Free Different Seasons by Stephen King Page B

have that slave habit of looking dumb and keeping their ears open. I got it backwards and forwards and in the middle, but I’ll give it to you from point A to point Z, and maybe you’ll understand why the man spent about ten months in a bleak, depressed daze. See, I don’t think he knew the truth until 1963, fifteen years after he came into this sweet little hell-hole. Until he met Tommy Williams, I don’t think he knew how bad it could get.
     
    Tommy Williams joined our happy little Shawshank family in November of 1962. Tommy thought of himself as a native of Massachusetts, but he wasn’t proud; in his twenty-seven years he’d done time all over New England. He was a professional thief, and as you may have guessed, my own feeling was that he should have picked another profession.
    He was a married man, and his wife came to visit each and every week. She had an idea that things might go better with Tommy—and consequently better with their three-year-old son and herself—if he got his high school degree. She talked him into it, and so Tommy Williams started visiting the library on a regular basis.
    For Andy, this was an old routine by then. He saw that Tommy got a series of high school equivalency tests. Tommy would brush up on the subjects he had passed in high school—there weren’t many—and then take the test. Andy also saw that he was enrolled in a number of correspondence courses covering the subjects he had failed in school or just missed by dropping out.
    He probably wasn’t the best student Andy ever took over the jumps, and I don’t know if he ever did get his high school diploma, but that forms no part of my story. The important thing was that he came to like Andy Dufresne very much, as most people did after awhile.
    On a couple of occasions he asked Andy “what a smart guy like you is doing in the joint”—a question which is the rough equivalent of that one that goes “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” But Andy wasn’t the type to tell him; he would only smile and turn the conversation into some other channel. Quite normally, Tommy asked someone else, and when he finally got the story, I guess he also got the shock of his young life.
    The person he asked was his partner on the laundry’s steam ironer and folder. The inmates call this device the mangler, because that’s exactly what it will do to you if you aren’t paying attention and get your bad self caught in it. His partner was Charlie Lathrop, who had been in for about twelve years on a murder charge. He was more than glad to reheat the details of the Dufresne murder trial for Tommy; it broke the monotony of pulling freshly pressed bedsheets out of the machine and tucking them into the basket. He was just getting to the jury waiting until after lunch to bring in their guilty verdict when the trouble whistle went off and the mangle grated to a stop. They had been feeding in freshly washed sheets from the Eliot Nursing Home at the far end; these were spat out dry and neatly pressed at Tommy’s and Charlie’s end at the rate of one every five seconds. Their job was to grab them, fold them, and slap them into the cart, which had already been lined with clean brown paper.
    But Tommy Williams was just standing there, staring at Charlie Lathrop, his mouth unhinged all the way to his chest. He was standing in a drift of sheets that had come through clean and which were now sopping up all the wet muck on the floor—and in a laundry wetwash, there’s plenty of muck.
    So the head bull that day, Homer Jessup, comes rushing over, bellowing his head off and on the prod for trouble. Tommy took no notice of him. He spoke to Charlie as if old Homer, who had busted more heads than he could probably count, hadn’t been there.
    “What did you say that golf pro’s name was?”
    “Quentin,” Charlie answered back, all confused and upset by now. He later said that the kid was as white as a truce flag. “Glenn Quentin, I