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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 rock would not hide us nor the dead tree give us shelter. He had a Bible quote for
every occasion, did Mr Sam Norton, and whenever you meet a man like that, my best
advice to you would be to grin big and cover up your balls with both hands.
There were less infirmary cases than in the days of Greg Stammas, and so far as I know
the moonlight burials ceased altogether, but this is not to say that Norton was not a
believer in punishment. Solitary was always well populated. Men lost their teeth not from
beatings but from bread and water diets. It began to be called grain and drain, as in Tm on
the Sam Norton grain and drain train, boys.'
The man was the foulest hypocrite that I ever saw in a high position. The rackets I told
you about earlier continued to flourish, but Sam Norton added his own new wrinkles.
Andy knew about them all, and because we had gotten to be pretty good friends by that
time, he let me in on some of them. When Andy talked about them, an expression of
amused, disgusted wonder would come over his face, as if he was telling me about some
ugly, predatory species of bug that has, by its very ugliness and greed, somehow more
comic than terrible.
It was Warden Norton who instituted the 'Inside-Out' programme you may have read
about some sixteen or seventeen years back; it was even written up in Newsweek. In the
press it sounded like a real advance in practical corrections and rehabilitation. There were
prisoners out cutting pulpwood, prisoners repairing bridges and causeways, prisoners
constructing potato cellars. Norton called it 'Inside-Out' and was invited to explain it to
damn near every Rotary and Kiwanis club in New England, especially after he got his
picture in Newsweek. The prisoners called it 'road-ganging', but so far as I know, none of
them were ever invited to express their views to the Kiwanians or the Loyal Order of the
Moose.
Norton was right in there on every operation, thirty-year church-pin and all, from cutting