Lincoln's Dreams

“What happened to them?” she asked.

The chicken? Tom Tita? Or all those yellow-haired boys?

“We’ll find them,” I said. She got into bed and lay down. I covered her up. Fifteen minutes later we went through the whole thing again. After I had her back in bed, I wedged the chair under the doorknob and waited.

It took half an hour that time, and then she stood up again, put her robe on, tied the belt, and tried to move the chair. It wouldn’t budge. She turned and looked at me. “What happened to them?” she said angrily, as if I had hidden them from her.

“We’ll find them,” I said, and started back to the bed, my hand lightly on her arm, but halfway there she stopped and took two steps toward the windows.

“My fault,” she said softly. “My fault.”

We were at Gettysburg again, in the woods that were like an oven, watching the soldiers struggle back from Pickett’s Charge.

“My fault,” she whispered, took a few faltering steps forward, and sank down on her knees, her face in her hands.

“What is it, Annie?” I said, squatting beside her. “Is it Gettysburg? Is it Pickett’s Charge?”

She took her hands away from her face and sat back on her heels, staring blindly at whatever it was.

“Can you wake up, Annie? Can you tell me what you’re dreaming?”

She stretched her hand out toward something on the floor in front of her and then drew it back. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

She knelt there for over an hour, me squatting beside her until my legs cramped and I had to switch positions, talking to her, trying to wake her up, trying to get her back to bed. In the end I picked her up and carried her, placing her arms around my neck so she wouldn’t fall back, unfastening them when I had her in bed.

“What happened to them?!’ she asked when I covered her up.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but I’ll find out. I promise.”

Five minutes later she stood up again, put on her robe, and went over to the door.

“Annie, you’ve got to wake up,” I said tiredly.

She stopped pushing on the chair, straightened up, looked at the door, at me. “Did I do it again? Did I go outside?”

“You were trying your darnedest to,” I said. “Where were you? Gettysburg?”

“No,” she said, sitting down in the chair. “I was at Arlington again. It had snowed, like in the first dream, and I was looking for the cat. He was out under the apple tree, and I went out to get him, and I stepped on something. It was a Union soldier. He was lying face-down, with his rifle underneath him, and his name pinned to his sleeve.”

She was clutching the tie belt of her robe the way she had clutched the African violet in Broun’s solarium that first night. “I bent down to unpin the paper, but when I did, it wasn’t a blue uniform sleeve, it was white. And then I saw it wasn’t a dead soldier, it was a girl in a white nightgown, asleep under the apple tree.”

She didn’t ask me where it was or what the dream meant. She sat for a while in the chair, looking toward the middle of the room as if she could still see the apple tree and the girl asleep under it.

“I’m sorry I was sleepwalking again, Jeff,” she said. “Maybe you should tie me to the bed.” She took off her robe and lay down, her arms stiffly at her sides, as if she were willing herself not to walk in her sleep.

She lay that way the rest of the night. I didn’t know if she was asleep. She didn’t move when I picked up Freeman from where it had fallen on the floor and went into my room to get the other three volumes, when I locked the connecting door to my room and pulled the desk across it, or when I moved the lamp over by the green chair so I could read by its light.

There weren’t very many index references to Annie Lee, in spite of her having been Lee’s favorite daughter. I looked up the last one first. “I have always promised myself to go, and I think if I am to accomplish it, I have no time to lose,” he had written his son Rooney in 1870. “I wish to witness Annie’s quiet sleep.” She had died during the war at White Sulphur Springs, North Carolina. She was twenty-three years old.

“He was a good man,” Annie had said. His soldiers loved him, his children loved him, and he had had to sacrifice them all to the war, even his favorite daughter. Annie Lee had died of a fever, but she was as much a casualty of the Civil War as any soldier, dying young and far away from home. At least Lee had had the comfort of knowing where she was buried. He had gone to visit her grave in 1870. “I wish to witness Annie’s quiet sleep.”

Poor man. When he had gotten the letter of her death, he had not shown any outward emotion. He had read the letter and then gone on answering his official correspondence with his aide. But when the aide had come back into the tent a few minutes later, he found Lee weeping.

It was four o’clock, one in California. I called Broun at the Westgate in San Diego, at the L.A. number. I called directory assistance and got the number for Dreamtime. There was no answer anywhere.