Different Seasons(14)
“I’d just give you one piece of advice the IRS wouldn’t bother with,” Andy said. His eyes were fixed unwinkingly on Hadley’s. “Make this gift to your wife if you’re sure. If you think there’s even a chance she might double-cross you or backshoot you, we could work out something else—”
“Double-cross me?” Hadley asked harshly. “Double-cross me? Mr. Hotshot Banker, if she ate her way through a boxcar of Ex-Lax, she wouldn’t dare fart unless I gave her the nod.”
Mert, Youngblood, and the other screws yucked it up dutifully. Andy never cracked a smile.
“I’ll write down the forms you need,” he said. “You can get them at the post office, and I’ll fill them out for your signature.”
That sounded suitably important, and Hadley’s chest swelled. Then he glared around at the rest of us and hollered,
“What are you jimmies starin at? Move your asses, goddammit!” He looked back at Andy. “You come over here with me, hotshot. And listen to me well: if you’re jewing me somehow, you’re gonna find yourself chasing your own head around Shower C before the week’s out.”
“Yes, I understand that,” Andy said softly.
And he did understand it. The way it turned out, he understood a lot more than I did—more than any of us did.
That’s how, on the second-to-last day of the job, the convict crew that tarred the plate-factory roof in 1950 ended up sitting in a row at ten o’clock on a spring morning, drinking Black Label beer supplied by the hardest screw that ever walked a turn at Shawshank State Prison. That beer was pisswarm, but it was still the best I ever had in my life. We sat and drank it and felt the sun on our shoulders, and not even the expression of half-amusement, half-contempt on Hadley’s face—as if he were watching apes drink beer instead of men—could spoil it. It lasted twenty minutes, that beer-break, and for those twenty minutes we felt like free men. We could have been drinking beer and tarring the roof of one of our own houses.
Only Andy didn’t drink. I already told you about his drinking habit. He sat hunkered down in the shade, hands dangling between his knees, watching us and smiling a little. It’s amazing how many men remember him that way, and amazing how many men were on that work-crew when Andy Dufresne faced down Byron Hadley. I thought there were nine or ten of us, but by 1955 there must have been two hundred of us, maybe more ... if you believed what you heard.
So yeah—if you asked me to give you a flat-out answer to the question of whether I’m trying to tell you about a man or a legend that got made up around the man, like a pearl around a little piece of grit—I’d have to say that the answer lies somewhere in between. All I know for sure is that Andy Dufresne wasn’t much like me or anyone else I ever knew since I came inside. He brought in five hundred dollars jammed up his back porch, but somehow that graymeat son of a bitch managed to bring in something else as well. A sense of his own worth, maybe, or a feeling that he would be the winner in the end ... or maybe it was only a sense of freedom, even inside these goddamned gray walls. It was a kind of inner light he carried around with him. I only knew him to lose that light once, and that is also a part of this story.
By World Series time of 1950—this was the year the Philadelphia Whiz Kids dropped four straight, you will remember—Andy was having no more trouble from the sisters. Stammas and Hadley had passed the word. If Andy Dufresne came to either of them, or any of the other screws that formed a part of their coterie, and showed so much as a single drop of blood in his underpants, every sister in Shawshank would go to bed that night with a headache. They didn’t fight it. As I have pointed out, there was always an eighteen-year-old car thief or a firebug or some guy who’d gotten his kicks handling little children. After the day on the plate-shop roof, Andy went his way and the sisters went theirs.
He was working in the library then, under a tough old con named Brooks Hatlen. Hatlen had gotten the job back in the late twenties because he had a college education. Brooksie’s degree was in animal husbandry, true enough, but college educations in institutes of lower learning like The Shank are so rare that it’s a case of beggars not being able to be choosers.
In 1952 Brooksie, who had killed his wife and daughter after a losing streak at poker back when Coolidge was President, was paroled. As usual, the State in all its wisdom had let him go long after any chance he might have had to become a useful part of society was gone. He was sixty-eight and arthritic when he tottered out of the main gate in his Polish suit and his French shoes, his parole papers in one hand and a Greyhound bus ticket in the other. He was crying when he left. Shawshank was his world. What lay beyond its walls was as terrible to Brooks as the Western Seas had been to superstitious fifteenth-century sailors. In prison, Brooksie had been a person of some importance. He was the librarian, an educated man. If he went to the Kittery library and asked for a job, they wouldn’t even give him a library card. I heard he died in a home for indigent old folks up Freeport way in 1953, and at that he lasted about six months longer than I thought he would. Yeah, I guess the State got its own back on Brooksie, all right. They trained him to like it inside the shithouse and then they threw him out.
Andy succeeded to Brooksie’s job, and he was librarian for twenty-three years. He used the same force of will I’d seen him use on Byron Hadley to get what he wanted for the library, and I saw him gradually turn one small room (which still smelled of turpentine because it had been a paint closet until 1922 and had never been properly aired) lined with Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and National Geographics into the best prison library in New England.