Lincoln's Dreams

“Good,” he said. “I want you to take care of yourself. I thought you looked kind of peaked last night.” He paused, and I could hear voices in the background. “Listen, they’re getting impatient on this end for that scene. Get some rest, son, and don’t worry about anything till I get back.”

“I’ll call it in right away,” I said.

I hung up and then wished I hadn’t. What would Broun say if I called him back and told him I’d gone out to Arlington after all, and with somebody who’d dreamed about the battle of Antietam and Lee’s lost cat?

He would say, “There’s a logical explanation for this,” and I had already told myself that—that and a lot of other things. I had gone through every argument there was last night, one after the other, the way I had gone through Broun’s books looking for Tom Tita.

They were only dreams. She was ill. She was crazy. It was all an elaborate scam so she could get close to Broun. There was a logical explanation for the dreams. She had read about the cat somewhere. She’d been to Arlington as a child. It was all a joke. She’d been put up to it by Richard. It was some kind of dopey Bridey Murphy phenomenon. It was just a coincidence. Lots of people dreamed about yellow tabby cats. They were only dreams.

There was no point in calling Broun back. He wouldn’t be able to add any new arguments to that list. Worse, he might not even try to convince me there was a logical explanation. Fascinated as he was by Lincoln’s dreams right now, he might say, “Has she ever dreamed she saw herself in a coffin in the East Room? Do you think you could try to get her to dream Lincoln’s dreams?”

I called the number Broun had given me for calling in the scene, and they put me on hold. I read the scene over while I was waiting.

“You can begin recording now,” a woman said, and I heard a click and then a dial tone. I called again, but the line was busy, so I set the machine to redial the number every two minutes, plugged in the auxiliary mike, and read the revised scene onto the answering machine:

The picket fire slowed up toward dark, and Malachi went back into the woods a little way and built a cookfire.

“What you Rebs havin’ for supper over there?” a voice called from across the river.

“Yankees,” Toby said, and then ducked as if he thought they’d shoot at the sound. There was laughter from across the river, and another voice called, “Any of you Rebs come from Hillsboro?”

“Yeah, and we are on our way to Washington.” Toby shouted back. He put his gun down and leaned on it, “Myself I hail from Big Sewell Mountain, What you want to know ’bout Hillsboro?”

The voice across the river shouted, “I am looking for my brother. His name’s Ben Freeman, You know him?”

Toby stepped forward in plain sight to say something funny, Ben stood up and fired across the river. There was a rapid volley of rifle fire, and Toby dived for the ground, his arms around his gun. Ben walked into the woods and sat down by Malachi’s fire. Malachi didn’t say anything, and after a minute Ben said, “I don’t think we should go talking to the enemy that away.”

Malachi stirred the fire and hung a can over it to boil the coffee in. “How’d you and your brother come to be on opposite sides of this thing?”

“We just did,” Ben said, staring at the can.

Toby came up to the fire and squatted down in front of it, “You and your brother fight over some girl?”

“We didn’t fight,” Ben reached for his rifle and laid it across his lap, “He just one day signed up, and I knew I had to, too, and there we was, enemies.’