Lincoln’s Dreams

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Traveller only let Lee down once. It was on the march into Maryland, right before Antietam. Lee had been sitting on a log, holding Traveller’s reins loosely in his hands. It was raining, and Lee was wearing a poncho and rubber overalls. Someone shouted, “Yankee cavalry!” and Traveller started. Lee stood up to grab his bridle and tripped over the poncho. He caught himself on his hands. One of his wrists was broken and the other was severely sprained. At Antietam his hands were still in splints.

Annie wasn’t at the inn or the coffee shop. The redheaded waitress, still disapproving, said she had told her to tell me she was at the library, and I thanked her with such obvious relief that she was probably convinced we had had some kind of lovers’ quarrel.

Annie was in the reference section, the L encyclopedias spread out around her in a half-circle, most of them open to a picture of Lincoln’s careworn face, but she wasn’t looking at them. She was staring at the orange-painted bookcases across from her and not seeing them, thinking hard about something. I hoped the something wasn’t Gettysburg.

“Good morning,” I said, sounding like the inanely cheerful park ranger. “I didn’t think you’d be up this early.”

She made a reflexively protective gesture toward the book in front of her, and then shut it before I could see the page it was open to.

“I want to go out and see the vet,” I said. “Maybe he’s heard from his sister.”

“All right.” She closed the other books and stacked them on top of the book in front of her. “Let me just put these away.”

“I’ll help you,” I said, and grabbed for the bottom three books before she could pile the others on top of them. The top two were encyclopedias. The bottom one was the drug compendium I had used to find out about Thorazine. “What are you looking up in here?” I asked. “Are you all right? You’re not having any side effects from the Thorazine, are you?”

“I’m fine,” she said, turning away to put the other encyclopedias back on the shelves. “I wanted to know it the Thorazine was causing the headaches I’ve been having, but it isn’t. Did you go out to the battlefield this morning?”

“Yes,” I said, trying to keep my voice as casual as hers. “They’ve got a reference library out there. That’s why this library’s so skimpy on Civil War-iana. Ready? Maybe we can catch the vet before he makes his rounds.”

We drove out and saw the vet. He was in the stable again, feeding some horses he was boarding. “I’m afraid I don’t have any information for you,” he said, forking a bundle of hay into one of the stalls. “I haven’t been able to get in touch with my sister yet, but I’m going to a conference on horse diseases in Richmond tomorrow, and I should be able to run down and see her then.”

I had been counting on his having already talked to her, so that I could say to Annie, “Well, we’ve done what we came to do. There’s no point in sticking around here.”

“When will you be back?” I asked.

He stopped and leaned on the pitchfork. “It lasts through the weekend. I’ll probably come back Monday. Will you still be here?”

“If I’m not, I’ll call you on Monday.” Annie was looking at me. “We’ll still be at the inn. You’ve got the number, don’t you?”

“Yeah. Sorry you had to come all this way out here for nothing.” He filled a washtub with a hose. “I looked through some of my dad’s stuff on Akhenaten. There was nothing about him having dreams. Dad did have this one book on dreams and what the Egyptians believed about them, though. It was pretty interesting. They believed that dreams were messages from the gods or from the dead.”

“Messages?” Annie said. “What kind of messages?”

“All kinds. Advice, warnings, blessings. The gods could tell you who you were going to marry, whether you should take a trip, if you were getting sick and with what. If you were getting a fever you dreamed about one thing, if you were catching cold you dreamed about something else. They had it all written down in this dream book, what everything meant.”

The vet’s wife came to the door to tell him he was wanted on the phone.

“I’ll call you when you get back from your conference,” I said.

“Is the horse all right?” Annie said. “She didn’t get lockjaw, did she?”

“What horse? Oh, the mare that was out here the other day? She’s fine. Bruised sole, just like I thought.”

“Good,” Annie said. “I’m glad.”

I headed back toward town the way we had come until the first fork in the road and then took the left-hand turn. Annie didn’t seem to notice. She had rolled her window halfway down and was leaning back, her head against the seat. The breeze from the moving car ruffled her hair. Her face had the serious, almost wistful expression it had had in the library.

This road wasn’t as pretty as the one we’d taken down to the vet’s. It was lined with the debris that towns always have on their outskirts: storage units, car junkyards, old trailers with porches and dog kennels tacked on and a horse tethered out back.

