Lincoln's Dreams

They had been arguing over a raise of fifty-five dollars for the minister. The meeting had gone on for three hours, and finally Lee had said, “I will give that sum,” just so it could be over. Lee had only worn his military cape, and he walked home through the chilly rain.

The family was waiting for him at the tea table. He sat down heavily on the sofa, cradling his left arm, and his wife said, half-joking, “Where have you been? You’ve kept us waiting a long time,” and asked him to say grace. He stood up and looked as though he were trying to say something, and then collapsed onto the sofa.

“What is it?” Annie said.

“It’s probably Dunker Church at Antietam. Let’s go.”

“I didn’t say goodbye to the cat.” She insisted on going around to the outside steps. It wasn’t there, and the scraps of chicken were half-buried in the snow. “What if something happened to it, Jeff?” Annie said, rubbing her wrist.

“Nothing happened to it. It’s holed up someplace nice and warm, in an attic full of mice maybe. There’s no sense waiting around for it to come back. Come on. Let’s go.”

She slept the whole way up as if she had been drugged. She didn’t even wake up when I stopped at a filling station just outside Woodbridge. It was raining there, a chilly, autumn-feeling rain that might turn to snow any minute.

I went inside and called the answering machine again. “Pay dirt,” Broun said. “I knew I was on the right track.” I hadn’t erased the messages. I listened to the whole message repeat itself, trying to pick up some clue to where Broun was.

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

“You have to call me immediately,” Richard said. I had hung up on him before, but now I listened to the message hoping that Broun had called again to tell me where he was, afraid to fast-forward for fear I’d go right over it and miss it. “I just got the test results back from the lab. There’s a problem with the EKG. I don’t know for sure what it is. Have you noticed any chest pains? Any pains in the wrist or the back or down the arm? If it’s unstable we could be looking at a myocardial infarction anytime. You’ve got to come back immediately.” There were no more messages. The machine ran on to the end and then switched off by itself.

Broun’s West Coast agent’s number was busy. I bought a cup of coffee to go and went back out to the car. Annie was still asleep, curled up in the passenger seat with her left arm cradled against her body. Her short hair was brushed back off her flushed cheeks. I took the lid off the Styrofoam cup, put the cup between my knees, and started the car. Annie shifted slightly and brought her other arm up to support her left arm. “Strike the tent,” she said.

I turned off the car. After a while I opened the door and poured the coffee out onto the ground and went back inside and called Richard.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

After the surrender, Lee was offered the job of president of a little college in Lexington. He rode up on Traveller to arrange for a home for his family. “He starts tomorrow,” his wife wrote, “on horseback because he prefers it that way and besides, does not like to part even for a time from his beloved steed, the companion of many a hard-fought battle.”

In Lexington he rode Traveller every day, stopping to give rides to little girls and to talk to the students. Lucy Long, the mare that had been stolen, was found and bought back, and one of Lee’s daughters would accompany him on the mare when he exercised Traveller. As time went on Traveller’s hard trot fatigued him more and more, and when he went on a speaking tour, he took the train. “Tell him I miss him dreadfully and have repented of our separation but once,” Lee wrote his wife, “and that is the whole time since we parted.”

I took Annie to Broun’s. “We can take the galleys over to Federal Express later,” I said. “This stuff’s going to turn into snow if we go any farther north. I’m not driving up to New York tonight. I need to check for messages and look at the mail.”

I had told Richard to park several streets over so Annie wouldn’t see the car, but the front door wasn’t locked and Broun’s Siamese was crouched on the bottom step. My first thought was that it had somehow gotten locked in when we left for Fredericksburg, but then I saw that the mail was neatly stacked on the hall table and that there was a jacket hanging over the bannister. Annie was standing in the door of the solarium with her gray coat and her gloves still on, and her left arm still cradled in her right, looking at the African violets. They had been watered—there was muddy water standing in puddles on the table.