----------------------- Page 23-----------------------
goddammit!' He looked back at Andy. 'You come over here with me, hotshot. And listen
to me well: if you're Jewing me somehow, you're gonna find yourself chasing your head
around Shower C before the week's out.'
'Yes, I understand that,' Andy said softly.
And he did understand it. The way it turned out, he understood a lot more than I did -
more than any of us did.
That's how, on the second-to-last day of the job, the convict crew that tarred the plate-
factory roof in 1950 ending up sitting in a row at ten o'clock on a spring morning,
drinking Black Label beer supplied by the hardest screw that ever walked a turn at
Shawshank Prison. That beer was piss-warm, but it was still the best I ever had in my life.
We sat and drank it and felt the sun on our shoulders, and not even the expression of half
amusement, half-contempt on Hadley's face - as if he was watching apes drink beer
instead of men -could spoil it. It lasted twenty minutes, that beer-break, and for those
twenty minutes we felt like free men. We could have been drinking beer and tarring the
roof of one of our own houses.
Only Andy didn't drink. I already told you about his -linking habits. He sat hunkered
down in the shade, hands dangling between his knees, watching us and smiling a little.
It's amazing how many men remember him that way, and amazing how many men were
on that work-crew when Andy Dufresne faced down Byron Hadley. I thought there were
nine or ten of us, but by 1955 there must have been two hundred of us, maybe more ... if
you believed what you heard.
So, yeah - if you asked me to give you a flat-out answer to the question of whether I'm
trying to tell you about a man or a legend that got made up around the man, like a pearl
around a little piece of grit - I'd have to say that the answer lies somewhere in between.
All I know for sure is that Andy Dufresne wasn't much like me or anyone else I ever
knew since I came inside. He brought in five hundred dollars jammed up his back porch,
but somehow that graymeat son of a bitch managed to bring in something else as well. A
sense of his own worth, maybe, or a feeling that he would be the winner in the end ... or
maybe it was only a sense of freedom, even inside these goddamned grey walls. It was a
kind of inner light he carried around with him. I only knew him to lose that light once,
and that is also a part of this story.
By World Series time of 1950 - this was the year Bobby Thompson hit his famous home
run at the end of the season, you will remember - Andy was having no more trouble from
the sisters. Stammas and Hadley had passed the word. If Andy Dufresne came to either of
them or any of the other screws that formed a part of their coterie, and showed so much
as a single drop of blood in his underpants, every sister in Shawshank would go to bed
that night with a headache. They didn't fight it As I have pointed out, there was always an
eighteen-year-old car thief or a firebug or some guy who'd gotten his kicks handling little
children. After the day on the plate-shop roof, Andy went his way and the sisters went
theirs.
He was working in the library then, under a tough old con named Brooks Hatlen. Hatlen