肖申克的救赎 The Shawshank Redemption 第四章

‘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 ail 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! Guardl 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 - gering 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 penalogy‘ 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, -.row down some grain or maybe a piece
of maggoty meat once or twice a week, and maybe there would be a dipperful ; 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 lie
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-yearold
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 f

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