se, more Erie Stanley Gardeners and more Louis L‘Amours.
And I‘m convinced that what happened happened because Norton just didn‘t want to lose
his good right hand. I‘ll go further: it happened because he was scared of what might
happen - what Andy might say against him - if Andy ever got clear of Shawshank State
Prison.
I got the story a chunk here and a chunk there over a space of seven years, some of it
from Andy - but not all. He never wanted to talk about that part of his life, and I don‘t
blame him. I got parts of it from maybe half a dozen different sources. I‘ve said once that
prisoners are nothing but slaves, but they have that slave habit of looking dumb and
keeping their ears open. I got it backwards and forwards and in the middle, but I‘ll give it
to you from point A to point Z, and maybe you‘ll understand why the man spent about ten
months in a bleak, depressed daze. See, I don‘t think he knew the truth until 1963, fifteen
years after he came into this sweet little hell-hole. Until he met Tommy Williams, I don‘t
think he knew how bad it could get.
Tommy Williams joined our happy little Shawshank family in November of 1962.
Tommy thought of himself as a native of Massachusetts, but he wasn‘t proud; in his
twenty-seven years he‘d done time all over New England. He was a professional thief,
and as you may have guessed, my own feeling was that he should have picked another
profession.
He was a married man, and his wife came to visit each and every week. She had an idea
that things might go better with Tommy - and consequently better with their three-yearold
mi and herself - if he got his high school degree. She talked him into it, and so
Tommy Williams started visiting the library on a regular basis.
For Andy, this was an old routine by then. He saw that Tommy got a series of high school
equivalency tests. Tommy would brush up on the subjects he had passed in high-school -
there weren‘t many - and then take the test Andy also saw that he was enrolled in a
number of correspondence courses covering the subjects he had failed in school or just
missed by dropping out
He probably wasn‘t the best student Andy ever took over the jumps, and I don‘t know if
he ever did get his high school diploma, but that forms no part of my story. The important
thing was that he came to like Andy Dufresne very much, as most people did after a
while.
On a couple of occasions he asked Andy ‘what a smart guy like you is doing in the joint‘ -
a question which is the rough equivalent of that one that goes ‘What‘s a nice girl like you
doing in a place like this?‘ But Andy wasn‘t the type to tell him; he would only smile and
turn the conversation into some other channel. Quite normally, Tommy asked someone
else, and when he finally got the story, I guess he also got the shock of his young life.
The person he asked was his partner on the laundry‘s steam ironer and folder. The
inmates call this device the mangier, because that‘s exactly what it will do to you if you
aren‘t paying attention and get your bad self caught in it. His j partner was Charlie
Lathrop, who had been in for about twelve years on a murder charge. He was more than
glad to reheat the details of the Dufresne murder trial for Tommy; it broke the monotony
of pulling freshly pressed bedsheets out of the machine and tucking them into the basket.
He was just getting to the jury waiting until after lunch to bring in their guilty verdict
when the trouble whistle went off and the mangle grated to a stop. They had been feeding
in freshly washed sheets from the Eliot Nursing Home at the far end; these were spat out
dry and neatly pressed at Tommy‘s and Charlie‘s end at the rate of one every five seconds.
Their job was to grab them, fold them, and slap them into the cart, which had already
been lined with brown paper.
But Tommy Williams was just stan

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