Porvenir. The message side of
the card was totally blank. But I know. I know it in my heart as surely as I know that
we‘re all going to die someday.
McNary was where he crossed. McNary, Texas.
So that‘s my story, Jack. I never believed how long it would take to write it all down, or
how many pages it would take. I started writing just after I got that postcard, and here I
am finishing up on 14 January 1976. I‘ve used three pencils right down to knuckle-stubs,
and a whole tablet of paper. I‘ve kept the pages carefully hidden ... not that many could
read my. hen-tracks, anyway.
It stirred up more memories than I ever would have believed. Writing about yourself
seems to be a lot like sticking a branch into clear river-water and roiling up the muddy
bottom.
Well, you weren‘t writing about yourself, I hear someone in the peanut-gallery saying.
You were writing about Andy Dufresne. You‘re nothing but a minor character in your
own story. But you know, that‘s just not so. It‘s all about me, every damned word of it
Andy was the part of me they could never lock up, the part of me that will rejoice when
the gates finally open for me and I walk out in my cheap suit with my twenty dollars of
mad-money in my pocket That part of me will rejoice no matter how old and broken and
scared the rest of me is. I guess it‘s just that Andy had more of that part than me, and used
it better.
There are others here like me, others who remember Andy. We‘re glad he‘s gone, but a
little sad, too. Some birds are not meant to be caged, that‘s all. Their feathers are too
bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to
feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to
imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much
more drab and empty for their departure.
That‘s the story and I‘m glad I told it, even if it is a bit inconclusive and even though
some of the memories the pencil prodded up (like that branch poking up the river-mud)
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 quic

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