Lincoln's Dreams

The wind had stopped and the snow was falling slowly, covering the numbers on the marker at our feet, burying the boys with their yellow hair and their outflung arms, blurring the charred pieces of paper they had pinned to their sleeves.

“What happens to Ben in The Duty Bound? ” Annie asked.

I had no idea how Broun had ended the book. He had killed off Malachi and Toby and Caleb. Maybe he had an epidemic of typhoid in the last chapter and killed everybody else. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Does he die?”

“Die? Ben? He’s the hero. Of course he doesn’t die. He marries Nelly and they go back to Hillsboro and have ten kids and live happily ever after. Broun loves happy endings.”

The marker was completely covered with snow. You couldn’t even tell it was there in the path.

“I’m sorry I got you into all this Jeff,” she said, still looking at the marker. “I needed your help. I didn’t even think how it would be for you.” She looked up at me. “I had another dream.”

“When? This afternoon? Is that why you came out here by yourself?”

“Last night,” she said. “I didn’t tell you.”

“Because you didn’t want to wake me up?”

“Because I didn’t want to have the dream. Because I already knew what it meant.”

“You don’t have to tell me your dream,” I said. “Let me take you back to the inn. It’s starting to snow. You’ll catch pneumonia.”

“Did you know that when Willie Lincoln had pneumonia. Bud Taft held his hand the whole time?”

“Annie …”

“Bud fell asleep once, and Lincoln picked him up and carried him off to another room. He shouldn’t have done that. Willie might have called for him.”

“Bud was only a little boy,” I said.

“Right before he died, Willie clutched Bud’s hand and said his name.” She was still watching the snow sift down onto the graves. “What happened to Lee after the war?”

“He lived for years. He became president of Washington College. Miley came out and took his picture, and tourists came and pulled hairs out of Traveller’s tail. Lee said he looked like a plucked chicken. He took little girls for rides on Traveller and let them hang daisy chains on him. They lived for years.”

“I think the war is almost over,” she said. “I think that’s what my dream means.”

“Did you

know Traveller saved Lee’s life up here?” I said, sounding like a frantic tour guide. “A shell burst and Traveller reared up on his hind legs or they’d both have been killed. The shell went right under them.”

She didn’t even hear me.

“I was asleep,” she said, looking at the snow falling on the graves. “In the dream. I was sleeping out under the apple tree in the bed I had when I was a little girl, only in the dream it had a green-and-white coverlet. I was asleep and the pharmacist came and woke me up and told me it was time to go and I got up and got dressed. I put on a dress with a red sash I had for Easter the year I was ten, and a blue cape. I knew I had to look as nice as possible, and at the last minute, when I was all dressed and they were all waiting for me, I stopped and made my bed. I asked the pharmacist to help me. He was getting dressed, too. He was putting his cuff links in, but he stopped to help me, and all the time we worked on the bed he was crying. ‘It’s time to go,’ he said. The whole time I was dreaming I had the feeling it was Easter Sunday.”

She stopped and turned to look at me, expectantly, waiting for me to help her. And I could no more help her than Ben could keep them from taking away Caleb’s body.

And what had I expected? I had brought her here to this town that was all graveyard and told her about other graveyards—Arlington and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg—and, as it that weren’t enough, I had read her a whole book on the subject of Duty, hundreds and hundreds of pages of people who had just signed up they didn’t know why, of people who had to see it through even though they hadn’t counted on getting kilt.

Where had I thought it would lead, this road “past the second Manassas, to Chancellorsville,” except here? I should have known from the beginning that to get her away from Arlington, to help her past Fredericksburg and Jackson’s death, past even Gettysburg, was bound to lead to this, that all the roads Traveller carried Lee over had to converge here in an apple orchard near Appomattox Court House. She had dreamed about an apple orchard in the very first dream, an apple orchard and a house with a porch. I should have known then.

Lee had lost a third of his men at Sayler’s Creek. The day after, April seventh. Grant wrote offering surrender terms. Sheridan was moving west and north to block Lee’s retreat at Appomattox Station, and Meade had the rear guard under attack. The infantry wasn’t strong enough to fight its way through. Its only chance was to try to escape to the west, into the mountains, slipping around the Union flank, and for the next two days they tried that.