Lincoln's Dreams

“He should have been home taking care of him instead of off gallivanting around some battlefield,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” I said. “He wasn’t off gallivanting. He was right there by Willie’s side the whole time.”

“I never should have gone to California,” Broun said, still looking at Lincoln. “I should have stayed home.”

“It isn’t your fault,” I said.

Broun let me help him back down the stairs. At the bottom he turned and looked back up at the memorial. “It’s been over a year, hasn’t it?”

“A year and a half,” I said.

I was almost out of the Elavil. I called Broun’s doctor and asked him if I could refill the prescription. “Is it helping you sleep?” he asked me. “You’re not having any side effects, are you?”

“No,” I said.

“Your records are here. I want to check them, and then if everything’s okay I’ll call it in for you. By the way, is Broun still interested in Lincoln’s dreams?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, if he is, there’s a paper by a psychiatrist he might be interested in, a Dr. Madison. He has a theory that you can dream yourself into ulcers or asthma—”

“Or a heart attack?”

“Yeah. Interesting theory.” He read me the title of the paper and the journal he’d read it in. “It says here Dr. Madison’s degree is from Duke University. You went to Duke, didn’t you? Maybe you know him. Richard Madison?”

Longstreet became quite successful after the war, in spite of Southern criticism that the failure of Pickett’s Charge had been his fault, becoming president of a cotton factory and then an ambassador to Turkey. He wrote articles and a book, and in them he defended his actions at Gettysburg until I think finally he convinced even himself that he had done the right thing and was not to blame for anything that had happened.

“No,” I said. “I don’t know him.” I started taking the Elavil two at a time.

After that trip to the Lincoln Memorial, Broun had put the Lincoln book aside, boxing up all the research and the rough draft and having me carry it up to the attic for him. I spent most of my time at the library. I was still trying to find out where Willie Lincoln was buried, even though Broun wasn’t interested anymore. I checked all the grave registries in the towns around Washington and even called Arlington, thinking maybe Commander Meigs had buried Willie in the front lawn of Lee’s house.

I ran out of Elavil again, but I didn’t call the doctor back. I didn’t dream very much, and when I did, Annie wasn’t in the dreams. I dreamed of a place I’d never seen before, a place with green hills and white fences. For some reason, I thought it was in West Virginia.

In February I found out what had happened to Willie Lincoln. He had been buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, in a vault belonging to William Thomas Carroll, a clerk of the Supreme Court and a friend of the Lincolns.

The information was in a biography of Mary Todd Lincoln at the branch library, and when I read it, I slammed the book shut, grabbed it up, and went running out. Alarms clanged, and Kate ran out on the steps and shouted after me, “Jeff, are you all right?” I didn’t answer her. I leaped in the car and went tearing out to the cemetery.

The narrow roads between the graves were blocked with snow so deep most of the gravestones were buried, but I got out of the car and walked through the snow to the tomb and looked at it, as if I thought Willie was still there, as if I thought, disturbed out of his sleep, he would tell me where Annie was and what had happened to her.

But he wasn’t there. He was in Springfield, lying beside his father. I had thought that finding his grave would tell me what had happened to Willie, but I already knew that, didn’t I? It was the same thing that had happened to all of them—Ben and Tom Tita and Little Hen. They had died in the war. Willie’s pony had been burned alive and Annie Lee had died of a fever, but they were Civil War dead, and they were all buried together at Fredericksburg, along with Stonewall Jackson’s arm, under a numbered granite square no larger than a scrap of paper. I knew what had happened to all of them except Annie. And Traveller. So I walked back through the snow and went home and sot out Freeman.

I knew that Traveller had outlived Lee because I remembered reading that he was part of Lee’s funeral procession, but there was no mention of him after that in the last chapter of Freeman and nothing at all about him in Davis or even Robert E. Lee, Jr.’s recollections of his father.