his life, and I don’t
blame him. I got parts of it from maybe half a dozen different sources. I’ve said once that
prisoners are nothing but slaves, but they have that slave habit of looking dumb and
keeping their ears open. I got it backwards and forwards and in the middle, but I’ll give it
to you from point A to point Z, and maybe you’ll understand why the man spent about ten
months in a bleak, depressed daze. See, I don’t think he knew the truth until 1963, fifteen
years after he came into this sweet little hell-hole. Until he met Tommy Williams, I don’t
think he knew how bad it could get.
Tommy Williams joined our happy little Shawshank family in November of 1962.
Tommy thought of himself as a native of Massachusetts, but he wasn’t proud; in his
twenty-seven years he’d done time all over New England. He was a professional thief, and
as you may have guessed, my own feeling was that he should have picked another
profession.
He was a married man, and his wife came to visit each and every week. She had an idea
that things might go better with Tommy – and consequently better with their three-year-
old mi and herself – if he got his high school degree. She talked him into it, and so
Tommy Williams started visiting the library on a regular basis.
For Andy, this was an old routine by then. He saw that Tommy got a series of high
school equivalency tests. Tommy would brush up on the subjects he had passed in high-
school – there weren’t many – and then take the test Andy also saw that he was enrolled in
a number of correspondence courses covering the subjects he had failed in school or just
missed by dropping out
He probably wasn’t the best student Andy ever took over the jumps, and I don’t know if
he ever did get his high school diploma, but that forms no part of my story. The important
thing was that he came to like Andy Dufresne very much, as most people did after a
while.
On a couple of occasions he asked Andy ‘what a smart guy like you is doing in the
joint’ – a question which is the rough equivalent of that one that goes ‘What’s a nice girl
like you doing in a place like this?’ But Andy wasn’t the type to tell him; he would only
smile and turn the conversation into some other channel. Quite normally, Tommy asked
someone else, and when he finally got the story, I guess he also got the shock of his
young life.
The person he asked was his partner on the laundry’s steam ironer and folder. The
inmates call this device the mangier, because that’s exactly what it will do to you if you