Lincoln's Dreams (13 page)

When we got back to the room, I said, “I thought I’d read galleys in here for a while.” I pulled a green chair over near the foot of the bed, and went to my room to get the galleys, taking a while to gather up Broun’s copyedited manuscript and a couple of blue pencils so Annie could get ready for bed, and whistling the whole time so she’d know I was there.

When I came back in, she was already in bed, in a long-sleeved white nightgown, sitting up against the pillows, her hands clenched together.

“Is that Broun’s book about Antietam?” Annie asked.

“More or less,” I said. “He keeps making changes. That’s why I need to get these done before he comes back from California, so he’ll quit fooling with it.”

“What do you have to do with them?”

“Read them over. Look for mistakes, typos, missing lines, punctuation, that kind of thing.” I moved the chair closer to the bed so I could prop my feet on the end of it.

“Can I help?” She said it calmly enough, but the knuckles of her clenched hands were white. “Please. I don’t want to just sit here and wait to go to sleep.”

I put the galleys down. “Look, I don’t have to work on these right now. We could watch some TV or something.”

“Really, I’d like to help with the galleys. I think reading would take my mind off the dreams. Do we take different parts or do we read it out loud to each other?”

“Annie, I just don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Because it’s about Antietam?”

Because it’s about Lee’s bandaged hands and a horse with its legs shot off and dead soldiers everywhere. “Yes.”

“You read those out loud, don’t you?” she said. “That’s exactly the reason I should help you. I can see if Broun made any mistakes. After all, I was there.”

There was nothing I could say to that. I handed her the galleys and a blue proofreader’s pencil. “I’ll read from the copyedited manuscript and you follow along to make sure everything’s there and they haven’t left out a line. You can check for typos, too. Just mark an X in the margin, and I’ll go back and put in the proofreader’s marks.” I handed her a pencil and put my feet up on the footboard and began to read:

“What time is it, do you reckon?” Ben said. They were crouched in a cornfield a little behind the sunken road where all the fighting was. They had fired over the heads of the men in the road until they ran out of cartridges and then had begun working their way backwards between the rows of shredded corn, taking rifles away from dead and wounded men and firing them. It seemed like they had been doing it for hours, but there was so much smoke Ben couldn’t even see the sun. He wondered if maybe they had been here all day and the sun had gone down.

“It ain’t noon yet,” Malachi said. He had his hand under a soldier whose left shoulder had been shot off and who was lying face down in the broken corn stalks. He had yellow hair. His arm was lying on the ground beside him, still holding on to his Springfield. There was a scrap of cloth pinned to his sleeve with a stick. Ben put down his rifle and unpinned the cloth. It was a handkerchief.

Malachi turned him over and rummaged in his pockets. It was Toby.

“Come on,” Malachi said. “Looks like he ran out of minnies, too before they got him.” He thrust Ben’s rifle at him and yanked him backwards. “Listen. They’re bringing the guns up,” Malachi said, and Ben could feel the rough dirt shake under his feet.

“I have to …” Ben said and started forward again.

Malachi stood up and grabbed him by the back of his shirt. “What in tarnation do you think you’re doin’?
”

He showed the handkerchief to Malachi. “I gotta pin
this back on Toby, How will they know who he is? How will his kin know what happened to him?
”

“They’ll have a right good idea, but they won’t find out from that,” he said, and jerked his finger at the handkerchief Ben looked at it. It was covered with soot from the powder so badly he couldn’t even make the letters out, “Now come on! What the hell you doin now?
”

“I know him,” Ben said, scrabbling in his pockets. “I know where he’s from. Do you got some paper?
”

A bullet kit Toby’s arm and gouged out another red hole, “Come on,” Malachi shouted, “or that gal back home’s gonna be findin’ out about you.” He took hold of Ben’s coat and yanked him back through the corn till they couldn’t see Toby anymore.

After a while the shooting let up a little and Malachi said, “Me, I stick my pertinents in my boots.
”

“They can shoot you in the foot, too,” Ben said.

