f acquitted, wasn‘t it true that Andy stood to gain $50,000
in benefits? True. And wasn‘t it true that he had gone up to Glenn Quentin‘s house with
murder in his heart, and wasn‘t it also true that he had indeed committed murder twice
over? No, it was not true. Then what did he think had happened, since there had been no
signs of robbery?
‘I have no way of knowing that, sir,‘ Andy said quietly.
The case went to the jury at one p.m. on a snowy Wednesday afternoon. The twelve
jurymen and women came back at three-thirty. The bailiff said they would have been
back earlier, but they had held off in order to enjoy a nice chicken dinner from Bentley‘s
Restaurant at the county‘s expense. They found him guilty, and brother, if Maine had the
death penalty, he would have done the airdance before that spring‘s crocuses poked their
heads out of the dirt.
The DA had asked him what he thought had happened, and Andy slipped the question -
but he did have an idea, and I got it out of him late one evening in 1955. It had taken
those seven years for us to progress from nodding acquaintances to fairly close friends -
but I never felt really close to Andy until 1960 or so, and I believe I was the only one
who ever did get really close to him. Both being long-timers, we were in the same
cellblock from beginning to end, although I was halfway down the corridor from him.
‘What do I think?‘ He laughed - but there was no humour in the sound. ‘I think there was a
lot of bad luck floating around that night. More than could ever get together in the same
short span of time again. I think it must have been some stranger, just passing through.
Maybe someone who had a flat tyre on that road after I went home. Maybe a burglar.
Maybe a psychopath. He killed them, that‘s all. And I‘m here.‘
As simple as that. And he was condemned to spend the rest of his life in Shawshank - or
the part of it that mattered. Five years later he began to have parole hearings, and he was
turned down just as regular as clockwork in spite of being a model prisoner. Getting a
pass out of Shawshank when you‘ve got murder stamped on your admittance-slip is slow
work, as slow as a river eroding a rock. Seven men sit on the board, two more than at
most state prisons, and every one of those seven has an ass as hard as the water drawn up
from a mineral-spring well You can‘t buy those guys, you can‘t no, you can‘t cry for them.
As far as the board concerned, money don‘t talk, and nobody walks. pc other reasons in
Andy‘s case as well ... but that belongs a little further along in my story.
There was a trusty, name of Kendricks, who was into me for some pretty heavy money
back in the fifties, and it was four years before he got it all paid off. Most of the interest
he paid me was information - in my line of work, you‘re dead if you can‘t find ways of
keeping your ear to the ground. This Kendricks, for instance, had access to records I was
never going to see running a stamper down in the goddam plate-shop.
Kendricks told me that the parole board vote was 7-0 against Andy Dufresne through
1957,6-1 in ‘58, 7-0 again in ‘59, and 5-2 in ‘60. After that I don‘t know, but I do know
that sixteen years later he was still in Cell 14 of Cellblock 5. By tben, 1976, he was fiftyeight.
They probably would have fatten big-hearted and let him out around 1983. They
give you fife, and that‘s what they take - all of it that counts, anyway. Maybe they set you
loose someday, but ... well, Listen: I knew this guy, Sherwood Bolton, his name was, and
he had this pigeon in his cell. From 1945 until 1953, when they let him out, he had that
pigeon. He wasn‘t any Birdman of Alcatraz; he just had this pigeon. Jake, he called him.
He set Jake free a day before he, Sherwood, that is, was to walk, and Jake flew away just
as pretty as you could want. But about a week after Sherwood Bolton le

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