Lincoln’s Dreams

CHAPTER TEN

Pickett’s Charge was the worst moment of the war for Lee. In spite of his telling his men, “Don’t be discouraged,” he had to have known the war was lost with it. Generals Garnett and Armistead were dead. General Kemper was mortally wounded, and there had been over twenty thousand casualties in three days. Even if the army managed to retreat safely into Virginia, it would never have the strength again for a major offensive. The long retreat to the apple orchard was beginning.

That night, worn out, Lee had tried to dismount and been unable to. A cavalryman leaned forward to assist him, but before he could reach him, Lee had gotten down by himself and stood leaning against Traveller. “Too bad!” he said. “Too bad! Oh, too bad!”

Annie slept fitfully all afternoon, not dreaming but not getting any rest either. At six I drove to McDonald’s and got hamburgers. She got up then, but she ate hardly anything, and afterwards she couldn’t get back to sleep. She walked the length of the room, back and forth, like a penned animal.

“Do you want to read galleys?” I asked, remembering that she’d said they helped keep her mind off the dreams, but she shook her head and went on pacing, stopping now and then to lean against the window. She looked dead on her feet. Her eyes were shadowed with fatigue, and there was hardly any color in her face.

“Do you think the library would be open tonight?” she asked.

“It closed at six,” I said. “We could go take in a movie. I could go get a paper and we could see what’s on.”

“No, I…” She went over to the bed and lay down. After a while she said sleepily, “When does it open in the morning?”

“The library? Nine,” I said, wanting to ask her what she wanted at the library but afraid I’d wake her up. She seemed to be asleep already.

I read Freeman awhile. I didn’t try to find out anything else about Annie Lee. There was no point. I had thought Annie would be glad we had finally found out why she was having the dreams, but she hadn’t even acted like she cared. And the information hadn’t helped her sleep.

When I got bored with Freeman, I picked up the galleys. Ben and Malachi ran into some of their own artillery and took cover behind it. I didn’t remember that. In the last version I’d read, they’d gotten separated, with Ben ending up on an ambulance detail, but in this version they were clear across the valley from where they should have been. I wondered if this was the scene Broun had written that afternoon after I’d accused him of being obsessed with the Lincoln book.

“Shouldn’t we ask somebody where our regiment is?” Ben asked.

Malachi pointed back across the cornfield to a road and a fence full of men. It wasn’t so smoky down there, and Ben could see the sun glinting off their bayonets. “They’re clear the hell over there, mebbe, and how do you conjure we get to ’em? We got ourselves separated and we’re gonna stay that way. ”

Malachi shouted the whole speech, but toward the end of it Ben could only tell what he was saying by reading his lips. The noise of the guns was getting louder every minute, and the firings and the shells landing had stopped making separate sounds and were roaring, like thunder. Ben could only tell when the guns fired by the smoke.

“Come on!” Malachi said. Ben didn’t hear that either, but they started to run, keeping their heads down as if to protect them from the noise.

They ran straight into one of the guns. Its barrel had exploded and there were men lying on their backs in a circle around it. A man wearing a straw hat, and a boy were trying to free the horses from the caisson. A lieutenant rode up and shouted, “Pull those horses back!” and Ben wondered how he was able to make himself heard. “You two there! Help him!” he said, pointing his sword at the boy, who was struggling with the reins.

The man wearing the straw hat had unbuckled the harnesses, but the horses had gotten themselves tangled in it. One of the girth straps was wrapped around the nearer horse’s hind leg. The harder he strained the tighter it pulled.

Ben grabbed hold of the horse’s dragging reins and tried to steady him. Malachi got alongside the horse and began to push him back against the caisson. The man in the straw hat reached under to cut the strap. The horse whinnied and reared up.

“Dang your hide, you crazy fool,” Malachi shouted at the horse. “Do you want to get kilt? ”

Ben stepped back out of the reach of the hoofs, grabbing for the reins. “Hold still, dang ya!” Malachi shouted.

