肖申克的救赎 The Shawshank Redemption 第三章

By World Series time of 1950 - this was the year Bobby Thompson hit his famous home
run at the end of the season, 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 20s 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 ‘and and a Greyhound bus ticket
in the other. He was crying "hen he left. Shawshank was his world. What lay beyond its
vails was as terrible to Brooks as the Western Seas had been to superstitious 13th-century
sailors. In prison, Brooksie had been a person of some importance. He was the head
librarian, in educated man. If he went to the Kittery library and asked or a job, they
wouldn‘t give him a library card. I heard he lied in a home for indigent old folks up
Freeport way in 1952, 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 head 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 Geographies into the
best prison library in New England.
He did it a step at a time. He put a suggestion box by the door and patiently weeded out
such attempts at humour as More Fuk-Boox Pleeze and Escape in 10 EZ Lesions. He got
sold of the things the prisoners seemed serious about. He wrote to three major book clubs
in New York and got two of them, The Literary Guild and The Book of the Month Club,
to send editions of all their major selections to us at a special cheap rate. He discovered a
hunger for information on such snail hobbies as soap-carving, woodworking, sleight of
hand, and card solitaire. He got all the books he could on such subjects. And those two
jailhouse staples, Erie Stanley Gardener and Louis L‘Amour. Cons never seem to get
enough of the courtroom or the open range. And yes, he did keep a box of fairly spicy
paperbacks under the checkout desk, loaning them out carefully and making sure they
always got back. Even so, each new acquisition of that type was quickly read to tatters.
He began to write to the state senate in Augusta in 1954. Staminas was warden by then,
and he used to pretend Andy was some sort of mascot He was always in the library,
shooting the bull with Andy, and sometimes he‘

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