rly 1959 a new warden was
appointed, and a new assistant warden, and a new chief of guards. For the next eight
months or so, Andy was just another con again. It was during that period that Normaden,
the big half-breed Passamaquoddy, shared Andy‘s cell with him. Then everything just
started up again. Normaden was moved out, and Andy was living in solitary splendour
again. The names at the top change, but die rackets never do.
I talked to Normaden once about Andy. ‘Nice fella,‘ Normaden said. It was hard to make
out anything he said because he had & harelip and a cleft palate; his words all came out
in a slush. ‘I liked it there. He never made fun. But he didn‘t want me there. I could tell.‘
Big shrug. ‘I was glad to go, me. Bad draught in that cell. All the time cold. He don‘t let
nobody touch his things. That‘s okay. Nice man, never made fun. But big draught.‘
Rita Hay worth hung in Andy‘s cell until 1955, if I remember right Then it was Marilyn
Monroe, that picture from The Seven Year Itch where she‘s standing over a subway
grating and the warm air is flipping her skirt up. Marilyn lasted until i960, and she was
considerably tattered about the edges when Andy replaced her with Jayne Mansfield.
Jayne was, you should pardon the expression, a bust. After only a year or so she was
replaced with an English actress - might have been Hazel Court, but I‘m not sure. In 1966
that one came down and Raquel Welch went up for a record-breaking six-year
engagement in Andy‘s ceil. The last poster to hang there was a pretty country-rock singer
whose name was Linda Ronstadt
I asked him once what the posters meant to him, and he gave me a peculiar, surprised sort
of look. ‘Why, they mean the same thing to me as they do to most cons, I guess,‘ he said.
‘Freedom. You look at those pretty women and you feel like you could almost ... not quite
but almost step right through and be beside them. Be free. I guess that‘s why I always
liked Raquel Welch the best It wasn‘t just her; it was that beach she was standing on.
Looked like she was down in Mexico somewhere. Someplace quiet, where a man would
be able to hear himself think. Didn‘t you ever feel that way about a picture, Red? That
you could almost step right through it?‘
I said I‘d never really thought of it that way.
‘Maybe someday you‘ll see what I mean,‘ he said, and he was right Years later I saw
exactly what he meant ... and when I did, the first thing I thought of was Normaden, and
about how he‘d said it was always cold in Andy‘s cell.
A terrible thing happened to Andy in late March or early April of 1963. I have told you
that he had something that most of the other prisoners, myself included, seemed to lack.
Call it a sense of equanimity, or a feeling of inner peace, maybe even a constant and
unwavering faith that someday the long nightmare would end. Whatever you want to call
it, Andy Dufresne always seemed to have his act together.
There was none of that sullen desperation about him that seems to afflict most lifers after
a while; you could never smell hopelessness on him. Until that late winter of ‘63.
We had another warden by then, a man named Samuel Norton. The Mather brothers,
Cotton and Increase, would have felt right at home with Sam Norton. So far as I know, no
one had ever seen him so much as crack a smile. He had a thirty-year pin from the Baptist
Advent Church of Eliot. His major innovation as the head of our happy family was to
make sure that each incoming prisoner had a New Testament. He had a small plaque on
his desk, gold letters inlaid in teakwood, which said CHRIST IS MY SAVIOUR. A
sampler on the wall, made by his wife, read: HIS JUDGMENT COMETH AND THAT
RIGHT EARLY. This latter sentiment cut zero ice with most of us. We felt that the
judgment had already occurred, and we would be willing to testify with the best of them
that the

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