There was a terrible roar. It surprised Ben that he could hear it. Dirt and grass and pieces of metal flew up in front of the caisson, and the horse came down on its front feet, hard, and pitched sideways onto Malachi. Ben ran over to him. The horse’s full weight was on his chest. “Dang your hide, you ugly plug!” Malachi said. “Get off ’n me. ”

Ben got his hands under Malachi’s shoulders and tried to pull him out, but he couldn’t budge him. He stood up and called to the boy to come and help, but he couldn’t see him anywhere. The man with the straw hat was bending over the tongue of the caisson, his arms swinging lazily back and forth.

“I allus hated horses,” Malachi said in a strong, clear voice that Ben didn’t have any trouble hearing. “Danged gray gelding bit me in the backside when I was a young ’un, and I never trusted them since. ”

Ben was still holding on to the reins. He stepped back and pulled on them, and the horse’s head moved a little. Its neck looked impossibly long, lying there on the ground, like he had stretched it with his pulling. Ben tried again.

“Dang horse throwed a shoe and I got off to look at his hoof. No way he’d let me pick it up to look at it, so I bend over to see if mebbe he’s split the hoof,” he said. A bubble of blood and mucus showed in his nose. He sniffed and went on talking. “He takes a piece out of my britches and what’s under ’em. I stood up to supper for two weeks. ”

Ben dropped the reins and knelt down beside Malachi. He worked his hands under the horse’s flank and tried to lift it up a little. “Can you ease yourself out a ways?” he asked.

“You are allus lookin’ behind you after a thing like that, but I never expected a durn horse to come at me from the side.” A larger bubble of blood came out of the corner of his mouth and trickled into his beard.

“Malachi?” Ben said, even though he knew he was dead. He stood up. The fighting had moved farther south, toward Sharpsburg. Ben could hear the individual guns easily now. He looked back down at Malachi. One of his boots was sticking out from under the horse’s tail, and the other one was half under its leg. Ben knelt down and pulled the boot off Malachi wasn’t wearing socks, and there was a blue-black blister on the heel. Ben turned the boot upside down. He set the boot down next to Malachi and started to pull the other one off.

“You there!” a man on a horse said. It was the same lieutenant who’d told them to help pull the horses back. He waved his sword at Ben. “Come away from there! What’s your regiment? ”

The boot came free, and Ben straightened up, holding it. “I was looking… ”

“You were looking to get a new pair of boots. Get back to your regiment before I have you shot for looting!” He waved the sword close to Ben’s middle.

Ben felt around the inside of the boot and pulled out a damp square of paper. “You got no call to talk to me thataway,” he said. “I was just trying to help.” He knelt down and tucked the paper in the pocket of Malachi’s shirt and started down the hill toward the sound of shooting.

In the original version Ben had never found out what happened to Malachi. He had simply dropped out of sight, like how many soldiers at Antietam and Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville? “Did he die?” I had asked Broun after reading the first draft.

“Die? Hell, no, an old vet like Malachi was too tough to die. He hightailed it to California after Gettysburg.”

Broun had rewritten the scene because he was furious with me, but what was he trying to communicate? Was he supposed to be Malachi, struggling with a recalcitrant research assistant who wouldn’t cooperate even when it was for his own good, or was he supposed to be Ben, who was only trying to help and who got threatened with being shot as a looter for his pains? Broun had been angry with me that afternoon, but he’d been worried, too. He had asked me that afternoon if I was Richard’s patient, if I was taking any medication. Maybe he had written this chapter to show me he was worried about me, that he only wanted to help.

I looked at my watch. It was eleven-thirty, eight-thirty in California, and God only knew what time it was in northern Virginia or Pennsylvania or wherever the hell Lee was tonight. Annie sighed in her sleep and turned over. I put the chain on the door and moved the chair over between it and the bed. I stood there awhile, watching her sleep, wishing I could help, and then went on reading.

