Lincoln's Dreams (22 page)

“Not letting you do anything?” Annie said. “Why not?”

“I don’t know. He’d never had a research assistant before, and I guess he was used to doing everything himself. He was just starting
The Duty Bound
, and there was tons of research to do on Antietam, but he insisted on doing it all, especially the stuff at the battlefield. I thought when we got there he’d let me do at least some of the legwork for him, but he wouldn’t. He traipsed around the battlefield, taking notes like crazy, snapping pictures, stretching out flat on his back so he could get what he called ‘the soldier’s eye view—’”

I stopped and glanced anxiously at Annie, but she was watching the scenery, still smiling. Her blonde hair was blowing in the wind, and she brushed it out of her face.

“He cut his foot wading across Antietam Creek,” I went on. “On an old tin lid. It bled like crazy. His foot, not the lid. He had to have a tetanus shot and twelve stitches, and he still wouldn’t let me take over.”

Outside of Remington, the two-lane highway connected with the state highway to Culpepper. I cut south again.

“So here he is, hobbling around, trying to run things—”

“Like Longstreet,” Annie said.

“And he announces he’s going to Springfield. His publishers called and they want him to check the
epigraph he used on the last book, so he’s going all the way to Springfield to see what’s written on Lincoln’s tomb or some damn thing, and I blew up. I said, ‘What in the hell did you hire me for? You won’t let me do anything, not even go look at some damned dead bodies.’”

Oh, Richard would have a heyday with this conversation. “Those are obviously Freudian slips,” he would say in his Good Shrink voice. “The subconscious is speaking, bringing up subjects the conscious mind wants to avoid.”

“So did he let you go to Springfield for him?” Annie asked, looking like she was unaware of the slips, Freudian or otherwise. She had taken my advice to heart. She was relaxing, getting away, even though I didn’t seem able to.

“He let me go to Springfield, but he kept calling me on the car phone on the trip out, reminding me to look at this and remember to ask that. He left messages at my motel and made me call every night and dictate my notes onto that damned answering machine of his. He just about drove me crazy. And then I don’t know what happened. Maybe he decided he hadn’t hired an incompetent idiot or something. He quit pestering me and let me do the research he’d sent me to do and from then on he let me do what he’d hired me to, which was to help him.”

I didn’t know till I got to the end of that instructive little story that that was what it was. My subconscious was calling for attention, all right, banging on the door to be let out, “He still does a lot of his own research,” I said, as if to convince myself that I hadn’t just been lecturing Annie on the subject of letting me take over, letting me help her. I have your best interests at heart.

“Maybe he had trouble giving up the research because he loved it,” Annie said.

“Maybe,” I said, thinking of how excited he had sounded about Lincoln’s dreams. “He loves Lincoln anyway.”

“And you.”

“Yeah.”

“I came to see Broun the night of the reception,” she said. “I made Richard come. I knew Broun knew all about the Civil War. I thought he might be able to tell me what the dreams meant.”

“Only Richard wouldn’t let you near him, and you got stuck with me.”

“Not stuck,” she said, and smiled at me the way she had that night in the solarium, that sweet, sad smile. “It’s you that got stuck with me.”

“We’re stuck with each other,” I said lightly. “And with Lee. But not today. Today we’re on leave. Are you hungry?”

“A little.”

“We’ll stop for lunch the next town we come to. We just came through Remington. There’s a map in the glove compartment. You can see if there’s a town coming up—”

“Stop the car,” Annie said. She had her hands on the edge of the half-open window and was looking back at what we had just passed. “Stop the car!”

She was out of the car before I had even pulled halfway onto the shoulder. She grabbed for the door handle and was out of the car and running toward the road.

“Annie!” I shouted, fumbling with the door. I leaped out after her.

She was standing on the edge of the shoulder, looking at nothing in particular, a rail fence and a plowed field, off in the distance a house with a wide porch. Her hands were balled into fists at her sides. “What is this place?” she demanded. “I know this place.”

Damn it. Damn it. I had thought we would be safe coming this way, away from Chancellorsville and the Spotsylvania Courthouse and the Wilderness. I had brought her this way on purpose because I thought it was safe.

