Lincoln's Dreams

Just before dawn, Annie got out of bed and put on her blue robe. I put out a restraining hand, afraid she was sleepwalking again. She went over to the window. “Did you find out what the dream meant?” she asked.

I told her about Annie Lee. “She died in 1862,” I said. “Right before Fredericksburg.”

“Willie Lincoln died in 1862. He was Lincoln’s favorite son,” she said, hugging her arms to herself. “What did she die of?”

“I don’t know. A fever of some kind.”

“Poor man,” she said, and I wondered which man she meant, or if she would know if I asked her.

We spent the morning trying to sleep, gave up, and went to see the last tourist attraction in town, Hugh Mercer’s apothecary shop. We looked at silverplated pills and brown glass laudanum bottles and handwritten prescriptions for curing fevers.

We spent the rest of the day in the library. Annie took notes on Lincoln. I read Lee’s letters and tried to find out what Annie had died from. Nobody seemed to know. I found the chicken, though. Its name was little Hen. She had walked uninvited into Lee’s tent one day, and Lee had kept her for over a year. She laid an egg under Lee’s camp cot every day and sat on Traveller’s back, which delighted the soldiers.

We looked for the cat after dinner, but it was nowhere to be found. The neat pile of chicken scraps Annie had left for it was still on the step. “It’s probably holed up someplace warm,” I said. “It’s supposed to turn cold tomorrow.” We went back to the room, and I barricaded the doors, as if I thought I could somehow keep the dreams out.

I needn’t have bothered. Annie didn’t sleepwalk. She lay quietly, and watching her I thought the dreams must not be as bad, though when she told me about them, they were worse than ever.

Her house was on fire and a rider handed her a message which she tried to open with one hand. The message was wrapped around three cigars, and she couldn’t open it because her hands were bandaged. She handed it to the redheaded waitress and she couldn’t open it either, there was something wrong with her arm, and it wasn’t the waitress, it was a girl in a white nightgown and the message wasn’t wrapped around cigars, it was a letter, and Annie was afraid to read it.

She dreamed she stood on the porch of Arlington and argued with Richard, who was wearing slippers. The vet was in the dream, too. He handed Richard a message, and Richard tore it into little pieces and threw them on the ground.

“Who is the vet?” she asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Pickett maybe? Longstreet?”

“No,” she said bitterly. “Richard is always Longstreet.”

She dreamed about Gettysburg, the retreating soldiers sometimes coming back into the orchard from a burning house, sometimes carrying a chicken in their arms. She tried to reform them under the apple tree, but she couldn’t because Annie Lee was asleep under the tree.

There were no tears or sleepwalking during the dreams, and afterwards she recited her horrors to me gravely and I explained them as best I could, but she scarcely heard me. She seemed to be conserving all her strength for the dreams, lying perfectly still under the green-and-white coverlet. Her cheeks no longer burned, and when I touched her hands or her forehead, they were cold.

In the early hours of the morning I called the answering machine. Richard said, “Annie’s records show low levels of serotonin, which is indicative of a suicidal depression. The symbolism of her dream corroborates that. The rifle represents the desire to inflict harm, the dead soldier is obviously herself.”

“I was right about the Dreamtime thing,” Broun said. “They were a bunch of quacks. Imaginative quacks, though. They said the dreams were warnings sent by Willie Lincoln to his dad, and when I asked them how Willie Lincoln happened to be sending messages, and why, if they knew what was going to happen, the rest of the dead didn’t warn us of impending disaster, they came back with this theory that the dead normally sleep peacefully, but that Willie’s rest had been disturbed when Lincoln dug him up.

“I’m flying up to Sacramento Wednesday to a sleep clinic there. I’ll be home sometime Tuesday. I’ve got an autograph party Saturday in L.A. and an appointment on Monday. I hope you’re doing okay on the galleys, son. I’m going to be impossible to get in touch with for the next few days.”

“I know,” I said.

I didn’t get any sleep to speak of. “Did you manage to get some sleep, Jeff?” Annie asked at breakfast. She looked as it she hadn’t. Her face was pale and there were dark, bruised-looking shadows around her eyes. She sat stiffly in the booth, as if her back hurt, and occasionally rubbed her hand along her arm.

“Some. How about you?”

“I’ll be all right,” she said, and handed me the stack of manuscript. She let the waitress pour her some coffee while she tried to find the place we’d left off.