“They can,” Malachi said, “but most likely you won’t get kilt straight off and you kin tell ’em who you are before you die.
”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We had no business reading that.
”

She was asleep. I took the galleys back from her and put in the proofreader’s marks till I began to feel sleepy myself, and then went and looked out the window a while at the Rappahannock. Union troops had camped on the far side of the river, no more than half a mile from here, their campfires hidden by the fog along the river, waiting for the battle to start. Everyone who had written about the Civil War, generals, platoon historians, journalists, said the waiting was the worst part. Once you were in the battle, they said, it wasn’t so bad. You did what you had to do without even thinking about it, but beforehand, waiting for the fog to lift and the signal to be given, was almost unbearable.

“It’s so cold,” Annie said. She sat up and tugged at the blankets with both hands, trying to pull them free of the foot of the bed.

“I’ll get a blanket,” I said, and then realized she
was still asleep. She yanked hard on the coverlet and it came free.

“Get Hill up here,” she said, wrapping the flounced muslin around her shoulders and holding it together with one hand at her neck, as if it were a cape. “I want him to see this.” Her cheeks were flushed almost red. I wondered if she would be feverish if I touched her.

She let go of the coverlet and leaned forward as if looking at something. The coverlet slipped off her shoulders. “Bring me a lantern,” she said, and fumbled with the satin edge of the blanket.

I wondered if I should try to wake her up. She was breathing fast and shallowly, and her cheeks were as red as fire. She clutched the edge of the blanket in a desperate pantomime of something.

I moved forward to take the blanket away from her before she tore it, and as I did she looked directly at me with the unseeing gaze of the sleeping, and let go of it.

“Annie?” I said softly, and she sighed and lay down. The coverlet was bunched behind her neck, and her head was at an awkward angle, and I gently eased the coverlet out from under and pulled the blanket up over her shoulders.

“I had a dream,” Annie said. She was looking at me and this time she saw me. Her cheeks were still flushed, though not as red as they had been.

“I know,’ I said. I hung the coverlet over the end of the bed and sat down beside her. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

She sat up, tucking the pillow up against the headboard and pulling the muslin coverlet up over her bent knees. “I was standing on the porch of my house at night, looking down at the lawn. It was winter, I think, because it was cold, but there wasn’t any snow, and the house was different. It was on a steep hill, and the lawn was a long way below me, at the bottom of the hill. I was looking down at the lawn, but I couldn’t see it because it was too dark, but I could hear the sound of someone crying. It was
a long way off, so I couldn’t really be sure what I heard, and I kept squinting down at the lawn, trying to make out what was down there.

“I turned on the porch light, and that just made it worse. I couldn’t see anything. So I turned it off again and stood there in the dark and just then somebody crashed into me and it was a Union soldier. He had a message for me, and I knew it would be good news, but I was afraid if I turned on the porch light to read it by, I wouldn’t be able to see what was on the lawn.

“Then I saw a light in the sky, a long way off, and I thought. Oh, good, somebody on their side has turned a porch light on, but it wasn’t like that, it bobbed and danced, and I thought, Somebody is bringing me a lantern to read the message by, and then the whole sky lit up with red and green, and I could see the bodies on the lawn.”

“Were they Union soldiers?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “only they weren’t wearing blue uniforms. Some of them were wearing long underwear, red and white, and some of them were naked, and I thought how cold they must be lying there without any clothes on. Do you know where we are?”

Oh, yes, I thought, I know where we are. I hadn’t taken her anywhere near the battlefield all day, but she had been there anyway. And why had I thought the battles Lee had won would haunt him any less than the ones he had lost?

“They weren’t wearing uniforms because the Confederates came down from Marye’s Heights in the middle of the night and stole them off the dead bodies. After the battle of Fredericksburg.”

She leaned back against the pillows as if I had said something comforting. “Tell me about the battle.”

“After Antietam, Lee retreated back into Virginia. It took forever for the Union army to make up its mind to follow him, and when they did it was at the worst possible place. In December, the Union army crossed the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg and tried to march across the plain southwest of
town, but the Confederate army held Marye’s Heights above the plain. They proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can’t attack a defended ridge from an open plain.”

“And after the battle the wounded soldiers lay there crying for help on the plain?”

“Yes. It froze that night.”

“And the Confederate soldiers stole their clothes,” she said softly. “What about the message?”

