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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 licence-plate factory 

ought to be resurfaced with roofing tar. They wanted it done before it got too hot up 

there, and they sued 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 ... plus all the guards in the towers keeping a weather 

eye on the proceedings through their field-glasses for good 

measure. 

Four of us would be carrying a big extension ladder on those morning marches -1 always 

got a kick out of the way Dickie Betts, who was on that job, called that sort of ladder an