Lincoln's Dreams

I couldn’t find the same clear-cut pattern with Chancellorsville. Jackson had been wounded on May second, and as soon as Lee found out about it, he wrote him, “I would I were wounded in your stead.” The message of the amputation of his arm arrived on the night of the fourth. There was no mention of Lee’s having insomnia that night, though it was hard to imagine him getting a good night’s sleep after news like that. On the fifth, word came that Jackson was recovering, and he definitely slept well that night, under a fly-tent at Fairview.

On the morning of the seventh, Jackson began to get worse, and by afternoon he was lost in delirious dreams, calling out for A. P. Hill and telling the infantry to move up. “Do your duty,” he told the doctor who was dosing him with mercury and opium. “Prepare for action.” On Sunday he said clearly, out of the final dream of some battle. “Let us cross over the river and rest under the trees,” and died.

Annie closed both the Lincoln books. “Would they have anything else on Lincoln?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “They might have something in the reference section. It’s downstairs.”

She nodded and left, taking her notes with her.

I started through the biographies of Lee, wishing I had brought Freeman with me. The first book was arranged so hopelessly I never even found Chancellorsville, let alone any references to Lee’s insomnia, but the second one, so old the pages were edged in gilt, and written in indecipherably flowery language, said, “When Lee received the dreadful news that the doctors’ ministrations were to no avail and that Jackson was sinking fast, he turned to that last, best source of hope in times of trouble. All night he prayed fervently on his knees for Jackson’s recovery.”

He had been up all one night praying and probably had slept badly three or four nights before that because of worrying about Jackson. There was definitely a pattern. During each of the events Annie had dreamed about, Lee had gone without sleep for several days in a row. Maybe when he did finally sleep, he experienced the storm of dreams that Dr. Stone had described. Dr. Stone had called them powerful, frightening dreams. Could they have been powerful enough to have blasted their way across a hundred years to Annie? And if they had, why was she having them one right after the other? Jackson had died five months after the battle of Fredericksburg.

I looked at my watch. It was four-thirty. I piled the books up and took them back downstairs. Annie was in the reference section with a large book spread open in front of her. They must have had something alter all. I went up into the alcove and put the books back on the shelves where they belonged so they would be there if I needed them again and not on a cart guarded by that fierce-looking librarian, and found a book on Gettysburg.

It weighed a ton. I didn’t try to carry it back up to the biographies room or even get it up onto a table. I just laid it open on the floor and bent over it, trying to see if the same pattern of lack of sleep persisted with Gettysburg. Gettysburg was the next Dig battle after Chancellorsville, but Annie wasn’t dreaming all the battles. I needed to see if the same conditions for dreaming had occurred during that battle.

There was a full page of references to Lee in the index. I tried looking them up, keeping one hand in the index page and going down the two-column pages with a finger of my other hand, hoping Lee’s name or the word sleep would jump out at me. At five-fifteen I gave up. It was in there, every word ever written about Gettysburg had to be in there, which was the whole problem. There was too much stuff to sort through, the way the vet’s bay had had too many symptoms. Lee’s insomnia was lost in the sheer volume of facts. I hefted the book back onto its shelf and went to look for Annie.

She wasn’t in the magazine section. I looked along the stacks and found her finally back in the biographies room. She had let up one of the shades and was looking out the window in the direction of the Rappahannock.

“I think I’ve figured out what’s causing the dreams,” I said.

She turned around. She looked tired, as if she had been up all night instead of a few hours.

“I think you were right when you said you were helping Lee sleep,” I said. “I think that may be exactly what you’re doing.”

We went out the arched green doors and down the cement steps. It must have rained while we were inside because the library’s asphalt parking lot was covered with puddles, but the sky was as clear as when we went inside, paling to lavender with the evening. The air smelled like apple blossoms.

“You said he couldn’t sleep,” I said. “You were right. He apparently suffered from insomnia through the whole war, and during the battles he didn’t sleep at all.” I explained my theory to her as we walked back to the inn, telling her about Dr. Stone’s storm of dreams and the pattern I’d discovered in her dreams.