recruited for the Underground. You will forgive me for not saying much about my fellow agents. Those who are mentioned in this volume are either alive and have tendered their permission, or have gone off to that final journey to meet with the Grand Discerner of Souls. We are not yet past a time when scores are settled and vengeances sought, so many of us must, even in this time, remain underground.
My life now doubled. I resumed my regular interest in woodworking and the crafting of furniture. And I acted as I had, helping among the folk who worked at Bryceton, though they worked in a manner then most strange to me. There was no division in labor along any front. The kitchen, the dairy, the mechanic’s workshop, were worked by all, regardless of sex and color, so that should Corrine Quinn be without business abroad it was nothing to see her out among the crops, or serving supper with Hawkins in the shotgun dining hall where we together assembled nightly.
After supper, we would return to our barracks and change from our dinner garb to the uniform of the night—flannel shirt, elastic-bound trousers, and light canvas shoes. Then we would report for that first phase of training. We ran for an hour every night, covering, by my estimation, six to seven miles. Mixed in with these miles were breaks for all manner of calisthenics—arm raises, leaning rest, hops, etc. And then after our run there was more—sideways lunges, leg lifts, knee bends, etc. The regimen was derived from the German ’48ers, men who’d fought for liberty in their old country, and found common cause here in the Underground. Whatever their origins, they made me stronger. The burning in my chest diminished to the slightest discomfort and I found that I could cover wide spans of country without rest.
There were no tasking men among these instructors, only the Quality and the Low. Some of them, I suspected, were among the men who had once regularly hunted me. I don’t know if I ever got over this. I felt myself disposable to them, at least to this portion in Virginia who were, to my mind, zealots. And though I know they had to be, that there was no other way for them to be, it meant a certain distance between us, for their war was against the Task, and mine would be a war for those who were Tasked.
As it happened, there was one exception, though I wonder now if this was because he was not Virginian, but a native of the North. That was Mr. Fields, whom I met with for an hour, thrice weekly, after my calisthenics, beneath the house in a sprawling sub-basement, accessible only by a trapdoor, which one accessed by stepping through a large mahogany marriage chest whose bottom had been cut out. Down two sets of stairs, there was another door, behind which lay a musky, lantern-lit study, with two rows of bookshelves on each side, stuffed end to end. In the middle of the room there was a long table with equidistant seats, and at each seat there was pen and paper.
In the farthest corner there were two large secretaries, the pigeonholes of which were filled with various papers pertaining to the Underground, tools of the house agents who, some nights, I saw down there, at the long table, quietly executing their stealthy craft. I would sit at the table with Mr. Fields, who took up our studies as though nothing had ever occurred between us, as though the span of years had not even happened.
My curriculum now expanded, and I was happy for this: geometry, arithmetic, some Greek and Latin. And then for one remaining hour, I was given the free run of the offices and left to choose among the volumes. I think now that my own volume, the one that you now hold here, began there in those moments—in that library. For eventually I began not simply to read but to write. At first it was merely a record of my studies. But soon this record expanded to my thoughts, and then from my thoughts to my impressions, so that I now possessed, not merely a record of my head, but of my heart. From where did such an idea originate? I guess I must thank Maynard. Among the effects he pilfered from my father’s own pigeonholed secretary was an old journal kept by our grandfather, John Walker, who, in keeping