Free Different Seasons by Stephen King

Andy. “Nice fella,” Normaden said. It was hard to make out anything he said because he had a harelip and a cleft palate; his words all came out in a slush. “I liked it there. He never made fun. But he didn’t want me there. I could tell.” Big shrug. “I was glad to go, me. Bad draft in that cell. All the time cold. He don’t let nobody touch his things. That’s okay. Nice man, never made fun. But big draft.”
     
    Rita Hayworth hung in Andy’s cell until 1955, if I remember right. Then it was Marilyn Monroe, that picture from The Seven-Year Itch where she’s standing over a subway grating and the warm air is flipping her skirt up. Marilyn lasted until 1960, and she was considerably tattered about the edges when Andy replaced her with Jayne Mansfield. Jayne was, you should pardon the expression, a bust. After only a year or so she was replaced with an English actress—might have been Hazel Court, but I’m not sure. In 1966 that one came down and Raquel Welch went up for a record-breaking six-year engagement in Andy’s cell. The last poster to hang there was a pretty country-rock singer whose name was Linda Ronstadt.
    I asked him once what the posters meant to him, and he gave me a peculiar, surprised sort of look. “Why, they mean the same thing to me as they do to most cons, I guess,” he said. “Freedom. You look at those pretty women and you feel like you could almost . . . not quite but almost... step right through and be beside them. Be free. I guess that’s why I always liked Raquel Welch the best. It wasn’t just her; it was that beach she was standing on. Looked like she was down in Mexico somewhere. Someplace quiet, where a man would be able to hear himself think. Didn’t you ever feel that way about a picture, Red? That you could almost step right through it?”
    I said I’d never really thought of it that way.
    “Maybe someday you’ll see what I mean,” he said, and he was right. Years later I saw exactly what he meant . . . and when I did, the first thing I thought of was Normaden, and about how he’d said it was always cold in Andy’s cell.
     
    A terrible thing happened to Andy in late March or early April of 1963. I have told you that he had something that most of the other prisoners, myself included, seemed to lack. Call it a sense of equanimity, or a feeling of inner peace, maybe even a constant and unwavering faith that someday the long nightmare would end. Whatever you want to call it, Andy Dufresne always seemed to have his act together. There was none of that sullen desperation about him that seems to afflict most lifers after awhile; you could never smell hopelessness on him. Until that late winter of ’63.
    We had another warden by then, a man named Samuel Norton. The Mathers, Cotton and Increase, would have felt right at home with Sam Norton. So far as I know, no one had ever seen him so much as crack a smile. He had a thirty-year pin from the Baptist Advent Church of Eliot. His major innovation as the head of our happy family was to make sure that each incoming prisoner had a New Testament. He had a small plaque on his desk, gold letters inlaid in teakwood, which said CHRIST IS MY SAVIOR. A sampler on the wall, made by his wife, read: HIS JUDGMENT COMETH AND THAT RIGHT EARLY. This latter sentiment cut zero ice with most of us. We felt that the judgment had already occurred, and we would be willing to testify with the best of them that the rock would not hide us nor the dead tree give us shelter. He had a Bible quote for every occasion, did Mr. Sam Norton, and whenever you meet a man like that, my best advice to you would be to grin big and cover up your balls with both hands.
    There were less infirmary cases than in the days of Greg Stammas, and so far as I know the moonlight burials ceased altogether, but this is not to say that Norton was not a believer in punishment. Solitary was always well populated. Men lost their teeth not from beatings but from bread and water