Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption

He renewed his request and renewed it. He was patient. He had nothing but time. It got to be summer. In Washington, President Kennedy was promising a fresh assault on poverty and on civil rights inequalities, not knowing he had only half a year to live. In Liverpool, a musical group called The Beatles was emerging as a force to be reckoned with in British music, but I guess that no one Stateside had yet heard of them. The Boston Red Sox, still four years away from what New England folks call The Miracle of ’67, were languishing in the cellar of the American League. All of those things were going on out in a larger world where people walked free.

Norton saw him near the end of June, and this conversation I heard about from Andy himself some seven years later.

‘If it’s the money, you don’t have to worry,’ Andy told Norton in a low voice. ‘Do you think I’d talk that up? I’d be cutting my own throat I’d be just as indictable as —’

‘That’s enough,’ Norton interrupted. His face was as long and cold as a slate gravestone. He leaned back in his office chair until the back of his head almost touched the sampler reading HIS JUDGMENT COMETH AND THAT RIGHT EARLY.

‘But—’

‘Don’t you ever mention money to me again,’ Norton said. ‘Not in this office, not anywhere. Not unless you want to see that library turned back into a storage room and paint-locker again. Do you understand?’

‘I was trying to set your mind at ease, that’s all.’

‘Well now, when I need a sorry son of a bitch like you to set my mind at ease, I’ll retire. I agreed to this appointment because I got tired of being pestered, Dufresne. I want it to stop. If you want to buy this particular Brooklyn Bridge, that’s your affair. Don’t make it mine. I could hear crazy stories like yours twice a week if I wanted to lay myself open to them. Every sinner in this place would be using me for a crying towel. I had more respect for you. But this is the end. The end. Have we got an understanding?’

‘Yes,’ Andy said. ‘But I’ll be hiring a lawyer, you know.’

‘What in God’s name for?’

‘I think we can put it together,’ Andy said. ‘With Tommy Williams and with my testimony and corroborative testimony from records and employees at the country club, I think we can put it together.’

‘Tommy Williams is no longer an inmate of this facility.’

‘What?’

‘He’s been transferred.’

‘Transferred where?’

‘Cashman.’

At that, Andy fell silent. He was an intelligent man, but it would have taken an extraordinarily stupid man not to smelt deal all over that. Cashman was a minimum-security prison far up north in Aroostook County. The inmates pick a lot of potatoes, and that’s hard work, but they are paid a decent wage for their labour and they can attend classes at CVI, a pretty decent vocational-technical institute, if they so desire. More important to a fellow like Tommy, a fellow with a young wife and a child, Cashman had a furlough programme … which meant a chance to live like a normal man, at least on the weekends. A chance to build a model plane with his kid, have sex with his wife, maybe go on a picnic.

Norton had almost surely dangled all of that under Tommy’s nose with only one string attached: not one more word about Elwood Blatch, not now, not ever. Or you’ll end up doing hard time in Thomaston down there on scenic Route 1 with the real hard guys, and instead of having sex with your wife you’ll be having it with some old bull queer.

‘But why?’ Andy said. ‘Why would —’

‘As a favour to you,’ Norton said calmly, ‘I checked with Rhode Island. They did have an inmate named Elwood Blatch. He was given what they call a PP — provisional parole, another one of these crazy liberal programmes to put criminals out on the streets. He’s since disappeared.’

Andy said: ‘The warden down there … is he a friend of yours?’

Sam Norton gave Andy a smile as cold as a deacon’s watchchain. ‘We are acquainted,’ he said.

‘Why?’ Andy repeated. ‘Can’t you tell me why you did it? You knew I wasn’t going to talk about … about anything you might have had going. You knew that. So why?