Ben carried wounded soldiers off the field all afternoon. Ben’s Union brother made it out of the East Wood and away from the Sunken Road before he was hit in the side. He lay still for a while in the hot sun and then crawled under a haystack and passed out. Around two-thirty an artillery shell set the haystack on fire, and he was burned alive.

“They can’t possibly hold that position,” Annie said. She sat up and swung her feet over the side of the bed. “I told him…” She stood up.

I glanced at the door, even though I had just fastened the chain, and took a protective step toward it, but she sat down on the side of the bed and put her arms around the wooden poster at the head of the bed. “My fault,” she said, so softly it was almost a sigh.

I tried to sit down next to her, but she pulled away, so I sat in the green chair and leaned forward, my hands between my knees. “Annie!”

“I know! I know!” she said bitterly. She stood up again, one arm still wrapped around the bedpost. “Where is he?” she asked, and turned to look at someone behind her. “He was supposed to tell Hood to bring up his division.”

She took a stiff, sleepwalker’s step toward the door to my room. “Try to reform your men among the trees,” she said kindly, as if she were speaking to a child.

“Annie?” I said quietly, moving so I was between her and the door, wishing I had chained the outside door of my room, too. “I know where we are. It’s Pickett’s Charge. Longstreet didn’t send the reinforcements up.”

She looked straight at me. “Don’t be discouraged,” she said. There was no emotion in her voice at all, but the look on her face was the look she had had at Arlington, looking down the hill at the bodies on the lawn. “It was my fault this time. Form your ranks again when you get under cover.”

It went on for half an hour like that. Sometimes she reached down, her hand almost touching the floor, and I thought she must be helping lift up a soldier who had fallen. Then I remembered that Lee had been on horseback. He had ridden Traveller down from his command post to meet the survivors and send them back to the safety of the woods. He must be reaching down to rest his hand on a private’s shoulder, to give his soldiers some encouragement as they limped past. “My fault,” Annie said softly, over and over. “My fault.”

And I had wanted her to dream Gettysburg to prove my theory. “It’s not your fault,” I said.

I took her arm, gently, and led her back to the bed, and she sat down and put her arms around the post again. “Too bad,” she said despairingly. “Oh, too bad.”

She wouldn’t let go of the post even after she was awake. “I was under the apple tree watching the house,” she said calmly, but her arms were still wrapped around the turned wood. “Only this time it wasn’t an apple orchard. It was a forest.”

“The point of woods,” I said. “At Gettysburg.”

“I knew it wasn’t really an apple orchard and that they weren’t really apple trees even though there were green apples on them. It was summer. It was so hot it was like an oven. I was wearing my gray coat, and I kept thinking I should take it off, but I couldn’t because I had to tell all the soldiers who kept coming past to get under the trees. They were trying to get up over the railing onto the front porch and it wasn’t a railing, it was more like a wall, but they couldn’t and I couldn’t see why they couldn’t get onto the porch because of all the smoke and then they’d come back into the apple orchard, all bloody. I said, over and over. This is my fault, this is my fault,’ to all of them as they came past.”

I sat beside her on the bed and told her what the dream meant, even though I was past believing I was helping her with my explanations any more than Richard had helped her with his theories and his sleeping pills.

She had told me that my explaining the dreams made them easier, but I had been doing that for a week, and the dreams had gotten steadily worse. Taking her to Arlington wasn’t going to help, either, and I wasn’t about to take her back within reach of Richard, but keeping her here in Fredericksburg wasn’t much better. Sooner or later she would decide she wanted to go out to the battlefield. To find what? A whole new batch of dreams? Spotsylvania? Petersburg? The Wilderness, where the wounded were burned alive? There were all sorts of wonderful possibilities. The war was only half over.

“Promise me you won’t try to stop me from having the dreams,” she had said that first day in Fredericksburg. And I had promised. Lee had made promises, too. “I could have taken no other course,” he had written Markie Williams. But when he saw boys of sixteen cut down like stalks of corn, when he saw them barefoot and bleeding and dead on their feet, didn’t he ever consider breaking his promise?

