Different Seasons Trivia Quiz

Answer: A rock hammer

Ellis Redding, placed into Shawshank on three life sentences for killing his wife (and, inadvertently, his neighbour and her son), claims to be a guy who can get anyone anything, and filled that role in prison for forty years. But this story pertains to a man named Andy Dufresne who, in 1949, asked him to smuggle a poster of Rita Hayworth into the joint. This, obviously, would not be a problem.

Andy, as Red notes, was in Shawshank having been determined guilty of killing his wife and her lover. Red believes him to be innocent, but at the time, he probably would have voted guilty, The jury was willing to convict in spite of some big grey areas in his story, and it's likely because of his demeanour in the courthouse; he was not convincingly innocent. It was a certain stroke of bad luck.

During Andy and Red's first encounter, a year before the poster, Andy requested that Red get his hands on a small rock hammer. Claiming to aspire to be an amateur geologist (and a bit of a rockhound), Andy believed it'd connect him to the outside world in spite of the situation. Sure enough, Red could get him one. It was a tool Red didn't see again for nineteen years, though he saw the small stones that resulted from it.

Over those early months, Andy would have run-ins with some of the prison's more dangerous inmates. It's possible, Red reasons, that Andy might have paid off some of the guards for his own security. Andy had a way of leveraging his cash, even in jail, that kept him cushioned. That would change.

Answer: Accountant

Things changed a lot for Andy when, one summer, while re-tarring the roof of the license plate factory situated on the prison grounds, he overheard one of the guards discussing his money woes and offered to sort out a way to claim his expected inheritance, tax-free, via an IRS loophole. Interestingly, and perhaps expectedly, this stopped any further attacks on Andy, and more than that, it led to him obtaining a job managing the prison library. He would spend twenty-three years in Shawshank as librarian, building it out through perseverance, and even getting money from the government to support it. While he worked the library he also, apparently, laundered money for some of the prison staff out of good will, leveraging his skills as a former accountant even more. It kept him out of trouble.

Things changed when Sam Norton, the new warden, came in and started leveraging prison labour to take bribes from local construction firms. Andy handled that money as well, but things changed again in 1962 when a new inmate, Tommy Williams, showed up and indicated to Andy that he may have known the man who actually killed Andy's wife and lover. Andy told Norton, but the warden wasn't even willing to entertain the idea; he was sent to solitary instead.

Over the months, Tommy was transferred out and, in spite of his refusal, Norton looked into the name that was given but determined the man had since gone missing. Andy, believing there was still a thread to be pulled here, claimed to want a lawyer, but Norton urged him to stop thinking about it, clearly looking to preserve his own best interests. Andy insisted that he'd stop the shady accounting but he'd been met instead with more solitary (and the removal of his protections). He straightened out and kept doing the deeds, but the consequence was that it hardened him over the next four years. Something changed.

Answer: Mexico

In 1967, Andy told Red that he'd always dreamt of going to Mexico, living in a place in Zihuatanejo, on the Pacific coast, when he got out. Before he was sent to prison, he had a safety-deposit box made up for himself in Portland under the name Peter Stevens, and in that was the cash. In a field in Buxton, a distinct rock would lead him to the key, and he'd start his journey to the south, and freedom. He tempted Red with the idea of joining, but Red knew, at that time, Andy probably wouldn't be getting out, especially with Norton's eye on him.

In 1975, Andy escaped.

On March 12, Andy wasn't in his cell at breakfast time, and it took about twelve hours before guards found the hole that was behind the poster on his cell wall. Evidently, he'd used his rock hammer over the years to break away at the wall and into a porcelain sewer pipe that hadn't been replaced over time. In this, he crawled five hundred yards to freedom. Red theorized that Andy, having discovered that the concrete in the ward was weak, took twenty-seven years to carve away at the wall, scattering the dirt he'd created out in the yard every morning.

Three months later, Warden Norton resigned a broken man.

In September of that year, Red received a postcard from McNary, Texas with nothing written on it. A border town, it would be the clearest signal, to him, that Andy made it.

Red would get out of Shawshank on parole in May of 1977, thirty-eight years after he was found guilty. Finding the rock in a field in Buxton, just where Andy said it'd be, he found a note left behind, inviting him to Mexico. It would break his parole, but he planned to get a ticket on a bus to El Paso and try his luck at freedom.

