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you came here. And I will make your life... very hard. Very difficult You'll do the hardest
time it's possible to do. You'll lose that one-bunk Hilton down in Cellblock 5, for starters,
and you'll lose those rocks on the windowsill, and you'll lose any protection the guards
have given you against the sodomites. You will... lose everything. Clear?'
I guess it was clear enough.
Time continued to pass - the oldest trick in the world, and maybe the only one that really
is magic. But Andy Dufresne had changed. He had grown harder. That's the only way I
can think of to put it He went on doing Warden Norton's dirty work and he held onto the
library, so outwardly things were about the same. He continued to have his birthday
drinks and his New Year's Eve drinks; he continued to share out the rest of each bottle. I
got him fresh rock-polishing cloths from time to time, and in 1967 I got him a new rock-
hammer - the one I'd gotten him nineteen years ago had plumb worn out Nineteen years!
When you say it sudden like that, those three syllables sound like the thud and double-
locking of a tomb door. The rock-hammer, which had been a ten-dollar item back then,
went for twenty-two by '67. He and I had a sad little grin over that
Andy continued to shape and polish the rocks he found in the exercise yard, but the yard
was smaller by then; half of what had been there in 1950 had been asphalted over in
1962. Nonetheless, he found enough to keep him occupied, I guess. When he had finished
with each rock he would put it carefully on his window ledge, which faced east He told
me he liked to look at them in the sun, the pieces of the planet he had taken up from the
dirt and shaped. Schists, quartzes, granites. Funny little mica sculptures that were held
together with airplane glue. Various sedimentary conglomerates that were polished and
cut in such a way that you could see why Andy called them 'millennium sandwiches' - the
layers of different material that had built up over a period of decades and centuries.
Andy would give his stones and his rock-sculptures away from time to time in order to
make room for new ones. He gave me the greatest number, I think - counting the stones
that looked like matched cufflinks, I had five. There was one of the mica sculptures I told
you about, carefully crafted to look like a man throwing a javelin, and two of the
sedimentary conglomerates, all the levels showing in smoothly polished cross-section.
I've still got them, and I take them down every so often and think about what a man can
do, if he has time enough and the will to use it, a drop at a time.
So, on the outside, at least, things were about the same. If Norton had wanted to break
Andy as badly as he had said, he would have had to look below the surface to see the
change. But if he had seen how different Andy had become, I think Norton would have
been well-satisfied with the four years following his clash with Andy.
He had told Andy that Andy walked around the exercise yard as if he were at a cocktail
party. That isn't the way I would have put it, but I know what he meant. It goes back to
what I said about Andy wearing his freedom like an invisible coat, about how he never
really developed a prison mentality. His eyes never got that dull look. He never
developed the walk that men get when the day is over and they are going back to their
cells for another endless night - that flat-footed, hump-shouldered walk. Andy walked