As simple as that. And he was condemned to spend the rest of his life in Shawshank — or the part of it that mattered. Five years later he began to have parole hearings, and he was turned down just as regular as clockwork in spite of being a model prisoner. Getting a pass out of Shawshank when you’ve got murder stamped on your admittance-slip is slow work, as slow as a river eroding a rock. Seven men sit on the board, two more than at most state prisons, and every one of those seven has an ass as hard as the water drawn up from a mineral-spring well. You can’t buy those guys, you can’t sweet-talk them, you can’t cry for them. As far as the board concerned, money don’t talk, and nobody walks. There were other reasons in Andy’s case as well … but that belongs a little further along in my story.

There was a trusty, name of Kendricks, who was into me for some pretty heavy money back in the fifties, and it was four years before he got it all paid off. Most of the interest he paid me was information — in my line of work, you’re dead if you can’t find ways of keeping your ear to the ground. This Kendricks, for instance, had access to records I was never going to see running a stamper down in the goddam plate-shop.

Kendricks told me that the parole board vote was 7-0 against Andy Dufresne through 1957, 6-1 in ’58, 7-0 again in ’59, and 5-2 in ’60. After that I don’t know, but I do know that sixteen years later he was still in Cell 14 of Cellblock 5. By then, 1976, he was fifty-eight. They probably would have fatten big-hearted and let him out around 1983. They give you fife, and that’s what they take — all of it that counts, anyway. Maybe they set you loose someday, but … well, Listen: I knew this guy, Sherwood Bolton, his name was, and he had this pigeon in his cell. From 1945 until 1953, when they let him out, he had that pigeon. He wasn’t any Birdman of Alcatraz; he just had this pigeon. Jake, he called him. He set Jake free a day before he, Sherwood, that is, was to walk, and Jake flew away just as pretty as you could want. But about a week after Sherwood Bolton left our happy little family, a friend of mine called me over to the west corner of the exercise yard, where Sherwood used to hang out, and my friend said: ‘Isn’t that Jake, Red?’ It was. That pigeon was just as dead as a turd.

I remember the first time Andy Dufresne got in touch with me for something; I remember like it was yesterday. That wasn’t the time he wanted Rita Hayworth, though. That came later. In that summer of 1948 he came around for something else.

Most of my deals are done right there in the exercise yard, and that’s where this one went down. Our yard is big, much bigger than most. It’s a perfect square, ninety yards on a side. The north side is the outer wall, with a guardtower at either end. The guards up there are armed with binoculars and riot guns. The main gate is in that north side. The truck loading-bays are on the south side of the yard. There are five of them. Shawshank is a busy place during the work-week — deliveries in, deliveries out. We have the license-plate factory, and a big industrial laundry that does all the prison wetwash, plus that of Kittery Receiving Hospital and the Eliot Sanatorium. There’s also a big automotive garage where mechanic inmates fix prison, state, and municipal vehicles — not to mention the private cars of the screws, the administration officers … and, on more than one occasion, those of the parole board.

The east side is a thick stone wall full of tiny slit windows. Cellblock 5 is on the other side of that wall. The west side is Administration and the infirmary. Shawshank has never been as overcrowded as most prisons, and back in ’48 it was only filled to something like two-thirds capacity, but at any given time there might be eighty to a hundred and twenty cons on the yard — playing toss with a football or a baseball, shooting craps, jawing at each other, making deals. On Sunday the place was even more crowded; on Sunday the place would have looked like a country holiday … if there had been any women.

It was on a Sunday that Andy first came to me. I had just finished talking to Elmore Armitage, a fellow who often came in handy to me, about a radio when Andy walked up. I knew who he was, of course; he had a reputation for being a snob and a cold fish. People were saying he was marked for trouble already. One of the people saying so was Bogs Dismond, a bad man to have on your case. Andy had no cellmate, and I’d heard that was just the way he wanted it, although the one-man cells in Cellblock 5 were only a little bigger than coffins. But I don’t have to listen to rumours about a man when I can judge him for myself.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m Andy Dufresne.’ He offered his hand and I shook it. He wasn’t a man to waste time being social; he got right to the point. ‘I understand that you’re a man who knows how to get things.’

I agreed that I was able to locate certain items from time to time. ‘How do you do that?’ Andy asked.

‘Sometimes,’ I said, ‘things just seem to come into my hand. I can’t explain it. Unless it’s because I’m Irish.’

He smiled a little at that. ‘I wonder if you could get me a rock hammer.’

‘What would that be, and why would you want it?’

Andy looked surprised. ‘Do you make motivations a part of your business?’ With words like those I could understand how he had gotten a reputation for being the snobby sort, the kind of guy who likes to put on airs — but I sensed a tiny thread of humour in his question.

‘I’ll tell you,’ I said. ‘If you wanted a toothbrush, I wouldn’t ask questions. I’d just quote you a price. Because a toothbrush, you see, is a non-lethal sort of a weapon.’

‘You have strong feelings about lethal weapons?’

‘I do.’

An old friction-taped baseball flew towards us and he turned, cat-quick, and picked it out of the air. It was a move Frank Malzone would have been proud of. Andy flicked the bail back to where it had come from — just a quick and easy-looking flick of the wrist, but that throw had some mustard on it, just the same. I could see a lot of people were watching us with one eye as they went about their business. Probably the guards in tile tower were watching, too. I won’t gild the lily; there are cons that swing weight in any prison, maybe four or five in a small one, maybe two or three dozen in a big one. At Shawshank I was one of those with some weight, and what I thought of Andy Dufresne would have a lot to do with how his time went. He probably knew it too, but he wasn’t kowtowing or sucking up to me, and I respected him for that.

‘Fair enough. I'll tell you what it is and why I want it. A rock-hammer looks like a miniature pickaxe — about so long.’ He held his hands about a foot apart, and that was when I first noticed how neatly kept his nails were. ‘It’s got a small sharp pick on one end and a fiat, blunt hammerhead on the other. I want it because I like rocks.’

‘Rocks,’ I said.

‘Squat down here a minute,’ he said.

I humoured him. We hunkered down on our haunches like Indians.

Andy took a handful of exercise yard dirt and began to sift it between his neat hands, so it emerged in a fine cloud. Small pebbles were left over, one or two sparkly, the rest dull and plain. One of the dull ones was quartz, but it was only dull until you’d rubbed it clean. Then it had a nice milky glow. Andy did the cleaning and then tossed it to me. I caught it and named it.

‘Quartz, sure,’ he said, ‘And look. Mica. Shale, silted granite. Here’s a piece of graded limestone, from when they cut this place out of the side of the hill.’ He tossed them away and dusted his hands. ‘I’m a rockhound. At least… I was a rockhound. In my old life. I’d like to be one again, on a limited scale.’

‘Sunday expeditions in the exercise yard?’ I asked, standing up. It was a silly idea, and yet … seeing that little piece of quartz had given my heart a funny tweak. I don’t know exactly why; just an association with the outside world, I suppose. You didn’t think of such things in terms of the yard. Quartz was something you picked out of a small, quick-running stream.