Answer: World War II

Thirteen-year-old Todd Bowden visits Arthur Denker's one day, having been following him around for a while, because it turns out that he recognizes him as Kurt Dussander, a former Nazi official who once worked at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Though Denker lets him into his home and initially lies about his past, it takes very little time to give up the truth-- he committed those crimes and killed many during WWII before fleeing Europe. And frankly, it's amazing a kid found him based on a photo in historical books; by chance, Todd saw Dussander in public though he's had a photo of him, in his SS greatcoat, in his scrapbook for months.

Todd doesn't really want anything; he just wants to hear about everything that happened. Dussander doesn't really want to talk, claiming that he only did what he did out of survival and still dreams (in nightmares) of those days, but Todd refuses to leave, intimating that he would tell everyone the truth if Dussander doesn't talk about the gas chambers.

Over months of visits under the guise of reading to an elderly local man, Todd hears all about the atrocities of WWII, much to Dussander's initial reluctance. It only takes a few months before these stories occupy his thoughts so much so that he starts failing his classes. In December, Todd spends $80 to buy Dussander an SS costume. Privately, Dussander has to admit, the boy has a hold on him.

Todd's grades dip further in the new year, and worse, he starts talking to himself. Both he and Dussander start to experience brutal nightmares, and the latter starts to fear that he has a reliance on the boy's visits as the alternative would mean living his final years alone. He finds that he can only sleep when he wears the uniform.

A month later, Todd's parents are none-the-wiser and willing to overlook Todd's slipping grades on the condition they improve immediately. Dussander effectively charms the Bowdens over dinner. Neither of them bring out the truth, but both of them realize they're holding each other hostage. What's worse is that, the longer they spend time together, the more impossible they find it is to avoid the nightmares from returning. It's a problem Dussander is only able to keep at bay by killing neighbourhood animals in his oven.

Answer: Burying a body

Todd and Dussander seem to keep each other in a stand-off. Dussander knows he could be deported if found out, or forced to own up to his crimes in the hands of another government. Todd, meanwhile, could end up in reformatory school, seen as a failure to his parents and friends. Ultimately, they're in it together, and this is put to the test when Todd's guidance counsellor, Ed French, asks to speak to his parents. Instead, Todd sends Dussander, having him pose as his grandfather and make up a lie to keep the issue at bay. Dussander follows through and no one is the wiser, but he forces Todd to study every day at his house in an effort to fix his grades. The boy starts to pull out of his educational tailspin, but cracks start to show. He becomes more malicious, and within months he acts on his dark thoughts.

Todd's parents are concerned about their boy's mounting issues, but with his grades improving, they don't ask him to make any real changes. Besides, as they note, it's okay for their son to grow up and have parts of his life he doesn't want to tell his parents all about. They don't realize that he's coming to the conclusion that he will need to kill Dussander to make the problem stop. By May, Todd's grades are on the mend, but on the day he considers pulling the trigger, Dussander lies, telling Todd that he has a note in a safety deposit box explaining everything; if he dies, the truth will come out. Todd lies in kind, alleging he left a note with a friend to be opened in case of emergency.

That summer, before Todd joins his parents on a month-long trip to Hawaii, he goes to the local train yard and kills a vagrant living there, stabbing him thirty-seven times. He tosses the knife in the river on the way home. Dussander, meanwhile, lures homeless men to his house and kills them in his kitchen, burying their remains in his cellar under lime. They both find these acts keep the nightmares at bay, at least temporarily, and while they become more distant from one another, they still keep up their visits.

On one occasion, three years into their relationship, Dussander brings a man home and begins to bury the body in the cellar when he has a brush with death. A heart attack nearly incapacitates him before he can finish the job and clean up. With nowhere else to turn, he calls Todd, makes up a story, and has him finish what he started before calling 9-1-1, and Todd, begrudgingly, follows through, creating a cover story before phoning for an ambulance.

Answer: He commits suicide

It's by sheer coincidence that when Dussander ends up in the hospital, a man by the name of Morris Heisel breaks his back, ending up in the bed next to his. It takes a few days, but Heisel, whose family died in the camps in WWII, realizes that he's in the room next to a man who interrogated him in Patin. Within weeks, Heisel is determined to be able to recover, to a degree, from his injuries, and as soon as he's out, he alerts the authorities.

