Lincoln's Dreams (16 page)

I started another list on a second sheet of stationery, writing the dates of the dreams in one column and the drugs she had been taking when she had the dreams in a second column. The drugs had some connection with the dreams, though I didn’t know what it was. They had not suppressed REM sleep or kept her from dreaming at all, even though they were supposed to.

It was when Annie was on the Elavil that her dreams had suddenly become clearer, and the phenobarbital her family doctor had had her on apparently hadn’t worked at all to stop the Arlington dream. Thorazine had stopped the dreams, but she hadn’t had the storm of dreams Dr. Stone had predicted when she stopped taking it, and none of the dreams seemed to have any particular correlation with the drugs she was or wasn’t taking, so maybe there wasn’t a connection after all, and the timing of the dreams had more to do with when Lee managed to get a few hours of sleep than with the tranquilizers.

Annie was awake. I could hear her moving around, I folded up the lists and put them into my jeans pocket. I knocked on the half-open door and she opened it the rest of the way immediately.

“Have you been up forever?” she said, looking at her watch. She looked tired in spite of all the sleep. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw how late it was.”

“I could. I woke up starving to death. It’s a good thing they serve breakfast all day at the coffee shop. What say we go get some?” I pulled on my coat. “I want to go to the library this afternoon. I think I’ve got an idea of what’s causing the dreams.”

I told her about Lee’s insomnia at breakfast, and then we walked down to the library. I bought a
notebook at the convenience store on the way. “I should probably be doing research on Lincoln’s dreams, too, in case the vet doesn’t find anything out,” I said.

“I’ll do that for you,” Annie said. “What do you want me to look for?”

“Anything on his acromegaly, which won’t be in the indexes because nobody knew what he had. Any references to his having headaches or bouts of depression. And anything you can find out about Willie’s death.”

“Willie. That was his son that died during the war?” she asked.

I nodded, “Yeah. He was Lincoln’s favorite child. Lincoln could hardly stand it after he died.”

We went into the library and looked around for the biographies. I hadn’t paid much attention to the library when I’d come here to look up Thorazine the day before yesterday, except to notice that it had been a school before it was a library, one of those square three-story buildings built in the early 1900s.

It could have been beautiful, with its high, sashed windows and oiled wooden floors, but it seemed almost determinedly drab. The hardwood floors had been covered with speckled tile and a carpet that looked like the Union army had marched over it. Stiff, patched shades had been pulled down over the windows so that the only light of any use was the sharp fluorescent light from tubes in the ceiling.

I’d spent a lot of time in libraries, and I usually preferred the old-fashioned ones with their dusty stacks to the modern plastic-and-plants “multimedia resource centers,” but I would have been glad to see a little updating in here.

The room the biographies were in was off to the side and up a few steps, an old classroom probably, though the blackboards had been replaced by bookshelves. I put my notebook down on the scratched wooden table and went to see what they had in the Ls. There were exactly two books on Lincoln: Thomas’s
Abraham Lincoln
and an ancient leather-bound book by someone whose name I didn’t even recognize.

I handed them to Annie. “We’re in the South now. We’re lucky they’ve got any books on him at all.”

She took the books back to the table, and I got down on all fours to see what they had on Lee. It might have been the South, but I didn’t do much better. I went out to the desk, asked where the history section was, and got directed to a little alcove located a half-flight up from the reference section where I had found the drug compendium.

Since I was already there and I knew where Annie was, I took the opportunity to look up phenobarbital in the dated drug compendium. It said about what I expected it to, that it was a tranquilizer and worked by suppressing REM sleep. Barbiturates were addictive, especially when used over a long period of time, and maybe that was why Richard had been so upset about Annie’s family doctor prescribing it, but phenobarbital was comparatively mild, and it didn’t have nearly the number of contraindications and warnings that Elavil had had, let alone Thorazine.