I felt suddenly too tired to even stand. I went back into my room, pushed the galleys off my bed onto the floor, and went to bed.

I slept till six-thirty. Three-thirty in California. Too early to call Broun. I went over to the coffee shop and read galleys, letting the redheaded waitress fill my coffee cup whenever it got halfway down, till it was a uniform, undrinkable temperature.

D.H. Hill’s horse got its legs shot off, Ben found his regiment, and they marched south and east toward Sharpsburg. Lee tried to look through a lieutenant’s telescope but couldn’t because his hands were bandaged. A.P. Hill came riding up in a red wool shirt to save the day, and Ben got shot in the foot.

At nine I called Broun’s hotel from the pay phone in the coffee shop. He had checked out.

I went back to the room and let myself in through my door. Annie was asleep, clutching her pillow the way she had the bedpost. I called the answering machine. “You’re probably wondering where I went,” Broun said. “I’m in San Diego. At the Westgate. I came here to see an endocrinologist. The psychiatrist put me onto him. He’s an expert on hormonal imbalances in the brain. Call me if you need anything, son.”

“I’m trying to,” I said. I called the Westgate in San Diego. A recorded voice asked who I was trying to call, and when I told it, it rang Broun’s room. He wasn’t there.

I wondered where he really was. He could be meeting with the endocrinologist, or standing in line at LAX, or be someplace else altogether, and his kind, gruff voice would still say, “I’m in San Diego at the Westgate.” The plane to San Diego could nave crashed and it still wouldn’t have made any difference. That voice would still have talked to me. I wondered if that was what was happening here, if the dreams were some kind of prerecorded message left by Lee, and he wasn’t there at all.

I went and got the car. Take Lafayette Boulevard to Sunken Road. You can’t miss it. The pharmacist had been right about that. There were signs everywhere: highway signs for US 3, small brown National Park Service signs every block or so on Lafayette Boulevard, a big brown sign at the entrance, a “Closed After Dark” sign next to the iron gates, Fredericksburg Historic Tour marker Number 24, a white “National Cemetery” sign. Sunken Road was marked with a regular green-and-white street sign. I pulled into Sunken Road and parked across from the Visitors’ Center. It was after nine, which meant the Visitors’ Center and, presumably, the library were open, but I didn’t go in. I went up the hill to see the graves.

It wasn’t as bad as I had thought it would be. The hill was terraced into grassy shelves just wide enough for a row of graves, and at the top the carved headstones sloped down and away in neat rows toward a flag anchored with pyramids of decorative solid shot, but the hill wasn’t even half as high as the hill at Arlington, hardly high enough to be called a ridge.

The plain below, where all the bodies had lain, was covered with grass and trees and criss-crossed with brick paths. Azaleas and ivy had been planted around the Visitors’ Center. It looked like somebody’s backyard.

Well, that was the kind of war the Civil War had been, wasn’t it? A backyard war, fought in cornfields and on front porches and across rutted country lanes, a homey little war that had killed two hundred and four thousand boys and men outright and four hundred thousand more with dysentery and amputated arms and bilious fever. But in spite of the neat rows of graves stretching away like points on a radius, it didn’t look like anybody had ever been killed here. And it didn’t look like Arlington.

At the top of the hill I took the brick path that led along its edge to a large sign that turned out to be a painting of Lee looking through binoculars out over the battlefield. Next to it was a brick pillar with a speaker in it. I pushed the button for the know-nothing tourist’s guided tour.

“At this spot on Marye’s Heights,” the deep, authoritative voice said, “General Robert E. Lee stood, commanding the battle of Fredericksburg.” It sounded like Richard on the answering machine. I let the voice ramble on while I looked at the graves on the edge.

They were marked with granite squares maybe six inches across. There were two numbers on each square. The one nearest me read 243, and then a line, and below that the number 4. I scribbled the numbers down on a piece of paper so I could ask what they meant.

