Lincoln's Dreams

“My friend Toby Banks that I told you about promised his mama he’d come home without a scratch on him. Some promises they just… you done the best you could. After he was,” he stopped and cast around for some way to say ‘dead,’ “after he was passed on to glory, he couldn’t feel whether you was holding on nohow. ”

“Promise me you won’t reenlist when your foot gets better,” she said.

“I promise,” he said, but she went on sitting by the bed, rubbing her wrist.

After a while Mrs. Macklin came in and asked to look at Nelly’s wrist. “No,” Nelly said.

“It’s all swollen,” Mrs. Macklin said angrily. “I’m a nurse. It’s my duty to tend to … ”

Nelly stood up, knocking the wooden chair over. “Don’t you talk to me about duty,” she said, cradling her arm like a baby against her, “not when you wouldn’t let me do mine. ”

Annie stopped reading. “I want to go to Arlington,” she said.

We had been through all this before. “There’s no reason to go to Arlington. We know what the dreams mean. Lee blamed himself for Annie’s death. Maybe he thought it wouldn’t have happened if Annie had been at home, if they hadn’t had to leave Arlington. We even know what the message is. It’s the letter telling him Annie’s dead. There isn’t any reason to go back to Arlington.”

“I have to …” She didn’t finish what she was going to say. “The dreams are going in circles. It’s like when I kept dreaming about the cat, and then when we went out to Arlington, it helped.”

Helped who? I wondered. You or Lee? She was helping him have the dreams, helping him sleep in that marble tomb of his at Lexington, and what was he doing to her?

“I think he is trying to atone,” Annie had said. Lee had loved his daughter. Surely he wouldn’t do anything to hurt Annie. I wished I could believe that. I wished I could believe this atonement of his didn’t mean dragging Annie through the Civil War till both their hearts were broken.

“Look,” I said, “you heard what the waitress said. The weather’s supposed to get bad, and anyway the vet’s not back from his conference. I think we should wait till we hear from him. That way we can finish the galleys, too. We can take them up to New York and stop at Arlington on the way.”

The waitress brought our eggs. “It’s snowing in Charleston,” she said. “I just heard it on the radio.”

“See?” I said, as if that settled it.

Annie cut her ham up but didn’t eat it. She just kept cutting it into smaller and smaller pieces. “It isn’t supposed to snow till tonight,” she said. “You could call the vet from Broun’s, Jeff. We could take the galleys with us and finish them in D.C.” She put the knife down and rubbed her wrist.

“Annie, you’re not in any shape to go to Arlington or anywhere else. You haven’t had any sleep for two days, and your wrist is obviously hurting.”

She stopped rubbing it. “I’ll be all right.”

“You could have sprained it when you hit it on the dashboard. Maybe we should go have a doctor look at it.”

“No,” she said and put it in her lap as if to hide it from me. “It isn’t sprained.”

“But it hurts. And you’re exhausted. We’re both too tired to think straight. I think the best thing for both of us to do is take some aspirin and try to get some sleep, and then we’ll talk about Arlington.”

“All right,” she said and looked, I thought, relieved.

We went back to the inn, and Annie did what I’d told her to, even though she protested that her wrist really didn’t hurt, took some aspirin and went straight to bed. I called Broun’s West Coast agent. He would know where Broun was if anybody did, and I had meant what I said about our being too tired to think straight. Broun wouldn’t be dead on his feet. He would know what to do, how to help.

His agent’s call referral service told me he was in New York. When I said I was trying to get in touch with Broun, she gave me a number to call. It was the number of Broun’s answering machine.