“It’s beautiful out here, isn’t it?” I said to be saying something, anything to get her mind off whatever battlefield she was thinking about. “The waitress said a cold front was supposed to be coming in, but I don’t see any signs of it.”

I turned again, to the south; and ran right into the interstate.

“Is this the way we came?” Annie said when the six-lane road loomed up ahead.

“I thought I’d take the scenic route back,” I said, ignoring the I-95 sign and cutting over to US 1. “I saw the cat this morning. It was sitting in front of the coffee shop. I think it was waiting for you. Have you been feeding it?”

“I gave it one of those little cream containers this morning,” she said. “And some bacon. It looked hungry,” she added defensively.

“All cats look hungry,” I said, looking for road signs. I didn’t want to turn west until we were past Spotsylvania. “You realize you’re stuck with him for life. Or at least until something better comes along. He’d desert you in a minute for somebody with a sardine.”

“Desert,” she said, looking out the window. We were passing a field with a haystack in it. “They shot deserters, didn’t they? In the war.”

And there we were, right back in it, in a war she didn’t even call the Civil War anymore because it was so familiar to her, because she fought its battles every night.

“Not always,” I said. “A lot of deserters got clean away. To California. Speaking of California, Broun’s gone down to San Diego, so he’ll be in California a few more days, and the vet won’t have any information for us till Monday. Why don’t we drive over to Shenandoah this afternoon? See the Blue Ridge Mountains? There’s supposed to be a great place for fried chicken in Luray, be a nice change from the coffee shop. There’s really no reason to stick around Fredericksburg.”

We were going to run into the interstate again if we went much farther north. I turned left at the next road. It was State Highway 208. The road to Spotsylvania, I turned north onto a gravel road, then made three more turns, going north and west, trying to get as far from Fredericksburg as I could.

“What about The Duty Bound? ” she asked.

“The galleys? Broun and I can finish them after he comes home from California.”

“I think we should finish them,” she said. “I’d like to know how it ends.”

“Fine. We’ll finish them when we get back.” The road we were on jogged north and ran into a four-lane highway. I hoped I hadn’t managed to run into the interstate again. I hadn’t. It was US 3, and the towns in both directions were clearly marked with arrows. The Wilderness was that way, Chancellorsville the other. Take your pick.

“Maybe it is a good idea,” Annie said, looking at the signs. “To get away.”

“Great,” I said. I crossed the highway and went west at the next turn. “We’ll get some fresh air and some southern fried chicken, a little exercise. There are all kinds of hiking trails.”

“And no battlefields,” she said softly.

“You know what else is in that neck of the woods? Monticello. Thomas Jefferson’s plantation. We could spend the night in Luray and then drive down the Skyline Drive tomorrow and see Monticello.”

We could drive down to Monticello, and while we were there that big front would come in, and we would have to go south to avoid it, into North Carolina and then Georgia and finally Florida, where there hadn’t been any war.

“Monticello’s a great place,” I said, turning again onto what looked like a paved road. After the first mile, the asphalt gave way to gravel. “Jefferson made this great clock out of cannonballs. And curtains,” I added hastily. “Jefferson made his own curtains.” The gravel turned into dirt, and the road became so deeply rutted I was going to high-center the car if I didn’t turn around. I put the car in reverse.

There was barely room to turn in the narrow lane. On one side or the road the weeds grew up knee-high next to a ditch, and on the other was a thin stand of pines that had been planted almost to the edge of the road. I stretched my arm out over the back of Annie’s seat and started to back carefully so I wouldn’t end up in the ditch.

“The dreams all have messages,” Annie said.

“What?” I said, angry that something in this rutted lane, this pine woods, had made her think of the dreams again. I could no more get her out of the Civil War than I could get her out of the grave-filled circuit of Fredericksburg. I shifted into first again and killed the engine.

“I was thinking about what Dr. Barton said about the Egyptians. He said they believed that dreams were messages from the dead.”

“I thought we weren’t going to talk about the dreams again,” I said. I tried to start the car again and flooded it.

“Did you know that Abraham Lincoln dreamed about Willie after he died?” she said. I turned the ignition again, but Annie reached out to stop me. “Willie’s face came to comfort him in dreams, the book said. I think he’s dead, Jeff. I think the dreams are messages from the dead.”

I took my hand away from the keys. So it hadn’t been the sunken lane, the west wood after all.

