Lincoln's Dreams (26 page)

“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.

“You told me that once before,” Nelly said. “You have your duty. I have mine,” and kept working as long as they had a hospital, which wasn’t long. The armies swarmed around and past Winchester, and the hospital had to be moved and men dismantled and the soldiers too hurt to walk taken off in wagons. When Ben’s unit marched past on its way to Fredericksburg, Ben went with them.

“No,” Nelly said when he told her he was going.

Annie sat up in the bed and screamed. I jerked as if I’d been shot. I dropped the galleys and stood up. My foot was asleep and I half-fell onto the bed. She screamed again and put up her hands to ward me off. I grabbed her wrists. “Wake up, Annie. You’re having a bad dream. Wake up!”

I could feel her heartbeat through her wrists, fast and light. “No!” she said, and her voice was full of desperation. She tried to pull away from my grip.

“Annie, wake up! It’s just a dream.”

“I’m so cold,” she said, and I thought for a minute she was awake. “It got so cold. In the church.”
She was shivering and her breath was coming in gasps, as if she had been running. “The meeting took so long.”

What meeting? Not the meeting with Longstreet at Gettysburg. That was in a school, not a church. Dunker Church? Surely she wasn’t going to dream Antietam, not now, when the dreams were supposed to be over.

“They couldn’t decide … I finally said … so cold!” Her teeth were chattering. I let go of her wrists and wrapped the blanket around her shoulders. I pulled the sides of the coverlet up and over her legs.

“What were they meeting about?”

She tried to say something through her chattering teeth, closed her eyes, and turned on her side. She gasped and shifted, as if her arm hurt. She put her hand up to cradle her elbow and murmured something I could not make out. Then she turned again, still holding her arm, and said clearly, “Tell Hill to come up.”

And now I knew what church she’d dreamed about. I shut my eyes.

She slept for another hour. I sat with her awhile and then went into the other room, hobbling on my still half-asleep foot, stripped the bed, and piled the blankets over her.

The phone rang. It was the vet’s wife with a message. Dr. Barton had called home from the horse-disease conference. He had two things he wanted to tell me. One was that he had gotten to talking about me with some of the other veterinarians at the convention, and one of them mentioned that he had just read an article about acromegaly in one of the science magazines. He thought I might be interested. She didn’t know which magazine, she was just relaying the message.

The second thing was that he had finally gotten in touch with his sister. She didn’t remember Dr. Barton—she meant Dr. Barton’s father—ever saying anything about dreaming about coffins or boats, and
she thought he would have mentioned it. He was very interested in dreams because of his study of the Egyptians. He had had a recurring dream for months before he died that he was convinced was warning him of his death. He had dreamed he was lying dead out under the apple tree in his backyard.

“What did he die of?” I asked. “The acromegaly?”

“No,” the vet’s wife said. “He died of a heart attack.”

“What symptoms did he have? Before the heart attack?”

“Gosh, I don’t know. He was living with Hank’s sister, and we didn’t see much of him. He complained of his arm hurting a lot, I know, because Hank’s sister thought it was arthritis, but afterwards the doctor told her it was probably angina, and I remember he rubbed his wrist all the time.”

I thanked her for giving me the message and hung up the phone. Then I went and stood by the window, looking out at the Rappahannock. My precious Annie.

When Annie woke up, I said, as casually as I could, “The weather’s supposed to get worse tonight. Maybe we should go on up this afternoon.”

“I thought you said tomorrow,” she said.

“I did, but I don’t want to get caught in a blizzard the way I did on my way back from West Virginia.”

She stood up, still cradling the arm. “What about the galleys?”

“We can stop somewhere for lunch along the way and finish them off. There are only a few pages left.”

She was looking at the tangled heap of blankets. “What happened?” she said. “Did I have another dream?” She turned to me, her face innocent and trusting, as if this dream were like all the others and I would say it was Antietam or The Further Adventures of little Hen. There was nothing in her face to show she had realized there was something terribly
wrong, that with the surrender the dreams were supposed to be over. Over.

“I don’t know,” I said. I pushed the blankets aside and laid her open suitcase on the bed. “You muttered something about being cold a couple of times. It was cold in here. I put some more blankets on you and I wrapped you up in the bedspread.”

“I’m still a little cold,” she said, and shivered. She began taking things out of the closet and putting them in the suitcase, and I noticed that now that she was awake she was using both hands, but she moved a little stiffly, as if her back hurt.

“I’ll go check us out downstairs,” I said.

“Wait a minute. What about Dr. Barton? Weren’t you going to wait till he got back?”

“He called,” I said. “His sister said their father never mentioned any dreams.” I shut the door and went down the stairs, thinking how easy that had been, as easy as emptying a capsule into her food. For her own good.

I went across the street to the phone booth in the coffee shop and called the hospital. “I have a friend who’s sick,” I said, and then stopped. I would never get her to a hospital. They would want to know the name of her doctor, they would have a thousand forms and while I was filling them out she would call a taxi and disappear.

I called the Sleep Institute and asked for Dr. Stone. “I’m sorry,” the receptionist said. “Dr. Stone’s in California. Can I take a message?” I called Broun’s hotel in L.A. He had checked out. I asked the clerk whether Broun had mentioned where he was going, and he repeated, “Mr. Broun has checked out.”

He had checked out, and I didn’t know where his autograph party was being held today or who the neurologist was he was going to see on Monday, and he wouldn’t be home till Tuesday, which was three days from now.

Annie insisted on having lunch at the coffee shop so she could say goodbye to the redheaded waitress, but she was not there. Her little girl was
sick, the manager told us. “Tell her goodbye for me,” Annie said and went on reading galleys as if we were not now cut off from everyone, the rear guard destroyed at Sayler’s Creek, Sheridan already at Appomattox Station, and Meade in the rear and coming up fast. Grant already writing the terms of surrender.

“No,” Nelly said when he told her, and he could hear the desperation in her voice, but this time he was the cause of it and there was nothing he could do. “The army won’t take you. You can’t even march.
”

“I’m walking pretty good,” Ben said. “Mebbe they won’t take me now, but there’s a time when they will and be glad of me.
”

“Why are you doing this?
”

“I gotta. I don’t know why. It’s the same as when I signed up. I just gotta.
”

“I will never know what happened to you,” she said.

“I been thinkin’ on that,” he said. He pulled a piece of folded paper out of his shirt pocket. “Friend of mine told me to put my name and my kin in my shoe, but that didn’t do no good. The boot was shot clean off and the paper with it. I want you should keep this.
”

‘“What good will that do?
”

Ben thought of her sitting by Caleb’s bed, holding his dead hand. “After the war’s over, you show them this paper and you point at one of them bodies and say, ‘That’s him,’ and they’ll put my name on a grave and write my kin, so’s they’ll know what happened to me.
”

“All right,” she said.

After he was gone she opened up the paper and read it. “Toby Banks,” it said. “Big Sewell Mountain, Virginia.
”

Annie stopped.

“I did have a dream,” she said. “I remember it now. I think I was in our church, the Presbyterian church on Main Street back home, and they were taking up the collection, only it wasn’t a church service. It was a meeting of some kind.”

A vestry meeting. At Grace Church.

“I don’t remember very much of it. It wasn’t like the other dreams.” Some of the panic came back in
her face as she tried to remember. “It was cold. I remember thinking I should have worn my other coat and wishing they’d stop arguing so I could go home.”

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.