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were either hung or put in gaol. And if you were sentenced to gaol, you did not go to an
institution. No, you dug your own gaol with a spade provided to you by the Province of
Maine. You dug it as wide and as deep as you could during the period between sunup and
sundown. Then ,they gave you a couple of skins and a bucket, and down you went Once
down, the gaoler would bar the top of your hole, -.row down some grain or maybe a piece
of maggoty meat once or twice a week, and maybe there would be a dipperful ; barley
soup on Sunday night You pissed in the bucket, and you held up the same bucket for
water when the gaoler came around at six in the morning. When it rained, you used lie
bucket to bail out your gaol-cell ... unless, that is, you wanted to drown like a rat in a
rainbarrel.
No one spent a long time 'in the hole', as it was called; thirty months was an unusually
long term, and so far as I've been able to tell, the longest term ever spent from which an
inmate actually emerged alive was served by the so-called Durham Boy', a fourteen-year-
old psychopath who castrated a schoolmate with a piece of rusty metal. He did seven
years, but of course he went in young and strong.
You have to remember that for a crime that was more serious than petty theft or
blasphemy or forgetting to put a snotrag in your pocket when out of doors on the
Sabbath, you were hung. For low crimes such as those just mentioned and for others like
them, you'd do your three or six or nine months in the hole and come out fishbelly white,
cringing from the wide-open spaces, your eyes half-blind, your teeth more than likely
rocking and rolling in their sockets from the scurvy, your feet crawling with fungus. Jolly
old Province of Maine. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.
Shawshank's Solitary Wing was nowhere as bad as that... I guess. Things come in three
major degrees in the human experience, I think. There's good, bad, and terrible. And as
you go down into progressive darkness towards terrible, it gets harder and harder to make
subdivisions.
To get to Solitary Wing you were led down twenty-three steps to a basement level where
the only sound was the drip of water. The only light was supplied by a series of dangling
sixty-watt bulbs. The cells were keg-shaped, like those wall-safes rich people sometimes
hide behind a picture. Like a safe, the round doorways were hinged, and solid instead of
barred. You get ventilation from above, but no light except for your own sixty-watt bulb,
which was turned off from a master-switch promptly at eight p.m., an hour before lights-
out in the rest of the prison. The wire wasn't in a wire mesh cage or anything like that.
The feeling was that if you wanted to exist down there in the dark, you were welcome to
it. Not many did ... but after eight, of course, you had no choice. You had a bunk bolted
to the wall and a can with no toilet seat. You had three ways to spend your time: sitting,
shitting, or sleeping. Big choice. Twenty days could get to seem like a year. Thirty days
could seem like two, and forty days like ten. Sometimes you could hear rats in the
ventilation system. In a situation like that, subdivisions of terrible tend to get lost.
If anything at all can be said in favour of solitary, it's just that you get time to think. Andy
had twenty days in which to think while he enjoyed his grain and drain, and when he got
out he requested another meeting with the warden. Request denied. Such a meeting, the