“I thought you were right, that Lee was having the dreams during the Civil War and they were coming across time somehow, but yesterday, when I saw that postcard of his tomb at Lexington, I knew he was dead.” She was looking at me earnestly, her hand still on my arm. “Richard told me that dreams help you work through the things that happened to YOU, that they’re kind of a healing mechanism to help you get over grief and come to terms with the guilt you couldn’t deal with any other way, only if there’s too much guilt the dreams can’t handle it. That’s what he said was happening with me, but what if you had so much guilt and grief that you went on dreaming after you were dead?”

How many dreams would it take to heal Lee of Fredericksburg? Twelve thousand seven hundred and seventy? Lee’s dreams weren’t a “healing mechanism.” They were a burial detail, and how many dreams would it take to bury all those boys at Gettysburg who staggered back from Pickett’s Charge to collapse at Lee’s feet, how many dreams to bury all the boys in the bloody angles and sunken roads of Lee’s mind? Two hundred and fifty-eight thousand? A hundred years’ worth?

“You told me Lee was a good man,” Annie said, “and he is, Jeff, but he had to send all those boys back into battle, and they didn’t have any shoes and no ammunition. He knew they’d be killed, but he had to send them in anyway. He had to send his own son Rob back in. How could he stand it, all those boys killed and nobody even knowing what happened to them? I think they still haunt him, after all these years, even though he’s dead.”

“And so he haunts you.”

“No. It isn’t like that. I think he’s trying to atone.”

“By inflicting his nightmares on you?”

“He’s not inflicting them on me. It isn’t like that. I’m helping him sleep somehow. Even though he’s dead.”

“And in the meantime, what are the dreams doing to you?”

She didn’t answer.

“I’ll tell you what they’re doing. The dreams are getting worse, and they’re going to go on getting worse until we do something.” She started to protest. “Look, maybe you’re right. Lee’s dreaming in his tomb, and you’re letting him get some sleep by having the dreams, in which case it won’t matter where we go, the dreams will go right along with us. Only maybe not. Maybe it’s the battlefield that’s aggravating the dreams, and if we get away from it, the dreams will let up. The point is, you’re not getting any sleep, you’re not eating anything, and what good are you going to be to Lee if you pitch headlong down a flight of stairs some night?”

I started the car. “I think we should go to Shenandoah, get some rest, eat some fried chicken, get away from the dreams for a while, and if we can’t get away from them, try to ignore them. You’re not deserting. You’re just getting away for a little while. On furlough.” I was lying. It I managed to get her out of here I would never let her come back.

“Clean away,” Annie said, and I wondered if she knew I was lying, if she wanted to get away, too.

“We won’t talk about the dreams, we won’t think about the dreams, we’ll go hiking and eat fried chicken and look at the Blue Ridge Mountains. All right?”

She sighed, a long, surrendering sigh. “All right,” she said.

I drove back onto gravel, onto pavement, and out onto the road we had come up on. A mile up it turned into a county road, and a few miles after that onto a two-lane highway with a long, straight stretch of road.

It could have been summer. Some of the trees were already in full leaf, and it was unbelievably warm. There weren’t any clouds at all in the sky, not even above the line of blue in the west where we could already see the Blue Ridge Mountains. I speeded up, anxious to put as much distance as I could between us and Fredericksburg. It was past lunchtime, but we would eat later, when we were closer to Shenandoah.

“This is more like it,” I said, resting my arm on the open window. “I thought for a while there we were never going to see a highway again.” I had told Annie we weren’t going to talk about the dreams, but that was easier said than done. The dreams were all we’d thought about for days. I couldn’t talk about the battlefield, or Lee, or Lincoln either, who had been afflicted with bad dreams, too. And I could hardly tell her carefree college-days stories about my old roomie Richard, I said, sounding more than ever like the park ranger. “Broun and I got lost on a back road like that one time when I first came to work for him. He wanted me to take some pictures of the country around Antietam, but he was convinced I’d get lost, so he came with me and got us both stuck in a mud puddle. We had to walk out and get a tow truck. He wouldn’t even let me do that by myself. He was like that the whole first year I worked for him.”

“Not letting you do anything?” Annie said. “Why not?”

“I don’t know. He’d never had a research assistant before, and I guess he was used to doing everything himself. He was just starting The Duty Bound, and there was tons of research to do on Antietam, but he insisted on doing it all, especially the stuff at the battlefield. I thought when we got there he’d let me do at least some of the legwork for him, but he wouldn’t. He traipsed around the battlefield, taking notes like crazy, snapping pictures, stretching out flat on his back so he could get what he called ‘the soldier’s eye view—’”

I stopped and glanced anxiously at Annie, but she was watching the scenery, still smiling. Her blonde hair was blowing in the wind, and she brushed it out of her face.