I went up into the alcove. It was labeled “Virginiana,” and was about as sparse as the biographies lad been, which didn’t make any sense. Fredericksburg was a major battle, and we were within shooting distance of Spotsylvania, Chancellorsville, and the Wilderness. This should be a main source library for those battles, at least, and, since researchers would inevitably come here, for the rest of the Civil War as well.

I gathered up what I could find on the three battles Annie had dreamed so far and took them back up to the biography room. The librarian, a sharpish-looking woman who would have been at home teaching school there in the old ruler-rapping days, gave me a suspicious glance but made no attempt to stop me.

Annie had the books open and had torn some pages out of my notebook to take notes on. She
looked up and smiled when I came in and then bent back over the book, her light hair swinging forward across her cheeks. I sat down opposite her and tried to find out Lee’s sleeping habits.

Lee’s “precious hours” of sleep between nine and midnight couldn’t account for the dreams Annie had had late at night or during the day, but she had said that she’d started having those only after she began staying awake to avoid the dreams. And maybe Lee had tried to grab a few hours here and there to compensate for his sleepless nights.

Lee had “slept little” the night before Antietam, and, according to General Walker, who had seen him sitting on Traveller in midstream when he took his division across, Lee had been there all night, supervising the retreat across the Potomac.

On the night before Fredericksburg, that same night that the aurora borealis lit up the sky and the Union messenger stumbled into Confederate lines, Lee had kept his staff up working all night. At dawn he had ridden out to inspect the pits dug by the work parties overnight. None of the books mentioned whether Lee had gotten some rest after the battle was over, though it was obvious from these accounts that he must have been ready to collapse with fatigue.

Dr. Stone had said that when the body was deprived of REM sleep, it made it up with a vengeance. Was that what the dreams were? Had Lee, worn out from the strain of battle and a lack of sleep, experienced a storm of dreams?

I couldn’t find the same clear-cut pattern with Chancellorsville. Jackson had been wounded on May second, and as soon as Lee found out about it, he wrote him, “I would I were wounded in your stead.” The message of the amputation of his arm arrived on the night of the fourth. There was no mention of Lee’s having insomnia that night, though it was hard to imagine him getting a good night’s sleep after news like that. On the fifth, word came that Jackson was
recovering, and he definitely slept well that night, under a fly-tent at Fairview.

On the morning of the seventh, Jackson began to get worse, and by afternoon he was lost in delirious dreams, calling out for A. P. Hill and telling the infantry to move up. “Do your duty,” he told the doctor who was dosing him with mercury and opium. “Prepare for action.” On Sunday he said clearly, out of the final dream of some battle. “Let us cross over the river and rest under the trees,” and died.

Annie closed both the Lincoln books. “Would they have anything else on Lincoln?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “They might have something in the reference section. It’s downstairs.”

She nodded and left, taking her notes with her.

I started through the biographies of Lee, wishing I had brought Freeman with me. The first book was arranged so hopelessly I never even found Chancellorsville, let alone any references to Lee’s insomnia, but the second one, so old the pages were edged in gilt, and written in indecipherably flowery language, said, “When Lee received the dreadful news that the doctors’ ministrations were to no avail and that Jackson was sinking fast, he turned to that last, best source of hope in times of trouble. All night he prayed fervently on his knees for Jackson’s recovery.”

He had been up all one night praying and probably had slept badly three or four nights before that because of worrying about Jackson. There was definitely a pattern. During each of the events Annie had dreamed about, Lee had gone without sleep for several days in a row. Maybe when he did finally sleep, he experienced the storm of dreams that Dr. Stone had described. Dr. Stone had called them powerful, frightening dreams. Could they have been powerful enough to have blasted their way across a hundred years to Annie? And if they had, why was she having them one right after the other? Jackson had died five months after the battle of Fredericksburg.

I looked at my watch. It was four-thirty. I piled
the books up and took them back downstairs. Annie was in the reference section with a large book spread open in front of her. They must have had something alter all. I went up into the alcove and put the books back on the shelves where they belonged so they would be there if I needed them again and not on a cart guarded by that fierce-looking librarian, and found a book on Gettysburg.

