stop. If you want to buy this particular Brooklyn Bridge, that’s your affair. Don’t make it
mine. I could hear crazy stories like yours twice a week if I wanted to lay myself open to
them. Every sinner in this place would be using me for a crying towel. I had more respect
for you. But this is the end. The end. Have we got an understanding?’
‘Yes,’ Andy said. ‘But I’ll be hiring a lawyer, you know.’
‘What in God’s name for?’
‘I think we can put it together,’ Andy said. ‘With Tommy Williams and with my
testimony and corroborative testimony from records and employees at the country club, I
think we can put it together.’
‘Tommy Williams is no longer an inmate of this facility.’
‘What?’
‘He’s been transferred.’
‘Transferred where?’
‘Cashman.’
At that, Andy fell silent. He was an intelligent man, but it would have taken an
extraordinarily stupid man not to smelt deal all over that. Cashman was a minimum-
security prison far up north in Aroostook County. The inmates pick a lot of potatoes, and
that’s hard work, but they are paid a decent wage for their labour and they can attend
classes at CVI, a pretty decent vocational-technical institute, if they so desire. More
important to a fellow like Tommy, a fellow with a young wife and a child, Cashman had a
furlough programme … which meant a chance to live like a normal man, at least on the
weekends. A chance to build a model plane with his kid, have sex with his wife, maybe go on a picnic.
Norton had almost surely dangled all of that under Tommy’s nose with only one string
attached: not one more word about Elwood Blatch, not now, not ever. Or you’ll end up
doing hard time in Thomaston down there on scenic Route 1 with the real hard guys, and
instead of having sex with your wife you’ll be having it with some old bull queer.
‘But why?’ Andy said. ‘Why would -‘
‘As a favour to you,’ Norton said calmly, ‘I checked with Rhode Island. They did have
an inmate named Elwood Blatch. He was given what they call a PP – provisional parole,
another one of these crazy liberal programmes to put criminals out on the streets. He’s
since disappeared.’
Andy said: ‘The warden down there … is he a friend of yours?’
Sam Norton gave Andy a smile as cold as a deacon’s watchchain. ‘We are acquainted,’
he said.
‘ Why?’ Andy repeated. ‘Can’t you tell me why you did it? You knew I wasn’t going to
talk about … about anything you might have had going. You knew that. So why?
‘Because people like you make me sick,’ Norton said deliberately. ‘I like you right
where you are, Mr Dufresne, and as long as I am warden here at Shawshank, you are
going to be right here. You see, you used to think that you were better than anyone else. I
have gotten pretty good at seeing that on a man’s face. I marked it on yours the first time I
walked into the library. It might as well have been written on your forehead in capital
letters. That look is gone now, and I like that just fine. It is not just that you are a useful
vessel, never think that. It is simply that men like you need to learn humility. Why, you
used to walk around that exercise yard as if it was a living room and you were at one of
those cocktail parties where the hellhound walk around coveting each others’ wives and
husbands and getting swinishly drunk. But you don’t walk around that way anymore. And
I’ll be watching to see if you should start to walk that way again. Over a period of years,
I’ll be watching you with great pleasure. Now get the hell out of here.’
‘Okay. But all the extracurricular activities stop now, Norton. The investment
counselling, the scams, the free tax advice. It all stops. Get H & R Block to tell you how
to declare your extortionate income.’
Warden Norton’s face first went brick-red … and then all the colour fell out of it
‘You’re going back into solitary for that Thirty days. Bread and water. Another black
mark. And while you’re in, think about this: if anything that’s been going on should stop, the library goes. I will make it my personal business to see that it goes back to what it was
before you came here. And I will make your life… very hard. Very difficult You’ll do the
hardest time it’s possible to do. You’ll lose that one-bunk Hilton down in Cellblock 5, for
starters, and you’ll lose those rocks on the windowsill, and you’ll lose any protection the
guards have given you against the sodomites. You will… lose everything. Clear?’
I guess it was clear enough.
Time continued to pass – the oldest trick in the world, and maybe the only one that
really is magic. But Andy Dufresne had changed. He had grown harder. That’s the only
way I can think of to put it He went on doing Warden Norton’s dirty work and he held
onto the library, so outwardly things were about the same. He continued to have his
birthday drinks and his New Year’s Eve drinks; he continued to share out the rest of each
bottle. I got him fresh rock-polishing cloths from time to time, and in 1967 I got him a
new rock-hammer – the one I’d gotten him nineteen years ago had plumb worn out
Nineteen years! When you say it sudden like that, those three syllables sound like the
thud and double-locking of a tomb door. The rock-hammer, which had been a ten-dollar
item back then, went for twenty-two by ’67. He and I had a sad little grin over that
Andy continued to shape and polish the rocks he found in the exercise yard, but the
yard was smaller by then; half of what had been there in 1950 had been asphalted over in 1962. Nonetheless, he found enough to keep him occupied, I guess. When he had finished
with each rock he would put it carefully on his window ledge, which faced east He told
me he liked to look at them in the sun, the pieces of the planet he had taken up from the
dirt and shaped. Schists, quartzes, granites. Funny little mica sculptures that were held
together with airplane glue. Various sedimentary conglomerates that were polished and
cut in such a way that you could see why Andy called them ‘millennium sandwiches’ – the
layers of different material that had built up over a period of decades and centuries.
Andy would give his stones and his rock-sculptures away from time to time in order to
make room for new ones. He gave me the greatest number, I think – counting the stones
that looked like matched cufflinks, I had five. There was one of the mica sculptures I told
you about, carefully crafted to look like a man throwing a javelin, and two of the sedi-
mentary conglomerates, all the levels showing in smoothly polished cross-section. I’ve
still got them, and I take them down every so often and think about what a man can do, if
he has time enough and the will to use it, a drop at a time.
So, on the outside, at least, things were about the same. If Norton had wanted to break
Andy as badly as he had said, he would have had to look below the surface to see the
change. But if he had seen how different Andy had become, I think Norton would have
been well-satisfied with the four years following his clash with Andy.
He had told Andy that Andy walked around the exercise yard as if he were at a cocktail
party. That isn’t the way I would have put it, but I know what he meant. It goes back to
what I said about Andy wearing his freedom like an invisible coat, about how he never
really developed a prison mentality. His eyes never got that dull look. He never developed
the walk that men get when the day is over and they are going back to their cells for
another endless night – that flat-footed, hump-shouldered walk. Andy walked with his
shoulders squared and his step was always light, as if he was heading home to a good
home-cooked meal and a good woman instead of to a tasteless mess of soggy vegetables,
lumpy mashed potato, and a slice or two of that fatty, gristly stuff most of the cons called
mystery meat … that, and a picture of Raquel Welch on the wall.
But for those four years, although he never became exactly like the others, he did
become silent, introspective, and brooding. Who could blame him? So maybe it was
Warden Norton who was pleased … at least, for a while.