“He cut his foot wading across Antietam Creek,” I went on. “On an old tin lid. It bled like crazy. His foot, not the lid. He had to have a tetanus shot and twelve stitches, and he still wouldn’t let me take over.”

Outside of Remington, the two-lane highway connected with the state highway to Culpepper. I cut south again.

“So here he is, hobbling around, trying to run things—”

“Like Longstreet,” Annie said.

“And he announces he’s going to Springfield. His publishers called and they want him to check the epigraph he used on the last book, so he’s going all the way to Springfield to see what’s written on Lincoln’s tomb or some damn thing, and I blew up. I said, ‘What in the hell did you hire me for? You won’t let me do anything, not even go look at some damned dead bodies.’”

Oh, Richard would have a heyday with this conversation. “Those are obviously Freudian slips,” he would say in his Good Shrink voice. “The subconscious is speaking, bringing up subjects the conscious mind wants to avoid.”

“So did he let you go to Springfield for him?” Annie asked, looking like she was unaware of the slips, Freudian or otherwise. She had taken my advice to heart. She was relaxing, getting away, even though I didn’t seem able to.

“He let me go to Springfield, but he kept calling me on the car phone on the trip out, reminding me to look at this and remember to ask that. He left messages at my motel and made me call every night and dictate my notes onto that damned answering machine of his. He just about drove me crazy. And then I don’t know what happened. Maybe he decided he hadn’t hired an incompetent idiot or something. He quit pestering me and let me do the research he’d sent me to do and from then on he let me do what he’d hired me to, which was to help him.”

I didn’t know till I got to the end of that instructive little story that that was what it was. My subconscious was calling for attention, all right, banging on the door to be let out, “He still does a lot of his own research,” I said, as if to convince myself that I hadn’t just been lecturing Annie on the subject of letting me take over, letting me help her. I have your best interests at heart.

“Maybe he had trouble giving up the research because he loved it,” Annie said.

“Maybe,” I said, thinking of how excited he had sounded about Lincoln’s dreams. “He loves Lincoln anyway.”

“And you.”

“Yeah.”

“I came to see Broun the night of the reception,” she said. “I made Richard come. I knew Broun knew all about the Civil War. I thought he might be able to tell me what the dreams meant.”

“Only Richard wouldn’t let you near him, and you got stuck with me.”

“Not stuck,” she said, and smiled at me the way she had that night in the solarium, that sweet, sad smile. “It’s you that got stuck with me.”

“We’re stuck with each other,” I said lightly. “And with Lee. But not today. Today we’re on leave. Are you hungry?”

“A little.”

“We’ll stop for lunch the next town we come to. We just came through Remington. There’s a map in the glove compartment. You can see if there’s a town coming up—”

“Stop the car,” Annie said. She had her hands on the edge of the half-open window and was looking back at what we had just passed. “Stop the car!”

She was out of the car before I had even pulled halfway onto the shoulder. She grabbed for the door handle and was out of the car and running toward the road.

“Annie!” I shouted, fumbling with the door. I leaped out after her.

She was standing on the edge of the shoulder, looking at nothing in particular, a rail fence and a plowed field, off in the distance a house with a wide porch. Her hands were balled into fists at her sides. “What is this place?” she demanded. “I know this place.”

Damn it. Damn it. I had thought we would be safe coming this way, away from Chancellorsville and the Spotsylvania Courthouse and the Wilderness. I had brought her this way on purpose because I thought it was safe.

“Did you dream it?” I said, dreading the answer.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I have the feeling that I’ve been here before. Where are we?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We just went through Remington.” I opened the car door and reached in for the map. The engine was still running. I switched it off. It couldn’t be Culpepper. I had seen a sign for Culpepper in Remington. We were still at least ten miles east of it. I grabbed the map out of the glove compartment, snapped it open, and scanned the map, unable to find Remington.

We were only a few miles past Remington. The next town… The next town was Brandy Station, two miles away. We were north of Brandy Station. There wasn’t a monument symbol next to it on the map, or a cross, though there should have been. The whole damned state was a graveyard. That plowed field was probably full of yellow-haired boys and grizzled veterans and horses.