“Did you dream it?” I said, dreading the answer.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I have the feeling that I’ve been here before. Where are we?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We just went through Remington.” I opened the car door and reached in for the map. The engine was still running. I switched it off. It couldn’t be Culpepper. I had seen a sign for Culpepper in Remington. We were still at least ten miles east of it. I grabbed the map out of the glove compartment, snapped it open, and scanned the map, unable to find Remington.

We were only a few miles past Remington. The next town … The next town was Brandy Station, two miles away. We were north of Brandy Station. There wasn’t a monument symbol next to it on the map, or a cross, though there should have been. The whole damned state was a graveyard. That plowed field was probably full of yellow-haired boys and grizzled veterans and horses.

“I feel like I’ve been here before,” she said, and walked across the road. She didn’t look in either direction, and I was not sure that for her there was even a road there. A blue car whipped around the curve and between us. It missed Annie by inches, lifting her skirt in the wind it made when it zoomed by. She didn’t jump or step away from it, startled. She didn’t even know it had been there.

I ran across the road to her. “It’s Brandy Station,” I said. “There was a cavalry battle near here. Lee’s son Rooney was wounded. Lee saw him being carried off the field. I’m sorry.” I took hold of her arm. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. Let’s go back to the car and get out of here.”

She didn’t move. She didn’t resist me, either. She simply stood there, stock-still, in the middle of the road. “Did he die?” she said.

“Rooney? I don’t know. I don’t think so. It was a leg injury.” I tugged at her arm. “We can find out when we get to Luray.”

She shook her head. “I want to go back to Fredericksburg.”

“Why? They’ll have a library in Luray. We can look up Rooney there. He didn’t die. I know he didn’t die. He was at his father’s funeral.”

Annie was staring at the plowed field as if she could see it all, Rooney on a litter, his leg torn open, the bandage soaked through with blood. “None of Lee’s sons were killed in the war,” I said.

“I have to go back,” she said. “I can’t desert him like that.”

I could hear a car coming, the low roar rising in pitch as it started to round the curve. “Desert him?” I said angrily, and practically pushed her back across the road and into the car. “You’re not one of his soldiers, Annie. You didn’t sign up for this war.”

A jeep roared past, straddling the center line. I came around and got in. I started the car and roared off the shoulder and onto the road, whipping around the rest of the curve at the same speed as the jeep, wanting us out of sight of the plowed field, out of sight of Rooney on a stretcher. “I had no business bringing you here!”

“It’s not your fault,” Annie said.

“Then whose fault is it? I take you to Fredericksburg. Fredericksburg, for God’s sake, where they’ve got so many bodies they’ve got to bury them in groups! I read you a book about Antietam out loud! And then, just to make sure you dream about Brandy Station tonight, I bring you out here so you can see the battle for yourself. And I wonder why the dreams are getting worse!”

There was a billboard up ahead,
VISIT MANASSAS NATIONAL BATTLEFIELD PARK.
I pushed my foot down hard on the accelerator. “Why don’t we drive up to Manassas? And then tomorrow we’ll run down to Richmond so you can dream the Seven Days battle. I was trying to get you the hell out of there to someplace that wasn’t a goddamned battlefield!”

The truck in front of me put on its brake lights. I jammed on the brakes. Annie’s hands came up hard against the dashboard.

“I was trying to help.”

“I know,” Annie said. “I know you were trying to help.”

I slowed the car down to a sane speed. “I was
taking the back roads because I didn’t want to run into the Wilderness. Did I hurt your hand?” I asked anxiously.

“No,” she said. She rubbed her wrist.

“Well go to a doctor. In Luray. Well have him look at your hand and then we’ll—”

“It’s no use, Jeff,” Annie said. “I can’t leave him. I have to see the dreams through to the end.”

I pulled the car over to the edge of the road and stopped. “The end? What end? What if Lee goes on dreaming for a hundred years? What if he decides to dream the whole damn Civil War?” I said bitterly. “Are you going to dream it for him?”

“If I have to.”

“Why? They’re not your dreams. They’re Lee’s. He’s the one who ordered all those boys back into battle. Let him dream them himself. Let his daughter Annie dream them for him, if she wants to, it’s her father. But not you.”

“I have to.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t bear it,” she said, and started to cry. “Poor man, poor man, I have to help him. I can’t stand to see him suffer so.”