“Good morning,” a brown-hatted ranger said. He came up beside me, carrying a plastic trash sack. “Did you need in to the Visitors’ Center? I was out checking the grounds, so I locked it up, but I can go open it. We’ve been having problems with kids geting in at night.” He pulled a beer can out of the back to show me and then dropped it back in. “The first tour’s at eleven. Are you looking for a particular grave?”

“No,” I said. “I just wanted to see the battlefield from up here.”

“It’s hard to imagine there was ever a battle here, isn’t it? The artillery were all along this ridge, and there were sharpshooters down behind that stone wall, where the road is. It’s not the original wall, by the way. General Robert E. Lee commanded the battle from up here,” he said with the enthusiasm of someone who’s never been in a war. “He watched the Union army coming up from the river there,” he pointed across the trees and roofs of Fredericksburg toward the Rappahannock, “and he said, ‘It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.’”

“What do the numbers on the unmarked graves mean?”

“Those are the graves’ registration numbers. After the war there were bodies buried all over this area from the battles of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania and the Wilderness. When the battlefield was made into a national cemetery, quartermaster teams were sent around to disinter the bodies and rebury them here. The numbers tell where the bodies were found.”

I took out the piece of paper I’d written the numbers on and unfolded it. “Can you tell me about this one?” I said. “Two hundred forty-three, and under that there’s a line and the number four.”

“Two hundred forty-three is the registration number. The four is the number of bodies.”

“The number of bodies?”

“That were found in the original grave. Or parts of bodies. It was hard to tell, sometimes, how many soldiers there really were. Some of the bodies had been buried for three years.”

Like Willie Lincoln, I thought irrelevantly. Maybe he had been buried in a field somewhere, and then a quartermaster’s team had dug him up and sent him home with his father’s body to Springfield.

“At Chancellorsville they found a grave full of arms and legs. They figured it must have been near a field hospital where they were doing amputations. And lots or times they’d buried horses along with the bodies.”

“How did they arrive at these numbers, then?”

“Skulls. It was a grisly business,” he said cheerfully. “If you’d like to come down to the Visitors’ Center, I can look up that grave number for you.”

“No,” I said. “I think I’ll stay up here awhile.”

“It is beautiful up here, isn’t it?” he said. He tipped his broad-brimmed hat to me and went back along the brick path and down the hill, stopping once to pick up a scrap of paper by one of the graves.

It was beautiful up here. The spreading town with its blue and gray roofs and blossoming trees hid where the plain had been, and below, where the infantry had been cut down by the rifles behind the stone wall, there was a line of ragtag souvenir shops selling postcards and Confederate flags. There was no sign of the dead horses that had littered the field, the wounded Union soldiers taking cover behind them because there was no other cover. “It is well that war is so terrible,” Lee had said, watching it, “or we should grow too fond of it.”

Too fond of it. Was that what the dreams were all about? Was Lee so fond of it he couldn’t let go of it, even in dreams? No, of course not. He had said that in the morning, when the plain was full of flags and bugle calls and sunlight glinting off the barrels of Springfield rifles.

That night the wounded had lain there where the souvenir shops and the Visitors’ Center were now, freezing to death, and Lee’s barefoot, threadbare soldiers had gone down the hill and over the stone wall that would have been black with blood and icy to the touch. Of course they had to put up a new one. The Confederates had gone down the hill and over the wall and taken their uniforms, with the names pinned to the sleeves, their boots with the names stuffed in the toes. And nobody, not even Lee, could have been fond of war at that point.

I could not possibly let Annie come out here. She had been here already in her dreams, had seen the bodies lying there on the cold ground, had seen the aurora borealis do its bloody dance in the northern sky, but she hadn’t seen the rows of granite markers, and she hadn’t seen the Roll of Honor or heard the ranger read the entries cheerfully, enthusiastically, not even aware of the horror of what he was saying. A lot of times they’d buried horses along with the bodies.