At the same time, Todd realizes he needs to call his relationship with Dussander quits, but it's then that Dussander lays all his cards out on the table. There was never a safe deposit box, for instance, but it doesn't matter. He knows Todd is killing people-- he's seen the stories in the paper. There's nothing to do about it though; they can't trust each other. Todd spends the next days unable to keep his violent thoughts at bay, even towards his parents. This is when things really start to unravel.

Dussander is awakened by a man who informs him that he's been found out. Weiskopf, an Israeli Jew working for the government, lets him know that he's working with the authorities to bring him in. Realizing he has no means of escape, Dussander steals drugs from the nurse's closet and overdoses in the middle of the night.

The paper comes out with the news the next day, revealing that a Nazi has committed suicide at Santo Donato Hospital, and that's how the Bowdens get the news. Todd plays ignorant, knowing that he'll be questioned, and sure enough, the police stop by to investigate, having already searched Dussander's house and found the bodies in the cellar. The detective notes that he's searching for the letter that Todd was originally sent over to read to him, but Todd burnt this when he cleaned up the house. This, and a couple of other tells, lead Weiskopf and the authorities to believe Todd was in on the killings-- they just don't know how right they are-- even though he was thirteen when he met Dussander.

It all comes to a head when Ed French, the guidance counsellor, discovers that Todd's grandfather isn't the man he met at the school. He digs into Todd's records to find evidence of doctored report cards, and he visits Todd's to confront him. At the same time, the Santo Donato police are given testimony from a local homeless man who, seeing Todd's photo in the paper, points him out as the boy seen with all the dead homeless people around town. It's why, when Ed stops by the Bowden house, Todd shoots him with the rifle in his garage in broad daylight.

Excitedly, Todd takes his rifle and heads over to the freeway. It takes five hours before the authorities are able to take him down.

Answer: Writer

The story about the body comes from Gordie who, growing up to become a writer, recounts a small part of his childhood that turned out to mean something much more in his life.

Chris, Teddie, and Gordie were playing cards in their clubhouse on a hot summer day when Vern found them, asking them the question that would change their lives: "Want to go see a dead body?" A missing kid from the nearby town of Chamberlain was quietly found by some of the older kids, and word of this hadn't gotten out yet; Vern only heard it because his brother, Billy, was talking about finding the body out on Back Harlow Road, about twenty or thirty miles out of town. The boys decided to make a trip of it, grabbing their gear and telling their parents they'd be camping. No one batted an eye, especially not Gordie's parents, who'd already been out of sorts since his brother, Dennis, died four months earlier.

On the day the boys headed out, Chris took him aside and showed him what he was bringing along: an old pistol with dark, wooden grips, already loaded, just in case.

Heading out as a foursome, the boys passed through the dump, grabbed some extra snacks and water, and set out into the woods.

Answer: Train tracks

After Gordie's food run and the boys' encounter at the town dump, the boys set out along the rail line, realizing that they were already hitting a streak of bad luck in their adventure, enough so that Teddy burst into tears over their fight with the dump owner, Milo, forcing the others to calm him down. They hit the Castle River at 3:30 in the afternoon, crossing the GS&WM trestle at a point where they would be able to cut hours off their journey (at the expense of a harrowing fifty-feet-up walk across the tracks). Of course, they arrived just when a train was scheduled to cross, forcing them to run for their lives and jump off closer to the end.

The event, and the time together, allowed the boys to be a bit more introspective. Gordie told the boys one of his many stories on the fly-- this one about a pie-eating contest-- while they sat and drank some Cokes, and even if Vern and Teddy didn't like it all too much, Chris thought it was a good one, even suggesting Gordie might become a writer some day. Gordie and Chris both seemed to know that when they all got to junior high, it was likely they wouldn't be in the same classes. Chris, however, believed it was for the best; Gordie might want to be with the other guys and stay friends, but Chris knew they were dragging him down. This was his way out.

That night, after the kids set up camp, still a ways out from finding Ray Brower's body, they were awakened by the sound of what must've been a wildcat nearby. Although they joked that it could have been Brower's ghost, they decided to take turns keeping watch. Gordie took the last shift, giving himself the morning alone before they set back out on the last leg of the journey. It was a gentle start to what would've been the hottest day.

Answer: Yes

The hottest day was the third, and it proved to be the toughest of all for the boys. After swimming in a pool of water that turned out to be full of leeches, the boys plodded onward in spite (Gordie even fainted partway). The way the track curved through the woods, they still had six miles to cover by that point. At the same time, what the boys didn't know was that the older kids, Vern's brother included, were also headed over in their car to relocate the corpse, intending to pretend they located it on a fishing trip to come out as heroes.