“A Union courier got lost in the dark the night before the battle and wandered up to a Confederate picket line. He was captured and the orders he was carrying were taken to Lee. That same night the aurora borealis shone, lighting up the whole sky with red and green. Both sides took it as a good omen.”

She sat a long time huddled under the coverlet. “What time is it?” she asked.

“Eleven forty-five.”

She lay down. “If this time is anything like the others, I shouldn’t have any more dreams tonight. I usually don’t have them after midnight.”

“Was this dream like the others, Annie?” I asked, thinking of the “storm of dreams” Dr. Stone had said followed abrupt discontinuation of a sedative.

“No,” she said. She had propped herself up on one elbow, and she was smiling. “It was easier. Because you were here to tell me what it meant.” She yawned. “Can I sleep late tomorrow?”

“Of course. The morning after a battle the soldiers always get to sleep late,” I said, which was a lie. The morning after the battle the soldiers were marched off to the next battle, and the next, till they came to the one that killed them.

I sat down in the green chair and picked up the galleys.

“You don’t have to stay up, Jeff,” she said. “I won’t have any more dreams. You can go to bed.”

“I just thought I’d finish reading the chapter we were on,” I said. “Don’t worry about me. Go back to sleep.”

She was asleep almost instantly, but I kept on
reading. Ben and Malachi made it out of their cornfield and into the dubious safety of the West Wood. Hooker opened fire on another cornfield with every battery he had, and nobody made it out of there. Ben’s brother and the rest of Mansfield’s Twelfth Corps got the order to hold the East Wood and, in the smoke and confusion, began firing at their own Union troops. When Mansfield tried to stop them he was hit in the chest by Confederate fire. It was a mortal wound, but he managed to dismount and lead his wounded horse to safety before he died.

D
. H. Hill had three horses shot out from under him at Antietam. Lee rode Traveller through the whole battle, though he had trouble controlling him with his bandaged hands. When General Walker brought the last of his men across the ford into Virginia the following night, Lee was sitting on Traveller in midstream. “How many divisions are left?” Lee asked, and when Walker told him he was the last except for some wagonloads of wounded that were right behind him, Lee said, “Thank God!” It was Walker’s impression that he had been sitting there all night.

Annie didn’t have any more dreams. I dozed in the green chair until it was light outside and then went to bed and slept until after nine. Annie was still
dead to the world, but Richard was up. He had already called Broun’s house and left another message for me.

“It’s obvious that you’re projecting your hostility onto me as an authority figure, but of course Broun is the real object of your anger. You’re superimposing your own revenge fantasy on Annie’s emotional illness, but it’s Broun who’s your real enemy.”

He stopped long enough for me to say, “You’re the enemy, you bastard.”

“Your conscious mind can’t acknowledge the rage you feel toward Broun for getting his name on the books you’ve researched, so your subconscious cloaks that rage by distorting Annie’s neurotic dreams into Robert E. Lee’s dreams. By so doing, your subconscious can declare war on Broun, as Lee declared war on Lincoln. It’s a common phenomenon in neurotic patients.”

“How about drugging patients? Is that a common phenomenon in neurotic psychiatrists?”

Annie was standing in the doorway in her nightgown. She looked frightened. “Who were you talking to, Jeff? Richard?”

“I wasn’t talking to anybody,” I said, and held the phone out to her so she could listen. “It’s the answering machine. Richard doesn’t know where we are, so he’s trying to get you back this way, by remote psychoanalysis. You’ll be glad to know I’m the one who’s crazy today.” I put the phone back up to my ear. “This may take a while. Broun’s answering machine can hold three hours of messages. Why don’t you get dressed and we’ll go have breakfast. We’ve got to go see the vet at eleven.”

She nodded and disappeared into the other room. I listened to the rest of Richard’s harangue, made sure Broun hadn’t called in another message, and erased everything on the machine. Broun usually didn’t call in to pick up his messages when he was out of town. He left messages for me as to where he could be reached and then let me get back to him with a list of the things that couldn’t wait. I didn’t
think he’d pick up his messages this trip, especially when he thought I was there to do it, but I thought I’d better call the machine once a day to collect them and erase the tape just in case. I didn’t want Broun hearing Richard’s ravings.