“I feel like I’ve been here before,” she said, and walked across the road. She didn’t look in either direction, and I was not sure that for her there was even a road there. A blue car whipped around the curve and between us. It missed Annie by inches, lifting her skirt in the wind it made when it zoomed by. She didn’t jump or step away from it, startled. She didn’t even know it had been there.

I ran across the road to her. “It’s Brandy Station,” I said. “There was a cavalry battle near here. Lee’s son Rooney was wounded. Lee saw him being carried off the field. I’m sorry.” I took hold of her arm. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. Let’s go back to the car and get out of here.”

She didn’t move. She didn’t resist me, either. She simply stood there, stock-still, in the middle of the road. “Did he die?” she said.

“Rooney? I don’t know. I don’t think so. It was a leg injury.” I tugged at her arm. “We can find out when we get to Luray.”

She shook her head. “I want to go back to Fredericksburg.”

“Why? They’ll have a library in Luray. We can look up Rooney there. He didn’t die. I know he didn’t die. He was at his father’s funeral.”

Annie was staring at the plowed field as if she could see it all, Rooney on a litter, his leg torn open, the bandage soaked through with blood. “None of Lee’s sons were killed in the war,” I said.

“I have to go back,” she said. “I can’t desert him like that.”

I could hear a car coming, the low roar rising in pitch as it started to round the curve. “Desert him?” I said angrily, and practically pushed her back across the road and into the car. “You’re not one of his soldiers, Annie. You didn’t sign up for this war.”

A jeep roared past, straddling the center line. I came around and got in. I started the car and roared off the shoulder and onto the road, whipping around the rest of the curve at the same speed as the jeep, wanting us out of sight of the plowed field, out of sight of Rooney on a stretcher. “I had no business bringing you here!”

“It’s not your fault,” Annie said.

“Then whose fault is it? I take you to Fredericksburg. Fredericksburg, for God’s sake, where they’ve got so many bodies they’ve got to bury them in groups! I read you a book about Antietam out loud! And then, just to make sure you dream about Brandy Station tonight, I bring you out here so you can see the battle for yourself. And I wonder why the dreams are getting worse!”

There was a billboard up ahead, VISIT MANASSAS NATIONAL BATTLEFIELD PARK. I pushed my foot down hard on the accelerator. “Why don’t we drive up to Manassas? And then tomorrow we’ll run down to Richmond so you can dream the Seven Days battle. I was trying to get you the hell out of there to someplace that wasn’t a goddamned battlefield!”

The truck in front of me put on its brake lights. I jammed on the brakes. Annie’s hands came up hard against the dashboard.

“I was trying to help.”

“I know,” Annie said. “I know you were trying to help.”

I slowed the car down to a sane speed. “I was taking the back roads because I didn’t want to run into the Wilderness. Did I hurt your hand?” I asked anxiously.

“No,” she said. She rubbed her wrist.

“Well go to a doctor. In Luray. Well have him look at your hand and then we’ll—”

“It’s no use, Jeff,” Annie said. “I can’t leave him. I have to see the dreams through to the end.”

I pulled the car over to the edge of the road and stopped. “The end? What end? What if Lee goes on dreaming for a hundred years? What if he decides to dream the whole damn Civil War?” I said bitterly. “Are you going to dream it for him?”

“If I have to.”

“Why? They’re not your dreams. They’re Lee’s. He’s the one who ordered all those boys back into battle. Let him dream them himself. Let his daughter Annie dream them for him, if she wants to, it’s her father. But not you.”

“I have to.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t bear it,” she said, and started to cry. “Poor man, poor man, I have to help him. I can’t stand to see him suffer so.”

I took her hand in mine and rubbed the wrist gently. “And I can’t stand to see what they’re doing to you,” I said. I brought her hand up to my chest and held it there. “‘I would that I were wounded in your stead,” I said. “Lee said that when they told him Stonewall Jackson had been wounded at Chancellorsville.”

She looked up at me, the tears running down her face. Her tears, not Lee’s, not Lee’s daughter’s. And it was me she was looking at this time.

“I would, you know,” I said. “If there was any way I could, I’d have the dreams for you.”

I listened to what I’d said and looked at her dear, tear-streaked face. “Which is what you’re trying to do, isn’t it? Have the dreams for Lee, so he won’t suffer.”

“Yes,” she said.

“All right,” I said. I let go of her hand and turned the car around. “We’ll find a place in Fredericksburg that has fried chicken. And we’ll hope to God you don’t dream about Brandy Station.”

She didn’t. She dreamed about a chicken. And Annie Lee’s grave.