The rain started when the boys found the body at the bottom of an embankment; it appeared that Brower jumped to avoid getting hit by the train, but the fall proved fatal. Unfortunately, they stumbled across the boy as the older kids showed up, prepared to fight over the discovery. Although the older guys moved forward, switchblades in-hand, Chris revealed the gun he packed away for the trip, successfully keeping the threat at bay until they left. All of them agreed not to take the credit for the 'discovery'.

The foursome headed out almost immediately after the encounter, rushing home through the rest of the day and the entire night, returning to their neighbourhood at five in the morning. The four of them knew something changed in their lives after the journey. Although Ray Brower's body was their claim, the story never got out. The body was eventually found without anyone taking the credit. Over the next month, all four boys would become victims of their bullies, individually, for what they did that day.

In the coming months and years, all four of the boys would drift apart, as friends of that age often do. Vern and Teddy pulled away first, finding new groups of friends. Vern died in an apartment fire in 1966 while Teddy was the victim of a car crash half a decade later. Chris tried for college courses, studying nightly with Gordon, and the two remained friends into their college years. Unfortunately, in 1971, Chris was stabbed and killed in a restaurant in Portland by a man who had, only a short time earlier, gotten out of Shawshank.

Things have since changed. Gordie, now a published author with a wife and three kids, realizes that Castle Rock has become quite different from when he was just a child. While the trestle bridge is gone, the river still winds its way through the woods.

Answer: Labour

A couple days before Christmas, David Adley takes a cab through a storm in NYC to an exclusive gentlemen's club, one he's been coming to for ten years. He recalls that, one year, Emlyn McCarron told the story of the Breathing Method, a story that affects him to this day.

Adley, at the time, was brought to the club as a guest of a law firm partner, George Waterhouse. It was quite the odd place, containing seemingly endless rooms and libraries of exotic, unheard-of titles. Above the big stone fireplace in the sitting room is carved with a motto: "It is the tale, not he who tells it."

This room is where the men of the club tell stories, and on that first night, Waterhouse invited him to return at his leisure. Adley didn't tell his wife the details, feeling he wouldn't be allowed back if he did, but eventually, he started returning on certain evenings (at his wife's insistence, no less, believing it would be good for him to have an activity). He wouldn't hear about the Breathing Method until the Thursday before one Christmas, a night generally reserved for the most uncanny stories.

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The story was about Emlyn McCarron, who also told it. A doctor working at Harriet White Memorial Hospital, overlooking Central Park in New York City, the tale was about a birth that took place on Christmas Eve while he was still interning there. The mother, Sandra Stansfield, had a tragic tale of her own. He spent seven months tracking her pregnancy, providing her details about prenatal vitamins and breathing exercises, still a newfound concept in that day (though it would become known as the Lamaze Method), and all the while she intended on giving birth without support-- no husband or boyfriend. She paid all of her services upfront on the first day.

Sandra's story unfolded pretty ordinarily. By August, many months into her pregnancy, she would be fired from her job at a department store, her boss feeling that having a child out of wedlock would be detrimental to her appearance at work. Sandra was angry, but kept herself in check by applying the Breathing Method, a technique she stood by after McCarron recommended it. In the fall, she started to feel a sense of pending doom.

The labour began on Christmas Eve, and after hailing a cab, she rushed to the hospital in poor conditions. McCarron arrived only minutes before, eager to collect her at the ER, but tragedy struck, and her death wasn't only the fault of her cab driver, but the Breathing Method. The taxi itself, struggling to keep on the slippery road, would broadside the statue out front and toss Sandra, like a ragdoll, out the back window. She would be decapitated in the accident. To the shock of McCarron and the nurses who rushed out to help, however, the body kept methodically breathing, continuing the reflexive Breathing Method going even in death. Miraculously, the baby was delivered before the corpse's breathing stopped.

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The room was silent when the story ended. McCarron reassured the room that the story is true. The baby lived and was subsequently adopted. Named John, the child would grow up in Maine, eventually becoming the head of the English department in one of the most respected private colleges in the country.

That evening, after the story, as Adley headed out, he asked the doorman a question-- one that may have been on the precipice of acceptability. Simply, he asked "are there many more rooms upstairs?" The response he got was cryptic; there were a great many, and men could become lost. It seemed they could go on and on. Satisfied enough, Adley would head out, and he would return again.