Lincoln's Dreams

It went on for half an hour like that. Sometimes she reached down, her hand almost touching the floor, and I thought she must be helping lift up a soldier who had fallen. Then I remembered that Lee had been on horseback. He had ridden Traveller down from his command post to meet the survivors and send them back to the safety of the woods. He must be reaching down to rest his hand on a private’s shoulder, to give his soldiers some encouragement as they limped past. “My fault,” Annie said softly, over and over. “My fault.”

And I had wanted her to dream Gettysburg to prove my theory. “It’s not your fault,” I said.

I took her arm, gently, and led her back to the bed, and she sat down and put her arms around the post again. “Too bad,” she said despairingly. “Oh, too bad.”

She wouldn’t let go of the post even after she was awake. “I was under the apple tree watching the house,” she said calmly, but her arms were still wrapped around the turned wood. “Only this time it wasn’t an apple orchard. It was a forest.”

“The point of woods,” I said. “At Gettysburg.”

“I knew it wasn’t really an apple orchard and that they weren’t really apple trees even though there were green apples on them. It was summer. It was so hot it was like an oven. I was wearing my gray coat, and I kept thinking I should take it off, but I couldn’t because I had to tell all the soldiers who kept coming past to get under the trees. They were trying to get up over the railing onto the front porch and it wasn’t a railing, it was more like a wall, but they couldn’t and I couldn’t see why they couldn’t get onto the porch because of all the smoke and then they’d come back into the apple orchard, all bloody. I said, over and over. This is my fault, this is my fault,’ to all of them as they came past.”

I sat beside her on the bed and told her what the dream meant, even though I was past believing I was helping her with my explanations any more than Richard had helped her with his theories and his sleeping pills.

She had told me that my explaining the dreams made them easier, but I had been doing that for a week, and the dreams had gotten steadily worse. Taking her to Arlington wasn’t going to help, either, and I wasn’t about to take her back within reach of Richard, but keeping her here in Fredericksburg wasn’t much better. Sooner or later she would decide she wanted to go out to the battlefield. To find what? A whole new batch of dreams? Spotsylvania? Petersburg? The Wilderness, where the wounded were burned alive? There were all sorts of wonderful possibilities. The war was only half over.

“Promise me you won’t try to stop me from having the dreams,” she had said that first day in Fredericksburg. And I had promised. Lee had made promises, too. “I could have taken no other course,” he had written Markie Williams. But when he saw boys of sixteen cut down like stalks of corn, when he saw them barefoot and bleeding and dead on their feet, didn’t he ever consider breaking his promise?

I felt suddenly too tired to even stand. I went back into my room, pushed the galleys off my bed onto the floor, and went to bed.

I slept till six-thirty. Three-thirty in California. Too early to call Broun. I went over to the coffee shop and read galleys, letting the redheaded waitress fill my coffee cup whenever it got halfway down, till it was a uniform, undrinkable temperature.

D.H. Hill’s horse got its legs shot off, Ben found his regiment, and they marched south and east toward Sharpsburg. Lee tried to look through a lieutenant’s telescope but couldn’t because his hands were bandaged. A.P. Hill came riding up in a red wool shirt to save the day, and Ben got shot in the foot.

At nine I called Broun’s hotel from the pay phone in the coffee shop. He had checked out.

I went back to the room and let myself in through my door. Annie was asleep, clutching her pillow the way she had the bedpost. I called the answering machine. “You’re probably wondering where I went,” Broun said. “I’m in San Diego. At the Westgate. I came here to see an endocrinologist. The psychiatrist put me onto him. He’s an expert on hormonal imbalances in the brain. Call me if you need anything, son.”

“I’m trying to,” I said. I called the Westgate in San Diego. A recorded voice asked who I was trying to call, and when I told it, it rang Broun’s room. He wasn’t there.

I wondered where he really was. He could be meeting with the endocrinologist, or standing in line at LAX, or be someplace else altogether, and his kind, gruff voice would still say, “I’m in San Diego at the Westgate.” The plane to San Diego could nave crashed and it still wouldn’t have made any difference. That voice would still have talked to me. I wondered if that was what was happening here, if the dreams were some kind of prerecorded message left by Lee, and he wasn’t there at all.