"No, I'm not lying. There's no reason why you should take my word for it, either. Engage a lawyer --"

Andy said quietly, "If you went to jail for tax evasion, you'd go to a federal penitentiary, not Shawshank. But you won't. The tax-free gift to the spouse is a perfectly legal loophole. I've done dozens… no, hundreds of them. It's meant primarily for people with small businesses to pass on, or for people who come into one-time-only windfalls. Like yourself."

"Ambulance-chasing highway-robbing cocksuckers!" Hadley cried.

"I think you're lying," Hadley said, but he didn't -- you could see he didn't. There was an emotion dawning on his face, something that was grotesque overlying that long, ugly countenence and that receding, sunburned brow. An almost obscene emotion when seen on the features of Byron Hadley. It was hope.

"You fucking-A. I don't need any smart wife-killing banker to show me where the bear shit in the buckwheat."

Andy shrugged. "Then go to the IRS. They'll tell you the same thing for free. Actually, you don't need me to tell you at all. You would have investigated the matter for yourself."

"Co-workers," Mert said, and let out a rusty guffaw. He slapped his knee. A real kneeslapper was old Mert, and I hope he died of intestinal cancer in a part of the world were morphine is as of yet undiscovered. "Co-workers, ain't that cute? Co-workers! You ain't got any --"

"You'll need a tax lawyer or a banker to set up the gift for you and that will cost you something," Andy said. "Or… if you were interested, I'd be glad to set it up for you nearly free of charge. The price would be three beers apiece for my co-workers --"

Hadley looked at Andy again. "What was you saying?"

"Shut your frigging trap," Hadley growled, and Mert shut.

"I was saying that I'd only ask three beers apiece for my co-workers, if that seems fair," Andy said. "I think a man feels more like a man when he's working out of doors in the springtime if he can have a bottle of suds. That's only my opinion. It would go down smooth, and I'm sure you'd have their gratitude."

I have talked to some of the other men who were up there that day -- Rennie Martin, Logan St Pierre, and Paul Bonsaint were three of them -- and we all saw the same thing then…felt the same thing. Suddenly it was Andy who had the upper hand. It was Hadley who had the gun on his hip and the billy in his hand, Hadley who had his friend Greg Staminas behind him and the whole prison administration behind Stammas, the whole power of the state behind that, but all at once in that golden sunshine it didn't matter, and I felt my heart leap up in my chest as it never had since the truck drove me and four others through the gate back in 1938 and I stepped out into the exercise yard.

"I'd just give you one piece of advice the IRS wouldn't bother with," Andy said. His eyes were fixed unwinkingly on Hadley's. "Make the gift to your wife if you're sure. If you think there's even a chance she might double-cross you or backshoot you, we could work out something else --"

No reason. But he didn't.

Andy was looking at Hadley with those cold, clear, calm eyes, and it wasn't just the thirty-five thousand then, we all agreed on that. I've played it over and over in my mind and I know. It was man against man, and Andy simply forced him, the way a strong man can force a weaker man's wrist to the table in a game of Indian wrestling. There was no reason, you see, why Hadley couldn't be given Mert the nod at that very minute, pitched Andy overside onto his head, and still taken Andy's advice.

"I could get you all a couple of beers if I wanted to," Hadley said. "A beer does taste good while you're working." The colossal prick even managed to sound magnanimous.

"Double-cross me?" Hadley asked harshly. "Double-cross me! Mr Hotshot Banker, if she ate her way through a boxcar of Ex-Lax, she wouldn't dare fart unless I gave her the nod."

Mert, Youngblood, and the other screws yucked it up dutifully. Andy never cracked a smile.

"I'll write down the forms you need," he said. "You can get them at the post office, and I'll fill them out for your signature."

That sounded suitably important, and Hadley's chest swelled. Then he glared around at the rest of us and hollered, "What are you jimmies staring at? Move your asses, goddammit!" He looked back at Andy. "You come over here with me, hotshot. And listen to me well: if you're Jewing me somehow, you're gonna find yourself chasing your head around Shower C before the week's out."

And he did understand it. The way it turned out, he understood a lot more than I did -- more than any of us did. That's how, on the second-to-last day of the job, the convict crew that tarred the plate-factory roof in 1950 ending up sitting in a row at ten o'clock on a spring morning, drinking Black Label beer supplied by the hardest screw that ever walked a turn at Shawshank Prison. That beer was piss-warm, but it was still the best I ever had in my life. We sat and drank it and felt the sun on our shoulders, and not even the expression of half amusement, half-contempt on Hadley's face -- as if he was watching apes drink beer instead of men -could spoil it. It lasted twenty minutes, that beer-break, and for those twenty minutes we felt like free men. We could have been drinking beer and tarring the roof of one of our own houses.

"Yes, I understand that," Andy said softly.

So, yeah -- if you asked me to give you a flat-out answer to the question of whether I'm trying to tell you about a man or a legend that got made up around the man, like a pearl around a little piece of grit -- I'd have to say that the answer lies somewhere in between. All I know for sure is that Andy Dufresne wasn't much like me or anyone else I ever knew since I came inside. He brought in five hundred dollars jammed up his back porch, but somehow that graymeat son of a bitch managed to bring in something else as well. A sense of his own worth, maybe, or a feeling that he would be the winner in the end… or maybe it was only a sense of freedom, even inside these goddamned grey walls. It was a kind of inner light he carried around with him. I only knew him to lose that light once, and that is also a part of this story.

Only Andy didn't drink. I already told you about his drinking habits. He sat hunkered down in the shade, hands dangling between his knees, watching us and smiling a little. It's amazing how many men remember him that way, and amazing how many men were on that work-crew when Andy Dufresne faced down Byron Hadley. I thought there were nine or ten of us, but by 1955 there must have been two hundred of us, maybe more… if you believed what you heard.