Lincoln's Dreams

“Annie, does Richard have you taking anything? Any medication?”

“Richard?” she said, and that faint note of questioning was there in her voice again.

“Is Richard there?” I asked.

“No,” she said, and it was the only thing she’d sounded sure about so far. “He’s at the Institute.”

“Annie,” I said, and felt like I was shouting to her from the bottom of a hill, “are you taking any medicine, any pills?”

“No,” she said through a yawn.

“When you first came to the Sleep Institute, did Richard prescribe anything for you? Any medicine?”

“Elavil,” she said, and I grabbed my notes on Willie and scribbled it in the margin. “But then he took me off of it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. He just took me off of it.”

“When did he do that?—take you off the Elavil?”

It took her a long time to answer. “It was after the dreams got clearer.”

“How long after?”

“I don’t know.”

“And he didn’t put you on anything else?”

“No,” she said.

“Listen, Annie, if you have any more dreams or if you need anything, if you want me to take you somewhere, anything, I want you to call me. All right?”

“All right.”

“Annie, last night you said you thought you were dreaming somebody else’s dream. Are you sure it was a dream?”

There was another long wait before she answered, and I was afraid the question had upset her, but she simply said, “What?” as if she hadn’t heard the question.

“How do you know it’s a dream, Annie? Could it be something that really happened?”

“No, they’re dreams,” she said, and her words were blurred a little, as if she still weren’t awake.

“How do you know?”

“Because they feel like dreams. I can’t describe it. They …” She all of a sudden sounded more awake. “What message was I looking for? Was it the message I sent to Hill at Harper’s Ferry?”

“No,” I said. “On the twelfth of September Lee issued campaign orders for the drive into Maryland. One of them was lost. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but a Union soldier found the order and gave it to McClellan.”

“There couldn’t have been a hundred and ninety-one copies of it, though,” she said, as if she were trying to convince herself. “Lee didn’t have that many generals. There probably weren’t that many generals in the whole Civil War.”

I said, “You’ve had a rough day. I don’t want you to catch pneumonia. Go back to bed, and we’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

“If there weren’t a hundred and ninety-one copies, why did I dream that number?”

“It was Special Order 191. It was addressed to D. H. Hill, the man you saw on the gray horse in your dream. He claimed the message was never delivered.”

She hung up. I stood there holding the receiver until the phone began beeping. Then I went and stood by the window and looked out at the snow till it got dark.

It had started snowing again, thick heavy flakes that would cover the graves at Arlington like a blanket. I hoped Annie was asleep and dreaming of something pleasant, a dream without dead Union soldiers in it, a dream without messages.

She hadn’t asked me about D. H. Hill, and I hadn’t told her. Hill had ridden a gray horse at Antietam. He had been surveying the troops on an exposed knoll when Lee and Longstreet rode up. They dismounted to scan the field, but Hill stayed in the saddle in spite of the artillery fire. “If you insist on riding up there, and drawing the fire, give us a little interval,” Longstreet had said angrily.

Hill hadn’t even had a chance to answer. The cannonball took the horse’s front legs off, and it plunged forward onto its stumps. Hill had had one foot in the stirrup, and when he tried to get off the horse he had been unable to get his other leg over the croup of the saddle, just the way Annie had described it. Just the way she had seen it. In her dream.

CHAPTER FOUR

Traveller was a Confederate gray gelding with a black mane and tail. He was probably not a thoroughbred, though historians have gone to incredible lengths to provide him with aristocratic breeding lines, one of them even claiming he was descended from Diomed, the famous English Derby winner. He did have a thoroughbred’s intelligence and courage and incredible endurance. “He never needs whip or spur,” his owner wrote to Lee, “and will go anywhere.”

I got up early and went to the library to see what I could find out about Elavil. The drug compendium said it was a fairly mild tricyclic antidepressant with a sedative effect, and that it was frequently used in connection with insomnia. It had an assortment of minor side effects and a couple of major ones. It was contraindicated for patients with heart conditions and those who had shown a previous hypersensitivity. It didn’t say anything about dreaming of dead Union soldiers. In fact, if Richard had had Annie on Elavil she shouldn’t have been dreaming at all. The tricyclic antidepressants increased the amount of time spent in delta sleep and decreased REM sleep, which was the stage most dreams occurred in.