Lincoln's Dreams

“Skulls. It was a grisly business,” he said cheerfully. “If you’d like to come down to the Visitors’ Center, I can look up that grave number for you.”

“No,” I said. “I think I’ll stay up here awhile.”

“It is beautiful up here, isn’t it?” he said. He tipped his broad-brimmed hat to me and went back along the brick path and down the hill, stopping once to pick up a scrap of paper by one of the graves.

It was beautiful up here. The spreading town with its blue and gray roofs and blossoming trees hid where the plain had been, and below, where the infantry had been cut down by the rifles behind the stone wall, there was a line of ragtag souvenir shops selling postcards and Confederate flags. There was no sign of the dead horses that had littered the field, the wounded Union soldiers taking cover behind them because there was no other cover. “It is well that war is so terrible,” Lee had said, watching it, “or we should grow too fond of it.”

Too fond of it. Was that what the dreams were all about? Was Lee so fond of it he couldn’t let go of it, even in dreams? No, of course not. He had said that in the morning, when the plain was full of flags and bugle calls and sunlight glinting off the barrels of Springfield rifles.

That night the wounded had lain there where the souvenir shops and the Visitors’ Center were now, freezing to death, and Lee’s barefoot, threadbare soldiers had gone down the hill and over the stone wall that would have been black with blood and icy to the touch. Of course they had to put up a new one. The Confederates had gone down the hill and over the wall and taken their uniforms, with the names pinned to the sleeves, their boots with the names stuffed in the toes. And nobody, not even Lee, could have been fond of war at that point.

I could not possibly let Annie come out here. She had been here already in her dreams, had seen the bodies lying there on the cold ground, had seen the aurora borealis do its bloody dance in the northern sky, but she hadn’t seen the rows of granite markers, and she hadn’t seen the Roll of Honor or heard the ranger read the entries cheerfully, enthusiastically, not even aware of the horror of what he was saying. A lot of times they’d buried horses along with the bodies.

Maybe I couldn’t stop the dreams, but I could protect her from this. And that meant getting her out of Fredericksburg, where well-meant waitresses and pharmacists and taxi drivers drew maps on drugstore counters in their eagerness to get us out here. I went down the hill and into the Visitors’ Center.

The ranger was behind the information desk, emptying a metal wastebasket into the trash can. “I found that grave number for you,” he said, brushing his hands together. He opened a thick, leather-bound book to a page he had marked with a scrap of paper. “They’re listed alphabetically by quartermaster team.”

He turned the book toward me, and I read down the fine-printed page. “Found Wilderness battlefield. Three bodies. Found Charis farm, in cornfield. Two skulls. Found Chancellorsville battlefield. Two bodies.”

“Here it is,” the ranger said, twisting his body around so he could read the numbers. “Two forty-three.” He pointed to a line near the bottom of the page. “Found Lacey’s farm, in apple orchard. Four skulls and parts.”

Found in apple orchard. Four skulls and parts. “It has something to do with the soldier with his name pinned to his sleeve,” Annie had said, trying to get at the meaning of the dreams. But it wasn’t one yellow-haired boy with his name too blurred to read. It was so many it took them years to dig up all the bodies buried in cornfields and under apple trees and put them here, so many they couldn’t bury them separately, they had to bury them all together under one marker.

“Do you know of any good tourist attractions away from Fredericksburg?” I said. “Someplace we could go today? Say within a hundred miles of here.”

He pulled a brochure out from under the desk. “The Wilderness battlefield is only

“Not the Wilderness. Not anything to do with the Civil War.”

He reached under the counter again, looking bewildered, and came up with a road map of Virginia. “Well, there’s Williamsburg, of course. It’s about a hundred miles.” He spread out the map on the counter. “Shenandoah National Park is about a hundred and twenty.” He pointed. “It’s got a lot of beautiful views and hiking trails. I don’t know what the weather’s like to the west, though. There’s supposed to be a big front coming in.”

I leaned over the map. There was no way out of Fredericksburg. To the south, Sayler’s Creek blocked our way to Richmond; to the north we would have to cross the Antietam. Chancellorsville and the Wilderness were between us and Shenandoah on US 3. But if we went south, not so far that we would run into Spotsylvania, and kept to the back roads till we were west of Culpepper, where the battle of Cedar Mountain had been fought, we might be able to do it.