Maybe I couldn’t stop the dreams, but I could protect her from this. And that meant getting her out of Fredericksburg, where well-meant waitresses and pharmacists and taxi drivers drew maps on drugstore counters in their eagerness to get us out here. I went down the hill and into the Visitors’ Center.

The ranger was behind the information desk, emptying a metal wastebasket into the trash can. “I found that grave number for you,” he said, brushing his hands together. He opened a thick, leather-bound book to a page he had marked with a scrap of paper. “They’re listed alphabetically by quartermaster team.”

He turned the book toward me, and I read down the fine-printed page. “Found Wilderness battlefield. Three bodies. Found Charis farm, in cornfield. Two skulls. Found Chancellorsville battlefield. Two bodies.”

“Here it is,” the ranger said, twisting his body around so he could read the numbers. “Two forty-three.” He pointed to a line near the bottom of the page. “Found Lacey’s farm, in apple orchard. Four skulls and parts.”

Found in apple orchard. Four skulls and parts. “It has something to do with the soldier with his name pinned to his sleeve,” Annie had said, trying to get at the meaning of the dreams. But it wasn’t one yellow-haired boy with his name too blurred to read. It was so many it took them years to dig up all the bodies buried in cornfields and under apple trees and put them here, so many they couldn’t bury them separately, they had to bury them all together under one marker.

“Do you know of any good tourist attractions away from Fredericksburg?” I said. “Someplace we could go today? Say within a hundred miles of here.”

He pulled a brochure out from under the desk. “The Wilderness battlefield is only

“Not the Wilderness. Not anything to do with the Civil War.”

He reached under the counter again, looking bewildered, and came up with a road map of Virginia. “Well, there’s Williamsburg, of course. It’s about a hundred miles.” He spread out the map on the counter. “Shenandoah National Park is about a hundred and twenty.” He pointed. “It’s got a lot of beautiful views and hiking trails. I don’t know what the weather’s like to the west, though. There’s supposed to be a big front coming in.”

I leaned over the map. There was no way out of Fredericksburg. To the south, Sayler’s Creek blocked our way to Richmond; to the north we would have to cross the Antietam. Chancellorsville and the Wilderness were between us and Shenandoah on US 3. But if we went south, not so far that we would run into Spotsylvania, and kept to the back roads till we were west of Culpepper, where the battle of Cedar Mountain had been fought, we might be able to do it.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?” the ranger asked eagerly. “There’s a guided tour at eleven.”

“No, thanks.” I folded up the map. “How many unknown soldiers were there altogether?”

“Here, you mean? There are twelve thousand seven hundred and seventy buried in Fredericksburg National Cemetery,” he said as if it were a point of pride. “They’re all Union soldiers, of course.”

“How many altogether? In the whole war?”

“The whole war? Oh, I have no idea. I’m not even sure there’s any way. He took a pencil out of his pocket and began writing oh the battlefield brochure. “All right. We have twelve thousand seven hundred seventy here, and there are eleven hundred and seventy Confederate unknowns in the Confederate Cemetery, and then Spotsylvania.” He wrote down a figure and then reached under the counter again and brought up a stack of brochures. “The Unknowns of the Civil War Memorial at Arlington has two thousand one hundred and eleven….” He shuffled through the brochures, turned one over. “There are four thousand, a hundred and ten at Petersburg. Gettysburg has nine hundred and seventy-nine unknowns in the cemetery proper, but of course there are more graves on the battlefield. Most of the Confederate dead were moved to Richmond and Savannah and Charleston after the war and buried in mass graves there.”

He riffled through the brochures again. “It all depended on who won the battles, of course. For the loser, over eighty percent would be unknown at any one battle.” He started adding up the figures. “I’d say between a hundred and two hundred and fifty thousand unknown dead altogether, but if you want a more accurate number…”

“Never mind,” I said, and got in the car and went to get Annie.