made me feel a little sad and even older than I am. Thank you for listening. And Andy: If
you’re really down there, as I believe you are, look at the stars for me just after sunset, and
touch the sand, and wade in the water, and feel free.
I never expected to take up this narrative again, but here I am with the dog-eared,
folded pages open on the desk in front of me. Here I am adding another three or four
pages, writing in a brand-new tablet. A tablet I bought in a store – I just walked into a
store on Portland’s Congress Street and bought it.
I thought I had put finish to my story in a Shawshank prison cell on a bleak January
day in 1976. Now it’s late June of 1977 and I am sitting in a small, cheap room of the
Brewster Hotel in Portland, adding to it
The window is open, and the sound of the traffic floating in seems huge, exciting, and
intimidating. I have to look constantly over at the window and reassure myself that there
are no bars on it I sleep poorly at night because the bed in this room, as cheap as the room
is, seems much too big and luxurious. I snap awake every morning promptly at six-thirty,
feeling disorientated and frightened. My dreams are bad. I have a crazy feeling of free
fall. The sensation is as terrifying as it is exhilarating.
What has happened in my life? Can’t you guess? I was paroled. After thirty-eight years
of routine hearings and routine details (in the course of those thirty-eight years, three
lawyers died on me), my parole was granted. I suppose they decided that, at the age of
fifty-eight, I was finally used up enough to be deemed safe.
I came very close to burning the document you have just read. They search outgoing
parolees just as carefully as they search incoming ‘new fish’. And beyond containing
enough dynamite to assure me of a quick turnaround and another six or eight years inside,
my ‘memoirs’ contained something else: the name of the town where I believe Andy
Dufresne to be. Mexican police gladly cooperate with the American police, and I didn’t
want my freedom – or my unwillingness to give up the story I’d worked so long and hard
to write — to cost Andy his.
Then I remembered how Andy had brought in his five hundred dollars back in 1948,
and I took out my story of him the same way. Just to be on the safe side, I carefully
rewrote each page which mentioned Zihuatanejo. If the papers had been found during my
‘outside search’, as they call it at the Shank, I would have gone back in on turnaround …
but the cops would have been looking for Andy in a Peruvian seacoast town named Las
Intrudres.
The Parole Committee got me a job as a ‘stock-room assistant’ at the big FoodWay
Market at the Spruce Mall in South Portland – which means I became just one more
ageing bag-boy. There’s only two kinds of bag-boys, you know; the old ones and the
young ones. No one ever looks at either kind. If you shop at the Spruce Mall FoodWay, I
may have even taken your groceries out to your car … but you’d have had to have shopped
there between March and April of 1977, because that’s as long as I worked there.
At first I didn’t think I was going to be able to make it on the outside at all. I’ve
described prison society as a scaled-down model of your outside world, but I had no idea
of how fast things moved on the outside; the raw speed people move at. They even talk faster. And louder.
It was the toughest adjustment I’ve ever had to make, and I haven’t finished making it
yet … not by a long way. Women, for instance. After hardly knowing that they were half
of the human race for forty years, I was suddenly working in a store filled with them. Old
women, pregnant women wearing T-shirts with arrows pointing downward and the
printed motto reading BABY HERE, skinny women with their nipples poking out of their
shirts – a woman wearing something like that when I went in would have gotten arrested
and then had a sanity hearing – women of every shape and size. I found myself going
around with a semi-hard almost all the time and cursing myself for being a dirty old man.
Going to the bathroom, that was another thing. When I had to go (and the urge always
came on me at twenty-five past the hour), I had to fight the almost overwhelming need to
check it with my boss. Knowing that was something I could just go and do in this too-
bright outside world was one thing; adjusting my inner self to that knowledge after all
those years of checking it with the nearest screwhead or facing two days in solitary for the
oversight… that was something else.
My boss didn’t like me. He was a young guy, twenty-six or -seven, and I could see that
I sort of disgusted him, the way a cringing, servile old dog that crawls up to you on its
belly to be petted will disgust a man. Christ, I disgusted myself. But … I couldn’t make
myself stop. I wanted to tell him, That’s what a whole life in prison does for you, young
man. It turns everyone in a position of authority into a master, and you into every master’s
dog. Maybe you know you’ve become a dog, even in prison, but since everyone else in
grey is a dog, too, it doesn’t seem to matter so much. Outside, it does. But I couldn’t tell a
young guy like him. He would never understand. Neither would my P.O., a big, bluff ex-
Navy man with a huge red beard and a large stock of Polish jokes. He saw me for about
five minutes every week. ‘Are you staying out of the bars, Red?’ he’d ask when he’d run
out of Polish jokes. I’d say yeah, and that would be the end of it until next week.
Music on the radio. When I went in, the big bands were just getting up a good head of
steam. Now every song sounds like it’s about fucking. So many cars. At first I felt like I
was taking my life into my hands every time I crossed the street.
There was more – everything was strange and frightening -but maybe you get the idea,
or can at least grasp a corner of it I began to think about doing something to get back in.
When you’re on parole, almost anything will serve. I’m ashamed to say it, but I began to
think about stealing some money or shoplifting stuff from the FoodWay, anything, to get
back in where it was quiet and you knew everything that was going to come up in the
course of the day.
If I had never known Andy, I probably would have done that But I kept thinking of
him, spending all those years chipping patiently away at the cement with his rock-
hammer so he could be free. I thought of that and it made me ashamed and I’d drop the
idea again. Oh, you can say he had more reason to be free than I did – he had a new
identity and a lot of money. But that’s not really true, you know. Because he didn’t know
for sure that the new identity was still there, and without the new identity, the money
would always be out of reach. No, what he needed was just to be free, and if I kicked
away what I had, it would be like spitting in the face of everything he had worked so hard
to win back.
So what I started to do on my time off was to hitchhike a ride down to the little town of
Buxton. This was in the early April of 1977, the snow just starting to melt off the fields,
the air just beginning to be warm, the baseball teams coming north to start a new season
playing the only game I’m sure God approves of. When I went on these trips, I carried a
Silva compass in my pocket.
There’s a big hayfield in Buxton, Andy had said, and at the north end of that hayfield there’s a rock wall, right out of a Robert Frost poem. And somewhere along the base of
that wall is a rock that has no earthly business in a Maine hayfield.
A fool’s errand, you say. How many hayfields are there in a small rural town like
Buxton? Fifty? A hundred? Speaking from personal experience, I’d put it at even higher
than that, if you add in the fields now cultivated which might have been haygrass when