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or six empty martini glasses. Displayed on the sideboard was what he guessed to be her farewell present, a very wide oil painting depicting a row of seven women seated in a formal drawing room, each seen only from the waist down and each with her respective terrier seated on her lap or at her feet. Werner could not help but smile at the sheer joy reflected in the expressions of the well-tended canines.  
    “Oh, don’t mind the mess,” Nancy remarked casually as she led him back to the kitchen. “They stayed so long there was no time to tidy up.”
    Nancy was an attractive and unusually energetic seventy-three-year-old, a woman who had formed countless friendships and acquaintances over the years, not only in Concord, but among Boston society at large and at her summer home on Islesboro, off the coast of Maine. She took enormous pleasure in entertaining her friends, visiting them at their homes and socializing with them at her downtown club. Since her husband’s death three years earlier, she had slashed her monthly expenses to the bone in order to maintain the house on Middle Street as long she could. Now, with the sale complete and the move to her daughter’s house in Western Massachusetts two weeks away, Nancy Widmer had invited Werner to bid on the purchase of nearly the entire contents of her amply stocked wine cellar. Despite the finality of such a move, Nancy seemed determined not to reveal even a trace of sadness or disappointment.
    “No dogs today?” Werner asked her, surprised at the absence of barking from her twin Corgis.
    “They’re spending the day with their doggie friends on Sudbury Street. But never mind the dogs. Come over here, Frank. I want to show you something.”
    He followed her into the pantry. There he saw her slide the shelves into a recess to reveal a heavy steel door that led down a flight of stairs into a cellar. Though he had been to the house a half dozen times to pick up wines and spirits that Nancy had sold him from time to time, Werner had never before been admitted to the wine cellar.
    “This house was built in 1820 with a small root cellar,” she declared. “The owners, who were radical Abolitionists, expanded the cellar in 1850 after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, to hide slaves traveling north along the Underground Railroad.”
    She pointed proudly to a small framed map showing the routes north to safety, a faded print showing ragged slaves on the run, and a laminated plaque with the lyrics of “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” a Negro Spiritual tune popular at the time.
    “Did you know that the slaves used the stars for navigation in those days, Frank? They watched for the Big Dipper because it points to the North Star. I remember learning that song in grammar school. We all learned it. And to think that the slaves probably sang it right here in this house!”
    Werner read the first stanza and was surprised when it sent a chill up his spine:

    When the sun comes back,
    And the first quail calls,
    Follow the drinking gourd,
    For the old man is waiting  
    For to carry you to freedom
    If you follow the drinking gourd.

    For the briefest moment an image of the Yukon tundra flashed through his head. His 2,000-mile trek from Kamas, Utah, to the Canol Road in the Yukon Territory had been the polar opposite of what the slaves had experienced. Unlike the Negro slaves marching toward freedom, every step had taken him further away from freedom and toward forced labor and premature death. More than a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, he still could not comprehend how the Corrective Labor Administration had come into being and expanded so rapidly within just a few years. Even today shackled prisoners were trudging to their deaths in corrective labor camps throughout Alaska, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories. Knowing this, and having survived it, was sometimes more than his mind could endure.  
    Nancy Widmer waited for Werner to read the lyrics, then led