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had gotten the job back in the late 20s because he had a college education. Brooksie's
degree was in animal husbandry, true enough, but college educations in institutes of
lower learning like The Shank are so rare that it's a case of beggars not being able to be
choosers.
In 1952 Brooksie, who had killed his wife and daughter after a losing streak at poker
back when Coolidge was President, was paroled. As usual, the state in all its wisdom had
let him go long after any chance he might have had to become a useful part of society
was gone. He was sixty-eight and arthritic when he tottered out of the main gate in his
Polish suit and his French shoes, his parole papers in one 'and and a Greyhound bus ticket
in the other. He was crying "hen he left. Shawshank was his world. What lay beyond its
vails was as terrible to Brooks as the Western Seas had been to superstitious 13th-century
sailors. In prison, Brooksie had been a person of some importance. He was the head
librarian, in educated man. If he went to the Kittery library and asked or a job, they
wouldn't give him a library card. I heard he lied in a home for indigent old folks up
Freeport way in 1952, and at that he lasted about six months longer than I thought he
would. Yeah, I guess the state got its own back on Brooksie, all right. They trained him to
like it inside the shithouse and then they threw him out.
Andy succeeded to Brooksie's job, and he was head librarian for twenty-three years. He
used the same force of will I'd seen him use on Byron Hadley to get what he wanted for
the library, and I saw him gradually turn one small room (which still smelled of
turpentine because it had been a paint closet until 1922 and had never been properly
aired) lined with Reader's Digest Condensed Books and National Geographies into the
best prison library in New England.
He did it a step at a time. He put a suggestion box by the door and patiently weeded out
such attempts at humour as More Fuk-Boox Pleeze and Escape in 10 EZ Lesions. He got
sold of the things the prisoners seemed serious about. He wrote to three major book clubs
in New York and got two of them, The Literary Guild and The Book of the Month Club,
to send editions of all their major selections to us at a special cheap rate. He discovered a
hunger for information on such snail hobbies as soap-carving, woodworking, sleight of
hand, and card solitaire. He got all the books he could on such subjects. And those two
jailhouse staples, Erie Stanley Gardener and Louis L'Amour. Cons never seem to get
enough of the courtroom or the open range. And yes, he did keep a box of fairly spicy
paperbacks under the checkout desk, loaning them out carefully and making sure they
always got back. Even so, each new acquisition of that type was quickly read to tatters.
He began to write to the state senate in Augusta in 1954. Staminas was warden by then,
and he used to pretend Andy was some sort of mascot He was always in the library,
shooting the bull with Andy, and sometimes he'd even throw a paternal arm around
Andy's shoulders or give him a goose. He didn't fool anybody. Andy Dufresne was no
one's mascot.
He told Andy that maybe he'd been a banker on the outside, but that part of his life was
receding rapidly into his past and he had better get a hold on the facts of prison life. As
far as that bunch of jumped-up Republican Rotarians in Augusta was concerned, there
were only three viable expenditures of the taxpayers' money in the field of prisons and