Lincoln's Dreams

“We won’t talk about the dreams, we won’t think about the dreams, we’ll go hiking and eat fried chicken and look at the Blue Ridge Mountains. All right?”

She sighed, a long, surrendering sigh. “All right,” she said.

I drove back onto gravel, onto pavement, and out onto the road we had come up on. A mile up it turned into a county road, and a few miles after that onto a two-lane highway with a long, straight stretch of road.

It could have been summer. Some of the trees were already in full leaf, and it was unbelievably warm. There weren’t any clouds at all in the sky, not even above the line of blue in the west where we could already see the Blue Ridge Mountains. I speeded up, anxious to put as much distance as I could between us and Fredericksburg. It was past lunchtime, but we would eat later, when we were closer to Shenandoah.

“This is more like it,” I said, resting my arm on the open window. “I thought for a while there we were never going to see a highway again.” I had told Annie we weren’t going to talk about the dreams, but that was easier said than done. The dreams were all we’d thought about for days. I couldn’t talk about the battlefield, or Lee, or Lincoln either, who had been afflicted with bad dreams, too. And I could hardly tell her carefree college-days stories about my old roomie Richard, I said, sounding more than ever like the park ranger. “Broun and I got lost on a back road like that one time when I first came to work for him. He wanted me to take some pictures of the country around Antietam, but he was convinced I’d get lost, so he came with me and got us both stuck in a mud puddle. We had to walk out and get a tow truck. He wouldn’t even let me do that by myself. He was like that the whole first year I worked for him.”

“Not letting you do anything?” Annie said. “Why not?”

“I don’t know. He’d never had a research assistant before, and I guess he was used to doing everything himself. He was just starting The Duty Bound , and there was tons of research to do on Antietam, but he insisted on doing it all, especially the stuff at the battlefield. I thought when we got there he’d let me do at least some of the legwork for him, but he wouldn’t. He traipsed around the battlefield, taking notes like crazy, snapping pictures, stretching out flat on his back so he could get what he called ‘the soldier’s eye view—’”

I stopped and glanced anxiously at Annie, but she was watching the scenery, still smiling. Her blonde hair was blowing in the wind, and she brushed it out of her face.

“He cut his foot wading across Antietam Creek,” I went on. “On an old tin lid. It bled like crazy. His foot, not the lid. He had to have a tetanus shot and twelve stitches, and he still wouldn’t let me take over.”

Outside of Remington, the two-lane highway connected with the state highway to Culpepper. I cut south again.

“So here he is, hobbling around, trying to run things—”

“Like Longstreet,” Annie said.

“And he announces he’s going to Springfield. His publishers called and they want him to check the epigraph he used on the last book, so he’s going all the way to Springfield to see what’s written on Lincoln’s tomb or some damn thing, and I blew up. I said, ‘What in the hell did you hire me for? You won’t let me do anything, not even go look at some damned dead bodies.’”

Oh, Richard would have a heyday with this conversation. “Those are obviously Freudian slips,” he would say in his Good Shrink voice. “The subconscious is speaking, bringing up subjects the conscious mind wants to avoid.”

“So did he let you go to Springfield for him?” Annie asked, looking like she was unaware of the slips, Freudian or otherwise. She had taken my advice to heart. She was relaxing, getting away, even though I didn’t seem able to.

“He let me go to Springfield, but he kept calling me on the car phone on the trip out, reminding me to look at this and remember to ask that. He left messages at my motel and made me call every night and dictate my notes onto that damned answering machine of his. He just about drove me crazy. And then I don’t know what happened. Maybe he decided he hadn’t hired an incompetent idiot or something. He quit pestering me and let me do the research he’d sent me to do and from then on he let me do what he’d hired me to, which was to help him.”

I didn’t know till I got to the end of that instructive little story that that was what it was. My subconscious was calling for attention, all right, banging on the door to be let out, “He still does a lot of his own research,” I said, as if to convince myself that I hadn’t just been lecturing Annie on the subject of letting me take over, letting me help her. I have your best interests at heart.

“Maybe he had trouble giving up the research because he loved it,” Annie said.

“Maybe,” I said, thinking of how excited he had sounded about Lincoln’s dreams. “He loves Lincoln anyway.”

“And you.”

“Yeah.”