Lincoln's Dreams

She stared at our reflections in the mirror. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

I walked her back to her own bed and covered her up. She had stopped crying, but her lashes were matted with tears. The Kleenex was a sodden wad, but I wiped her nose again with it and tucked her in.

I stood beside the bed for a while, thinking she would wake up, but she didn’t. I reached for Freeman on the floor next to the green chair and tried to find a burning house. During the battle of Antietam, Longstreet had helped some women and children get their belongings out of a burning house in sharpsburg, but Lee hadn’t been there. In the weeks before the battle of Fredericksburg, most of the town had been burned down, but no one had been killed except for seventeen thousand soldiers.

“I had another dream,” Annie said, without any trace of tears in her voice. She sat up in the bed. “My house was on fire.” She shook her head as if to contradict what she was saying. “It was the same house as in the other dreams, but it wasn’t my house, and it wasn’t Arlington.”

“Whose house was it?”

“I don’t know. We were standing under the apple tree watching it burn, and a rider handed me a message. I couldn’t open it because I was wearing gloves, so I handed it to somebody who was standing beside me. It was the clerk here at the inn. He opened the message with one hand. There was something wrong with his other arm. When he opened the message, I saw it was a box of candles.”

I shut Freeman. I knew whose house was on fire now. “One of Lee’s aides risked his life to bring Lee a box of candles because he was having trouble reading the dispatches by the light of the campfire,” I said. “It’s the Chancellor house that’s on fire. We’re at Chancellorsville.”

“It isn’t a box of candles, though,” Annie said, looking at me the way she had looked at her own reflection in the mirror. “It’s a message.”

“The message is about Stonewall Jackson,” I said. “Lee’s right-hand man. He was injured at the battle of Chancellorsville. He had his arm amputated.”

“I sent a message back to Jackson, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” I said. I knew what was in that message, too. “Give Jackson my affectionate regards,” Lee had written. “Tell him to make haste and get well and come back to me as soon as he can. He has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right.”

Annie leaned back against the pillows, rubbing her wrist as if it hurt. “But he’s not going to get well, is he? He’s going to die.”

“Yes,” I said.

She lay down immediately, docilely, as if she were a child who had promised to go to sleep after a bedtime story, and I went back into my room and got a blanket and brought it into Annie’s room so I could spend the night in the green chair.

Jackson’s doctors had predicted a speedy recovery, but he developed pneumonia and died nine days later. Toward the end he was delirious much of the time. “Order A. P. Hill to prepare for action!” Jackson had said once. Lee had called out for Hill, too, when he lay dying of a heart attack seven years later. “Tell Hill he must come up!” he had said clearly. I wondered if they had dreamed of the same battle and which one it was, and if Annie was doomed to dream it, too.

At five I gave up trying to sleep and went into my room and read galleys, leaving the door open in case Annie woke up again. Ben and Malachi spent the rest of the morning and most of a chapter trying to find their regiment, and Robert E. Lee found his son Rob. He was standing on a little knoll by the road when Rob’s artillery unit came straggling past with the only gun they had left. They were filthy and exhausted, and Rob stopped in front of his father and said, “General, are you going to send us in again?”

Robert E. Lee had his arm in a sling. A courier was holding Traveller because Lee’s hands were too swollen for him to hang on to the reins, and all around them cornfields and woods were on fire, and Antietam Creek ran a rusty red.

“Yes, my son,” Lee said. “You all must do what you can to help drive these people back.” He told them to take the best horses and sent them back into battle.

I had left Freeman on Annie’s bed. I went in to get it. She was asleep on her stomach, one hand under her cheek, the other flung out across the book. I eased the book gently out from under her, and then went on sitting there, as if my presence could somehow protect her from the dreams.

She had made me promise to help her have the dreams. Well, I was helping, all right. She’d already had more dreams since she met me than she had ever had with Richard, drugs or no drugs, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do for her while she was having them. I couldn’t even wake her up.