“Wellnow,” Norton said. “It’s pretty obvious to me that this young fellow Williams is impressed with you. Quite taken with you, as a matter of fact. He hears your tale of woe, and it’s quite natural of him to want to ... cheer you up, let’s say. Quite natural. He’s a young man, not terribly bright. Not surprising he didn’t realize what a state it would put you into. Now what I suggest is—”
“Don’t you think I thought of that?” Andy asked. “But I’d never told Tommy about the man working down at the marina. I never told anyone that—it never even crossed my mind! But Tommy’s description of his cellmate and that man
... they’re
identical
!” ”Wellnow, you may be indulging in a little selective perception there,” Norton said with a chuckle. Phrases like that, selective perception, are required learning for people in the penology and corrections business, and they use them all they can.
“That’s not it all. Sir.”
“That’s your slant on it,” Norton said, “but mine differs. And let’s remember that I have only your word that there was such a man working at the Falmouth Hills Country Club back then.”
“No, sir,” Andy broke in again. “No, that isn’t true. Because—”
“Anyway,” Norton overrode him, expansive and loud, “let’s just look at it from the other end of the telescope, shall we? Suppose—just suppose, now—that there really was a fellow named Elwood Blotch.”
“Blatch,” Andy said tightly.
“Blatch, by all means. And let’s say he was Thomas Williams’s cellmate in Rhode Island. The chances are excellent that he has been released by now.
Excellent.
Why, we don’t even know how much time he might have done there before he ended up with Williams, do we? Only that he was doing a six-to-twelve.”
“No. We don’t know how much time he’d done. But Tommy said he was a bad actor, a cut-up. I think there’s a fair chance that he may still be in. Even if he’s been released, the prison will have a record of his last known address, the names of his relatives—”
“And both would almost certainly be dead ends.”
Andy was silent for a moment, and then he burst out:
“Well, it’s a
chance,
isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course it is. So just for a moment, Dufresne, let’s assume that Blatch exists and that he is still ensconced in the Rhode Island State Penitentiary. Now what is he going to say if we bring this kettle of fish to him in a bucket? Is he going to fall down on his knees, roll his eyes, and say: ‘I did it! I did it! By all means add a life term onto my 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 all the old time-cards, don’t you realize that?” Andy shouted. “They’ll have tax-forms and W-twos 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 Blatch!
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!
Guard!
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 fingering 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 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 “penology” 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 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, throw down some grain or maybe a piece of maggoty meat once or twice a week, and maybe there would be a dipperful of 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 the 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 toward 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 got ventilation from above, but no light except for your own sixty-watt bulb, which was turned off from a master-switch promptly at 8:00 P.M., an hour before lights-out in the rest of the prison. The lightbulb 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 favor 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 gray 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 squeeze, 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.”
“Wellnow, 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 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’s 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 smell
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 labor 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 program... 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 favor 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 programs 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 hellbound 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 counseling, the scams, the free tax advice. It all stops. Get H and R Block to tell you how to declare your income.”