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extensible - and we'd put it up against the side of that low, lit building. Then we'd start 

bucket-brigading hot buckets of tar up to the roof. Spill that shit on you and you'd 

jitterbug all the way to the infirmary. 

There were six guards on the project, all of them picked on the basis of seniority. It was 

almost as good as a week's vacation, because instead of sweating it out in the laundry or 

the plate-shop or standing over a bunch of cons cutting pulp or brush somewhere out in 

the willy wags, they were having a regular May holiday in the sun, just sitting there with 

their backs up against the low parapet, shooting the bull back and forth. 

They didn't even have to keep more than half an eye on us, because the south wall sentry 

post was close enough so that rte fellows up there could have spit their chews on us, if 

ihsy'd wanted to. If anyone on the roof-sealing party had made one funny move, it would 

take four seconds to cut him smack in two with .45 calibre machine-gun bullets. So those 

screws just sat there and took their ease. All they needed was a couple of six-packs 

buried in crushed ice, and they would have been the lords of all creation. 

One of them was a fellow named Byron Hadley, and in :hat year of 1950, he'd been at 

Shawshank longer than I had. Longer than the last two wardens put together, as a matter 

of "act. The fellow running the show in 1950 was a prissy-looking downcast Yankee 

named George Dunahy. He had a degree in penal administration. No one liked him, as far 

as I could tell, except the people who had gotten him his appointment. I heard that he 

wasn't interested in anything but compiling statistics for a book (which was later 

published by a small New England outfit called Light Side Press, where he probably had 

to pay to have it done), who won the intramural baseball championship each September, 

and getting a death-penalty law passed in Maine. A regular bear for the death-penalty was 

George Dunahy. He was fired off the job in 1953, when it came out he was running a 

discount auto repair service down in the prison garage and splitting the profits with Byron 

Hadley and Greg Stammas. Hadley and Stammas came out of that one okay - they were 

old hands at keeping their asses covered - but Dunahy took a walk. No one was sorry to 

see him go, but nobody was exactly pleased to see Greg Stammas step into his shoes, 

either. He was a short man with a tight, hard gut and the coldest brown eyes you ever 

saw. He always had a painful, pursed little grin on his face, as if he had to go to the 

bathroom and couldn't quite manage it. During Stammas's tenure as warden there was a 

lot of brutality at Shawshank, and although I have no proof, I believe there were maybe 

half a dozen moonlight burials in the stand of scrub forest that lies east of the prison. 

Dunahy was bad, but Greg Stammas was a cruel, wretched, cold-hearted man. 

He and Byron Hadley were good friends. As warden, George Dunahy was nothing but a 

posturing figurehead; it was Stammas, and through him, Hadley, who actually 

administered the prison. 

Hadley was a tail, shambling man with thinning red hair. He sunburned easily and he 

talked loud and if you didn't move fast enough to suit him, he'd clout you with his stick. 

On that day, our third on the roof, he was talking to another guard named Mert 

Entwhistle. 

Hadley had gotten some amazingly good news, so he was griping about it. That was his 

style - he was a thankless man with not a good word for anyone, a man who was