his knees, roil his eyes, and say “I did it! I did it! By all means add a life term onto my
burglary charge!”?’
‘How can you be so obtuse?’ Andy said, so low that Chester could barely hear. But he
heard the warden just fine.
‘What? What did you call me?’
‘Obtuse? Andy cried. ‘Is it deliberate?’
‘Dufresne, you’ve taken five minutes of my time – no, seven – and I have a very busy
schedule today. So I believe we’ll just declare this little meeting closed and -‘
‘The country club will have ail the old time-cards, don’t you realize that?’ Andy
shouted. They’ll have tax-forms and W-2s and unemployment compensation forms, all
with his name on them! There will be employees there now that were there then, maybe
Briggs himself! It’s been fifteen years, not forever! They’ll remember him! They will
remember Blotch! If I’ve got Tommy to testify to what Blatch told him, and Briggs to
testify that Blatch was there, actually working at the country club, I can get a new trial! I can —’
‘Guard! Guardl Take this man away!’
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Andy said, and Chester told me he was very nearly
screaming by then. ‘It’s my life, my chance to get out, don’t you see that? And you won’t
make a single long-distance call to at least verify Tommy’s story? Listen, I’ll pay for the
call! I’ll pay for -‘
Then there was a sound of thrashing as the guards grabbed him and started to drag him
out
‘Solitary,’ Warden Norton said dryly. He was probably – gering his thirty-year pin as he
said it ‘Bread and water.’
And so they dragged Andy away, totally out of control now, still screaming at the
warden; Chester said you could hear him even after the door was shut: ‘It’s my life! It’s my
life, don’t you understand it’s my life?’
Twenty days on the grain and drain train for Andy down there in solitary. It was his
second jolt in solitary, and his dust-up with Norton was his first real black mark since he
had joined our happy little family.
I’ll tell you a little bit about Shawshank’s solitary while we’re on the subject It’s
something of a throwback to those hardy pioneer days of the early-to-mid-1700s in
Maine. In ..those days no one wasted much time with such things as penalogy’ and
‘rehabilitation’ and ‘selective perception’. In ,those days, you were taken care of in terms of
absolute black and white. You were either guilty or innocent. If you were guilty, you were
either hung or put in gaol. And if you were sentenced to gaol, you did not go to an
institution. No, you dug your own gaol with a spade provided to you by the Province of
Maine. You dug it as wide and as deep as you could during the period between sunup and
sundown. Then ,they gave you a couple of skins and a bucket, and down you went Once
down, the gaoler would bar the top of your hole, -.row down some grain or maybe a piece
of maggoty meat once or twice a week, and maybe there would be a dipperful ; barley
soup on Sunday night You pissed in the bucket, and you held up the same bucket for
water when the gaoler came around at six in the morning. When it rained, you used lie
bucket to bail out your gaol-cell … unless, that is, you wanted to drown like a rat in a
rainbarrel.
No one spent a long time ‘in the hole’, as it was called; thirty months was an unusually
long term, and so far as I’ve been able to tell, the longest term ever spent from which an
inmate actually emerged alive was served by the so-called Durham Boy’, a fourteen-year-
old psychopath who castrated a schoolmate with a piece of rusty metal. He did seven
years, but of course he went in young and strong.
You have to remember that for a crime that was more serious than petty theft or
blasphemy or forgetting to put a snotrag in your pocket when out of doors on the Sabbath,
you were hung. For low crimes such as those just mentioned and for others like them,
you’d do your three or six or nine months in the hole and come out fishbelly white,
cringing from the wide-open spaces, your eyes half-blind, your teeth more than likely
rocking and rolling in their sockets from the scurvy, your feet crawling with fungus. Jolly
old Province of Maine. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.
Shawshank’s Solitary Wing was nowhere as bad as that… I guess. Things come in three
major degrees in the human experience, I think. There’s good, bad, and terrible. And as
you go down into progressive darkness towards terrible, it gets harder and harder to make
subdivisions.
To get to Solitary Wing you were led down twenty-three steps to a basement level
where the only sound was the drip of water. The only light was supplied by a series of
dangling sixty-watt bulbs. The cells were keg-shaped, like those wall-safes rich people
sometimes hide behind a picture. Like a safe, the round doorways were hinged, and solid
instead of barred. You get ventilation from above, but no light except for your own sixty-
watt bulb, which was turned off from a master-switch promptly at eight p.m., an hour
before lights-out in the rest of the prison. The wire wasn’t in a wire mesh cage or anything
like that. The feeling was that if you wanted to exist down there in the dark, you were
welcome to it. Not many did … but after eight, of course, you had no choice. You had a
bunk bolted to the wall and a can with no toilet seat. You had three ways to spend your
time: sitting, shitting, or sleeping. Big choice. Twenty days could get to seem like a year.
Thirty days could seem like two, and forty days like ten. Sometimes you could hear rats in
the ventilation system. In a situation like that, subdivisions of terrible tend to get lost.
If anything at all can be said in favour of solitary, it’s just that you get time to think.
Andy had twenty days in which to think while he enjoyed his grain and drain, and when
he got out he requested another meeting with the warden. Request denied. Such a
meeting, the warden told him, would be ‘counter-productive’. That’s another of those phrases you have to master before you can go to work in the prisons and corrections field.
Patiently, Andy renewed his request And renewed it And renewed it He had changed,
had Andy Dufresne. Suddenly, as that spring of 1963 bloomed around us, there were lines
in his face and sprigs of grey showing in his hair. He had lost that little trace of a smile
that always seemed to linger around his mouth. His eyes stared out into space more often,
and you get to know that when a man stares that way, he is counting up the years served,
the months, the weeks, the days.
He renewed his request and renewed it He was patient He had nothing but time. It got to
be summer. In Washington, President Kennedy was promising a fresh assault on poverty
and on civil rights inequalities, not knowing he had only half a year to live. In Liverpool,
a musical group called The Beatles was emerging as a force to be reckoned with in British
music, but I guess that no one Stateside had yet heard of them. The Boston Red Sox, still
four years away from what New England folks call The Miracle of ’67, were languishing
in the cellar of the American League. All of those things were going on out in a larger
world where people walked free.
Norton saw him near the end of June, and this conversation I heard about from Andy
himself some seven years later.
‘If it’s the money, you don’t have to worry,’ Andy told Norton in a low voice. ‘Do you
think I’d talk that up? I’d be cutting my own throat I’d be just as indictable as —’
That’s enough,’ Norton interrupted. His face was as long and cold as a slate gravestone.
He leaned back in his office chair until the back of his head almost touched the sampler
reading HIS JUDGMENT COMETH AND THAT RIGHT EARLY.
‘But-‘
‘Don’t you ever mention money to me again,’ Norton said. ‘Not in this office, not
anywhere. Not unless you want to see that library turned back into a storage room and
paint-locker again. Do you understand?’
‘I was trying to set your mind at ease, that’s all.’
‘Well now, when I need a sorry son of a bitch like you to set my mind at ease, I’ll retire.
I agreed to this appointment because I got tired of being pestered, Dufresne. I want it to