Lincoln's Dreams

There was a billboard up ahead, VISIT MANASSAS NATIONAL BATTLEFIELD PARK. I pushed my foot down hard on the accelerator. “Why don’t we drive up to Manassas? And then tomorrow we’ll run down to Richmond so you can dream the Seven Days battle. I was trying to get you the hell out of there to someplace that wasn’t a goddamned battlefield!”

The truck in front of me put on its brake lights. I jammed on the brakes. Annie’s hands came up hard against the dashboard.

“I was trying to help.”

“I know,” Annie said. “I know you were trying to help.”

I slowed the car down to a sane speed. “I was taking the back roads because I didn’t want to run into the Wilderness. Did I hurt your hand?” I asked anxiously.

“No,” she said. She rubbed her wrist.

“Well go to a doctor. In Luray. Well have him look at your hand and then we’ll—”

“It’s no use, Jeff,” Annie said. “I can’t leave him. I have to see the dreams through to the end.”

I pulled the car over to the edge of the road and stopped. “The end? What end? What if Lee goes on dreaming for a hundred years? What if he decides to dream the whole damn Civil War?” I said bitterly. “Are you going to dream it for him?”

“If I have to.”

“Why? They’re not your dreams. They’re Lee’s. He’s the one who ordered all those boys back into battle. Let him dream them himself. Let his daughter Annie dream them for him, if she wants to, it’s her father. But not you.”

“I have to.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t bear it,” she said, and started to cry. “Poor man, poor man, I have to help him. I can’t stand to see him suffer so.”

I took her hand in mine and rubbed the wrist gently. “And I can’t stand to see what they’re doing to you,” I said. I brought her hand up to my chest and held it there. “‘I would that I were wounded in your stead,” I said. “Lee said that when they told him Stonewall Jackson had been wounded at Chancellorsville.”

She looked up at me, the tears running down her face. Her tears, not Lee’s, not Lee’s daughter’s. And it was me she was looking at this time.

“I would, you know,” I said. “If there was any way I could, I’d have the dreams for you.”

I listened to what I’d said and looked at her dear, tear-streaked face. “Which is what you’re trying to do, isn’t it? Have the dreams for Lee, so he won’t suffer.”

“Yes,” she said.

“All right,” I said. I let go of her hand and turned the car around. “We’ll find a place in Fredericksburg that has fried chicken. And we’ll hope to God you don’t dream about Brandy Station.”

She didn’t. She dreamed about a chicken. And Annie Lee’s grave.

CHAPTER TWELVE

At the battle of the Wilderness, Lee yelled to the Texas brigade to form a line of battle and then spurred Traveller through an opening between the guns and up to the front of the line to lead the attack. “Go back. General Lee!” the soldiers shouted. “Go back!” A sergeant grabbed hold of Traveller’s bridle, and General Gregg rode up to head him off. The soldiers stopped in their attack and shouted, “We won’t go on unless you go back,” but Lee seemed not to hear them.

We read galleys after we got back, me in the green chair with my feet on the bed, Annie propped up against the pillows with the copyedited manuscript on her knees. Broun had written himself off the battlefield finally, and into a makeshift hospital near Winchester, where Ben had been taken with his wounded foot and was being nursed by a sixteen-year-old girl named Nelly.

In these chapters Broun introduced a lot of new characters: an overworked, alcoholic surgeon who had been a horse doctor before the war, a battle-ax nurse named Mrs. Macklin, a fast-talking private named Caleb who was all of fifteen.

Theoretically, it was a bad idea to bring in so many new characters so late in the book, but Broun didn’t have any choice. Like Lee, he’d killed off everybody else, and now it was time to bring in the old men and the boys. And the women.

“Where’d you get shot? ” (Annie read) the boy in the bed next to Ben said. “I got it in the foot. ”

“Me, too,” Ben said, and turned his head carefully to look at him. He was afraid if he moved too quickly he would pass out. He had passed out in the wagon. The ambulance detail had propped him up in the back of it with his arms over the sides, and he had watched blood drip from under the wagon onto the dirt road. He had had the idea it was all his blood, and after he had bled more than any one person could possibly bleed, he had fainted.