It weighed a ton. I didn’t try to carry it back up to the biographies room or even get it up onto a table. I just laid it open on the floor and bent over it, trying to see if the same pattern of lack of sleep persisted with Gettysburg. Gettysburg was the next Dig battle after Chancellorsville, but Annie wasn’t dreaming all the battles. I needed to see if the same conditions for dreaming had occurred during that battle.

There was a full page of references to Lee in the index. I tried looking them up, keeping one hand in the index page and going down the two-column pages with a finger of my other hand, hoping Lee’s name or the word
sleep
would jump out at me. At five-fifteen I gave up. It was in there, every word ever written about Gettysburg had to be in there, which was the whole problem. There was too much stuff to sort through, the way the vet’s bay had had too many symptoms. Lee’s insomnia was lost in the sheer volume of facts. I hefted the book back onto its shelf and went to look for Annie.

She wasn’t in the magazine section. I looked along the stacks and found her finally back in the biographies room. She had let up one of the shades and was looking out the window in the direction of the Rappahannock.

“I think I’ve figured out what’s causing the dreams,” I said.

She turned around. She looked tired, as if she had been up all night instead of a few hours.

“I think you were right when
you
said you were helping Lee sleep,” I said. “I think that may be exactly what you’re doing.”

We went out the arched green doors and down the cement steps. It must have rained while we were inside because the library’s asphalt parking lot was covered with puddles, but the sky was as clear as when we went inside, paling to lavender with the evening. The air smelled like apple blossoms.

“You said he couldn’t sleep,” I said. “You were right. He apparently suffered from insomnia through the whole war, and during the battles he didn’t sleep at all.” I explained my theory to her as we walked back to the inn, telling her about Dr. Stone’s storm of dreams and the pattern I’d discovered in her dreams.

“I still think the drugs you took are somehow connected to all this, but I haven’t figured out how yet,” I said. “You said your family doctor put you on phenobarbital. Did you notice any change in the dreams while you were on it?”

“No,” Annie said, looking in the direction of the inn two blocks away. The black cat was coming out to meet us, highstepping its way along the wet sidewalk.

“How long were you on the phenobarbital?” I asked.

The cat meowed a greeting that sounded like a complaint. Annie knelt to pick it up. “Did you know that when Willie Lincoln had pneumonia he kept calling for the boy across the street?” she said. “His name was Bud Taft. He came and held Willie’s hand and sat with him the whole time, did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“One night while Bud was with Willie, Lincoln came in and said, ‘Better go to bed. Bud,’ and Bud said, ‘If I go, he will call for me.’”

The cat struggled to be let down. Annie put it back on the sidewalk, and it stalked off, offended. Half a block away, it sat down on the sidewalk and began to lick its white paws.

“You didn’t happen to find out where Willie Lincoln was buried, did you?” I said.

“I thought he was buried at Arlington.”

“Nope. And I don’t know where he was buried.”

Annie looked at the cat. “Maybe nobody knows,” she said.

When we came up even with the cat, it stood up and walked alongside us all the way back to the inn.

L
ee’s affection for Traveller was obvious. “If I were an artist like you,” he wrote his cousin Markie Williams, “I would draw a true picture of Traveller…. Such a picture would inspire a poet, whose genius could then depict his worth and describe his endurance of toil, hunger, thirst, heat, cold, and the dangers and sufferings through which he has passed. He could dilate on his sagacity and affection, and his invariable response to every wish of his rider. He might even imagine his thoughts through the long night marches and days of battle through which he has passed. But I am no artist.”

When Michael Miley took Lee’s photograph, Lee insisted that he be mounted on Traveller, “just as we went through the four years of war together.”

We went back to the inn after dinner and waited for Lee’s aides to deliver some last message so that he could take off his boots and settle onto his camp cot and go to sleep.

Annie rechecked the galleys that I had read the
night before, and I got out my trusty Freeman and started in on Gettysburg. It was impossible for me to believe that Lee wouldn’t dream about this, the worst battle of the war, the end of the war really for the Confederacy, though Broun would fight me on that.