of myth-magic, if you get what I mean. That story I passed on about Andy refusing to give
Bogs Diamond a head-job is part of that myth, and how he kept on fighting the sisters is
part of it, and how he got the library job is part of it, too … but with one important
difference: I was there and I saw what happened, and I swear on my mother’s name that
it’s all true. The oath of a convicted murderer may not be worth much, but believe this: I
don’t lie.
Andy and I were on fair speaking terms by then. The guy fascinated me. Looking back
to the poster episode, I see there’s one thing I neglected to tell you, and maybe I should.
Five weeks after he hung Rita up (I’d forgotten all about it by then, and had gone on to
other deals), Ernie passed a small white box through the bars of my cell.
‘From Dufresne,’ he said, low, and never missed a stroke with his push-broom.
Thanks, Ernie,’ I said, and slipped him half a pack of Camels.
Now what the hell was this, I was wondering as I slipped the cover from the box. There
was a lot of white cotton inside, and below that…
I looked for a long time. For a few minutes it was like I didn’t even dare touch them,
they were so pretty. There’s a crying shortage of pretty things in the slam, and the real pity
of it is that a lot of men don’t even seem to miss them.
There were two pieces of quartz in that box, both of them carefully polished. They had
been chipped into driftwood shapes. There were little sparkles of iron pyrites in them like
flecks of gold. If they hadn’t been so heavy, they would have served as a fine pair of men’s
cufflinks – they were that close to being a matched set
How much work went into creating those two pieces? Hours and hours after lights out, I
knew that First the chipping and shaping, and then the almost endless polishing and
finishing with those rock-blankets. Looking at them, I felt the warmth that any man or
woman feels when he or she is looking at something pretty, something that has been
worked and made – that’s the thing that really separates us from the animals, I think – and I felt something else, too. A sense of awe for the man’s brute persistence. But I never knew
just how persistent Andy Dufresne could be until much later.
In May of 1950, the powers that be decided that the roof of the licence-plate factory
ought to be resurfaced with roofing tar. They wanted it done before it got too hot up there, and they sued for volunteers for the work, which was planned to take about a week. More
than seventy men spoke up, because it was outside work and May is one damn fine month
for outside work. Nine or ten names were drawn out of a hat, and two of them happened
to be Andy’s and my own.
For the next week we’d be marched out to the exercise yard after breakfast, with two
guards up front and two more
behind … plus all the guards in the towers keeping a weather
eye on the proceedings through their field-glasses for good
measure.
Four of us would be carrying a big extension ladder on those morning marches -1
always got a kick out of the way Dickie Betts, who was on that job, called that sort of
ladder an extensible – and we’d put it up against the side of that low, lit building. Then
we’d start bucket-brigading hot buckets of tar up to the roof. Spill that shit on you and
you’d jitterbug all the way to the infirmary.
There were six guards on the project, all of them picked on the basis of seniority. It was
almost as good as a week’s vacation, because instead of sweating it out in the laundry or
the plate-shop or standing over a bunch of cons cutting pulp or brush somewhere out in
the willy wags, they were having a regular May holiday in the sun, just sitting there with their backs up against the low parapet, shooting the bull back and forth.
They didn’t even have to keep more than half an eye on us, because the south wall
sentry post was close enough so that rte fellows up there could have spit their chews on
us, if ihsy’d wanted to. If anyone on the roof-sealing party had made one funny move, it
would take four seconds to cut him smack in two with .45 calibre machine-gun bullets.
So those screws just sat there and took their ease. All they needed was
a couple of
six-packs buried in crushed ice, and they would have been the lords of all creation.
One of them was a fellow named Byron Hadley, and in :hat year of 1950, he’d been at
Shawshank longer than I had. Longer than the last two wardens put together, as a matter
of “act. The fellow running the show in 1950 was a prissy-looking downcast Yankee
named George Dunahy. He had a degree in penal administration. No one liked him, as far
as I could tell, except the people who had gotten him his appointment. I heard that he
wasn’t interested in anything but compiling statistics for a book (which was later
published by a small New England outfit called Light Side Press, where he probably had
to pay to have it done), who won the intramural baseball championship each September,
and getting a death-penalty law passed in Maine. A regular bear for the death-penalty was
George Dunahy. He was fired off the job in 1953, when it came out he was running a
discount auto repair service down in the prison garage and splitting the profits with Byron
Hadley and Greg Stammas. Hadley and Stammas came out of that one okay – they were
old hands at keeping their asses covered – but Dunahy took a walk. No one was sorry to
see him go, but nobody was exactly pleased to see Greg Stammas step into his shoes,
either. He was a short man with a tight, hard gut and the coldest brown eyes you ever saw.
He always had a painful, pursed little grin on his face, as if he had to go to the bathroom
and couldn’t quite manage it. During Stammas’s tenure as warden there was a lot of
brutality at Shawshank, and although I have no proof, I believe there were maybe half a
dozen moonlight burials in the stand of scrub forest that lies east of the prison. Dunahy
was bad, but Greg Stammas was a cruel, wretched, cold-hearted man.
He and Byron Hadley were good friends. As warden, George Dunahy was nothing but a
posturing figurehead; it was Stammas, and through him, Hadley, who actually
administered the prison.
Hadley was a tail, shambling man with thinning red hair. He sunburned easily and he
talked loud and if you didn’t move fast enough to suit him, he’d clout you with his stick.
On that day, our third on the roof, he was talking to another guard named Mert
Entwhistle.
Hadley had gotten some amazingly good news, so he was griping about it. That was his
style – he was a thankless man with not a good word for anyone, a man who was
convinced that the whole world was against him. The world had cheated him out of the
best years of his life, and the world would be more than happy to cheat him out of the
rest. I have seen some screws that I thought were almost saintly, and I think I know why
that happens – they are able to see the difference between their own lives, poor and
struggling as they might be, and the lives of the men they are paid by the state to watch
over. These guards are able to formulate a comparison concerning pain. Others can’t, or
won’t.
For Byron Hadley there was no basis of comparison. He could sit there, cool and at his
ease under the warm May sun and find the gall to mourn his own good luck while less
than ten feet away a bunch of men were working and sweating and burning their hands on
great big buckets filled with bubbling tar, men who had to work so hard in their ordinary
round of days that this looked like a respite. You may remember the old question, the one that’s supposed to define your outlook on life when you answer it. For Byron Hadley the
answer would always be half empty, the glass is half empty. Forever and ever, amen. If
you gave him a cool drink of apple cider, he’d think about vinegar. If you told him his
wife had always been faithful to him, he’d tell you it was because she was so damn ugly.