Lincoln's Dreams

When we got back to the room, I said, “I thought I’d read galleys in here for a while.” I pulled a green chair over near the foot of the bed, and went to my room to get the galleys, taking a while to gather up Broun’s copyedited manuscript and a couple of blue pencils so Annie could get ready for bed, and whistling the whole time so she’d know I was there.

When I came back in, she was already in bed, in a long-sleeved white nightgown, sitting up against the pillows, her hands clenched together.

“Is that Broun’s book about Antietam?” Annie asked.

“More or less,” I said. “He keeps making changes. That’s why I need to get these done before he comes back from California, so he’ll quit fooling with it.”

“What do you have to do with them?”

“Read them over. Look for mistakes, typos, missing lines, punctuation, that kind of thing.” I moved the chair closer to the bed so I could prop my feet on the end of it.

“Can I help?” She said it calmly enough, but the knuckles of her clenched hands were white. “Please. I don’t want to just sit here and wait to go to sleep.”

I put the galleys down. “Look, I don’t have to work on these right now. We could watch some TV or something.”

“Really, I’d like to help with the galleys. I think reading would take my mind off the dreams. Do we take different parts or do we read it out loud to each other?”

“Annie, I just don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Because it’s about Antietam?”

Because it’s about Lee’s bandaged hands and a horse with its legs shot off and dead soldiers everywhere. “Yes.”

“You read those out loud, don’t you?” she said. “That’s exactly the reason I should help you. I can see if Broun made any mistakes. After all, I was there.”

There was nothing I could say to that. I handed her the galleys and a blue proofreader’s pencil. “I’ll read from the copyedited manuscript and you follow along to make sure everything’s there and they haven’t left out a line. You can check for typos, too. Just mark an X in the margin, and I’ll go back and put in the proofreader’s marks.” I handed her a pencil and put my feet up on the footboard and began to read:

“What time is it, do you reckon?” Ben said. They were crouched in a cornfield a little behind the sunken road where all the fighting was. They had fired over the heads of the men in the road until they ran out of cartridges and then had begun working their way backwards between the rows of shredded corn, taking rifles away from dead and wounded men and firing them. It seemed like they had been doing it for hours, but there was so much smoke Ben couldn’t even see the sun. He wondered if maybe they had been here all day and the sun had gone down.

“It ain’t noon yet,” Malachi said. He had his hand under a soldier whose left shoulder had been shot off and who was lying face down in the broken corn stalks. He had yellow hair. His arm was lying on the ground beside him, still holding on to his Springfield. There was a scrap of cloth pinned to his sleeve with a stick. Ben put down his rifle and unpinned the cloth. It was a handkerchief.

Malachi turned him over and rummaged in his pockets. It was Toby.

“Come on,” Malachi said. “Looks like he ran out of minnies, too before they got him.” He thrust Ben’s rifle at him and yanked him backwards. “Listen. They’re bringing the guns up,” Malachi said, and Ben could feel the rough dirt shake under his feet.

“I have to …” Ben said and started forward again.

Malachi stood up and grabbed him by the back of his shirt. “What in tarnation do you think you’re doin’? ”