I took her hand in mine and rubbed the wrist gently. “And I can’t stand to see what they’re doing to you,” I said. I brought her hand up to my chest and held it there. “‘I would that I were wounded in your stead,” I said. “Lee said that when they told him Stonewall Jackson had been wounded at Chancellorsville.”

She looked up at me, the tears running down her face. Her tears, not Lee’s, not Lee’s daughter’s. And it was me she was looking at this time.

“I would, you know,” I said. “If there was any way I could, I’d have the dreams for you.”

I listened to what I’d said and looked at her dear, tear-streaked face. “Which is what you’re trying to do, isn’t it? Have the dreams for Lee, so he won’t suffer.”

“Yes,” she said.

“All right,” I said. I let go of her hand and turned the car around. “We’ll find a place in Fredericksburg that has fried chicken. And we’ll hope to God you don’t dream about Brandy Station.”

She didn’t. She dreamed about a chicken. And Annie Lee’s grave.

A
t the battle of the Wilderness, Lee yelled to the Texas brigade to form a line of battle and then spurred Traveller through an opening between the guns and up to the front of the line to lead the attack. “Go back. General Lee!” the soldiers shouted. “Go back!” A sergeant grabbed hold of Traveller’s bridle, and General Gregg rode up to head him off. The soldiers stopped in their attack and shouted, “We won’t go on unless you go back,” but Lee seemed not to hear them.

We read galleys after we got back, me in the green chair with my feet on the bed, Annie propped up against the pillows with the copyedited manuscript on her knees. Broun had written himself off the battlefield finally, and into a makeshift hospital near Winchester, where Ben had been taken with his wounded foot and was being nursed by a sixteen-year-old girl named Nelly.

In these chapters Broun introduced a lot of new characters: an overworked, alcoholic surgeon who
had been a horse doctor before the war, a battle-ax nurse named Mrs. Macklin, a fast-talking private named Caleb who was all of fifteen.

Theoretically, it was a bad idea to bring in so many new characters so late in the book, but Broun didn’t have any choice. Like Lee, he’d killed off everybody else, and now it was time to bring in the old men and the boys. And the women.

“Where’d you get shot?
” (Annie read)
the boy in the bed next to Ben said. “I got it in the foot.
”

“Me, too,” Ben said, and turned his head carefully to look at him. He was afraid if he moved too quickly he would pass out. He had passed out in the wagon. The ambulance detail had propped him up in the back of it with his arms over the sides, and he had watched blood drip from under the wagon onto the dirt road. He had had the idea it was all his blood, and after he had bled more than any one person could possibly bleed, he had fainted.

He had come to when they tried to get him up the stairs, but one of them, a big, mean-looking woman, had hit his foot against the bannister, and he had passed out again.

“I ain’t shot bad,” the boy said proudly. He had a friendly, sunburned face. “I’m goin’ back soon’s they let me. My name’s Caleb. What’s yours?

Ben had tried to answer him, but then it was dark and there was the sound of a horse whinnying. Ben’s heart pounded. “Malachi?” he said.

“Promise me you’ll hold my hand,” somebody said pitifully, and Ben was afraid he was the one who had said it, but the voice went on. “Nothing bad can happen so long’s you are holdin’ it,” and Ben knew that wasn’t true so he decided he must not be the one talking. The horse whinnied again, and Ben recognized it as a scream this time.

“I promise,” a girl’s voice said, gravely, kindly, and then it was morning and the girl was standing over him saying, “I’ve brought you your medicine. Can you sit up and take it?
”

She was beautiful. She had light, fine hair pulled back into a bun. When she bent over, to set the brown bottle on a chair, Ben could see the part in her hair. She was wearing
an apron and a gray dress that looked like it had faded from blue.

“Course I kin sit up for you,” the boy named Caleb said. He was sitting up on top of the covers. “For you I could git up out of this bed and go dancing, but would you dance with me? No. You’re breeding my heart. Miss Nelly, you know that, don’t you?
”

“I do not think you are quite ready for dancing yet,” Nelly said, pouring the laudanum into a tin spoon. Caleb’s leg was bandaged with heavy white strips of linen, but Ben could see that there wasn’t a foot there at all. He wondered if he himself had a foot.