‘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 safely 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 burglary 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-2s 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 Blotch! 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 little 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 to you 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 towards 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 get ventilation from above, but no light except for your own sixty-watt bulb, which was turned off from a master-switch promptly at eight p.m., an hour before lights-out in the rest of the prison. The wire 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 favour 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 grey 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 money, 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 —’