“No, he stopped,” said Mr. Fields. “But it didn’t matter. His master just went ahead and now this is the new theory of the home-place.”
“Master take it out on the tasking folks…,” said Hawkins.
“…And the tasking folks take it out on Johns,” I said.
“With time and a half. He got no people now. His country ain’t his country,” said Hawkins. “And he want out.”
“Sound like a piece of work to me,” I said, shaking my head. “Surely there are tasking folks more deserving of justice.”
“Course they are,” said Hawkins. “But we ain’t bringing justice to Johns. We bringing it to his master.”
“What?” I said.
“You see, Johns, whatever his cowardly ways, is a hell of a field-hand,” said Hawkins. “And he’s more than that. He’s something of a genius—plays the violin. Even works the wood like you.”
“What’s that got to do with freedom?” I asked.
“Nothing,” said Hawkins. “It ain’t about freedom. It’s about war.”
I paused and looked them both over.
“No, don’t start that,” said Hawkins. “Don’t start thinking again. Remember where that got you last time. There’s a bigger thing here. A higher plan.”
“And what’s that?” I asked.
“Hiram,” Mr. Fields said, “it’s for your own good. For all of our good. You don’t want to know it all. Just trust us on that.”
He paused for a moment to see if I could catch on and then he said, “It is hard to trust, I understand. Believe me, I do. All you have been met with since our first meeting are deceptions. I am sorry for that. It is not always an honorable life. And so perhaps it would help if you were given some bit of truth, even if it does not pertain to our journey this night. I want you to know my real name, Hiram. It is not Isaiah Fields. It is Micajah Bland. ‘Mr. Fields’ is a name I’ve assumed for my work here in Virginia. I would appreciate you using it for as long as we are down here, but it is not the name to which I was born.
“So I have trusted you now, with something most precious, something that could get me killed. Will you now trust us?”
And so our journey began—Hawkins, myself, and Micajah Bland. We did not run. For all the training, we merely walked. But we took a brisk pace, avoiding main roads, and going through the pathless backwoods and over hills, until the woodlands flattened and I knew from this, and our respective orientation to the stars, that we must be headed east. The land was dry, the night warm. I knew by then that this was the worst season to conduct, simply because of the brevity of the sunless hours when we could travel. Winter was the field agent’s high season. In summer, with fewer hours, precision of arrival and departure was everything. We walked for six hours or so roughly to the south-east.
Johns was just where he was supposed to be—at the crossing of two paths in the forest, distinguished by a wood-pile on the right end. Standing in the woods, we saw him pacing in his nervousness. It was my first mission and I was entrusted with making the contact. We worked in teams. But only one man made contact at first. By this method, should we be betrayed, only one of us would fall.
I stepped out from beyond the trees and approached. Johns stopped pacing. He had come just as he’d been told to. No bundles. No extra effects. Only the forged papers in his hand, in case of Ryland. Surveying him, I confess myself mixed. There had always been men like him, those who, for their own amusement, menaced an entire tasking team. In the days of my grandmother, Santi Bess, they had ways of dealing with such men. An accidental fall in the woods. A spooked horse. A pinch of pokeweed. And now I must work to free such a scoundrel, while good men, women, and children lay buried under.
I looked at him hard and said, “Ain’t no moon over the lake tonight.”
He said, “That’s ’cause the lake had its fill with the sun.”
“Come on,” I said. He paused for a second, looked to the woods and motioned. And then out came a girl, perhaps about seventeen, in field overalls with her hair tied under a cloth. And this is why such men as Parnel Johns were fed to the pokeweed. Every act of normal sympathy was, to