Read Different Seasons for Free Online Page B

bars on his single slit window.
     
    Now I’m going to tell you what happened in mid-May of 1950 that finally ended Andy’s three-year series of skirmishes with the sisters. It was also the incident which eventually got him out of the laundry and into the library, where he filled out his work-time until he left our happy little family earlier this year.
    You may have noticed how much of what I’ve told you already is hearsay—someone saw something and told me and I told you. Well, in some cases I’ve simplified it even more than it really was, and have repeated (or will repeat) fourth-or fifth-hand information. That’s the way it is here. The grapevine is very real, and you have to use it if you’re going to stay ahead. Also, of course, you have to know how to pick out the grains of truth from the chaff of lies, rumors, and wish-it-had-beens.
    You may also have gotten the idea that I’m describing someone who’s more legend than man, and I would have to agree that there’s some truth to that. To us long-timers who knew Andy over a space of years, there was an element of fantasy to him, a sense, almost, of myth-magic, if you get what I mean. That story I passed on about Andy refusing to give Bogs Diamond a head-job is part of that myth, and how he kept on fighting the sisters is part of it, and how he got the library job is part of it, too ... but with one important difference: I was there and I saw what happened, and I swear on my mother’s name that it’s all true. The oath of a convicted murderer may not be worth much, but believe this: I don’t lie.
    Andy and I were on fair speaking terms by then. The guy fascinated me. Looking back to the poster episode, I see there’s one thing I neglected to tell you, and maybe I should. Five weeks after he hung Rita up (I’d forgotten all about it by then, and had gone on to other deals), Ernie passed a small white box through the bars of my cell.
    “From Dufresne,” he said, low, and never missed a stroke with his push-broom.
    “Thanks, Ernie,” I said, and slipped him half a pack of Camels.
    Now what the hell was this, I was wondering as I slipped the cover from the box. There was a lot of white cotton inside, and below that ...
    I looked for a long time. For a few minutes it was like I didn’t even dare touch them, they were so pretty. There’s a crying shortage of pretty things in the slam, and the real pity of it is that a lot of men don’t even seem to miss them.
    There were two pieces of quartz in that box, both of them carefully polished. They had been chipped into driftwood shapes. There were little sparkles of iron pyrites in them like flecks of gold. If they hadn’t been so heavy, they would have served as a fine pair of men’s cufflinks—they were that close to being a matched set.
    How much work went into creating those two pieces? Hours and hours after lights-out, I knew that. First the chipping and shaping, and then the almost endless polishing and finishing with those rock-blankets. Looking at them, I felt the warmth that any man or woman feels when he or she is looking at something pretty, something that has been worked and made —that’s the thing that really separates us from the animals, I think—and I felt something else, too. A sense of awe for the man’s brute persistence. But I never knew just how persistent Andy Dufresne could be until much later.
    In May of 1950, the powers that be decided that the roof of the license-plate factory ought to be re-surfaced with roofing tar. They wanted it done before it got too hot up there, and they asked for volunteers for the work, which was planned to take about a week. More than seventy men spoke up, because it was outside work and May is one damn fine month for outside work. Nine or ten names were drawn out of a hat, and two of them happened to be Andy’s and my own.
    For the next week we’d be marched out to the exercise yard after breakfast, with two guards up front and two more behind ...