Lincoln's Dreams

The men, boys most of them, barefoot and hungry and dead on their feet, his men crowded around him, yelling out, “We’ll go on fightin’ for you. General!” and “I love you just as well as ever!” and “Goodbye!,” but most of them couldn’t speak at all and they reached out to touch Traveller’s mane and side and flanks. Lee looked straight ahead, his face set, tears in his eyes, but Traveller tossed his head all down the line, as if the cheers were for him.

“It’s all right,” I said. “You won’t dream anymore. The war’s over.”

She held out her arms to me, and I took her and held her and never let her go.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Lee seemed to understand the need for surrender before any of his generals did. By the time they made it to the apple orchard, half of his army had been destroyed. Nothing was left of the infantry but a few brigades and Longstreet’s and Gordon’s corps, and none of them had had anything to eat in days. Yet, when he showed Grant’s first letter of surrender terms to General Longstreet, Longstreet snapped, “Not yet,” and when he asked Venable what kind of answer he should send, Venable said stiffly, “I would not answer such a letter.” “Ah, but it must be answered,” Lee said.

The last night before the surrender he slept, all alone, under an apple tree, holding on to Traveller’s bridle.

We went on reading galleys in the coffee shop the next day as if nothing had happened and we would do this every morning for the rest of our lives. During the night the snow had turned to a cold rain.

“We should be able to finish them off this afternoon,” I said, “and then tomorrow we can run them up to New York and hand them to the publishers. What’s the weather like?” I asked our waitress.

“It’s raining hard north of here. Some truckers in here were talking about flooding.”

Annie yawned. She looked beautiful, rested, her cheeks as pink as that first night when she had come to me for help. I took hold of her hand.

“Why don’t you go back to bed?” I said. “You’ve got a lot of catching up on sleep to do. I’ll call McLaws and Herndon.” The waitress frowned. “And the highway patrol.”

We went back up to the room. I called the answering machine to make sure Broun hadn’t decided to come home. Broun had left a message. “Pay dirt,” he said, sounding excited. “I knew I was on the right track. The sleep clinic has some TB patients they’ve been studying because the fever makes them have more REM sleep. All of them dream about being buried alive. They say they can feel the cold wet dirt being shoveled in on them. The doctors say it’s the night sweats, but I talked to them and some of them started having these dreams before they had any other symptoms.

“Not only that, but as the disease progresses the dreams get clearer and less symbolic and they dream their own symptoms, fevers and coughing and blood, and sometimes they dream about dying, being at their own funeral, being in the coffin. That’s why Lincoln dreamed the coffin dream that last week. His acromegaly was getting worse.

“But here’s the best part. One of the patients is this kid who was reading Treasure Island. I asked him about it and he said Robert Louis Stevenson was his hero because he had TB as a kid, too. He said Stevenson had dreamed about being buried alive, too. Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed the same dream over a hundred years ago!”

He didn’t say where he was. He had an autograph party in L.A. on Saturday and an appointment with a neurologist on Monday. He would be home sometime Tuesday if he finished with the prodromic-dreams thing.

Broun’s agent had left another message. “I told McLaws and Herndon the galleys would in Monday at the latest. If you can’t reach Broun, they’ll have to go in as is.”

Before she had even stopped talking, Richard said, “You have to call me immediately.”

“The hell I do,” I said, and hung up. I took the galleys and went back into Annie’s room. Annie was asleep, on top of the covers, her legs pulled up against her body. She was cradling her left arm in her right, as if it hurt. I took the folded-up blanket at the foot of the bed and put it over her.

There were only a few pages of The Duty Bound left to go. Mrs. Macklin had broken Nelly’s wrist trying to get her away from her dead private. The alcoholic surgeon had had to take time off from sawing at arms to set hers and put it in a sling. Mrs. Macklin wanted her to go home. “You can’t do any good here,” she said.