rom 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 lightsout
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 -‘
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 th

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