Lincoln's Dreams (21 page)

Annie wasn’t at the inn or the coffee shop. The redheaded waitress, still disapproving, said she had told her to tell me she was at the library, and I thanked her with such obvious relief that she was probably convinced we had had some kind of lovers’ quarrel.

Annie was in the reference section, the
L
encyclopedias spread out around her in a half-circle, most of them open to a picture of Lincoln’s careworn face, but she wasn’t looking at them. She was staring at the orange-painted bookcases across from her and not seeing them, thinking hard about something. I hoped the something wasn’t Gettysburg.

“Good morning,” I said, sounding like the inanely
cheerful park ranger. “I didn’t think you’d be up this early.”

She made a reflexively protective gesture toward the book in front of her, and then shut it before I could see the page it was open to.

“I want to go out and see the vet,” I said. “Maybe he’s heard from his sister.”

“All right.” She closed the other books and stacked them on top of the book in front of her. “Let me just put these away.”

“I’ll help you,” I said, and grabbed for the bottom three books before she could pile the others on top of them. The top two were encyclopedias. The bottom one was the drug compendium I had used to find out about Thorazine. “What are you looking up in here?” I asked. “Are you all right? You’re not having any side effects from the Thorazine, are you?”

“I’m fine,” she said, turning away to put the other encyclopedias back on the shelves. “I wanted to know it the Thorazine was causing the headaches I’ve been having, but it isn’t. Did you go out to the battlefield this morning?”

“Yes,” I said, trying to keep my voice as casual as hers. “They’ve got a reference library out there. That’s why this library’s so skimpy on Civil War-iana. Ready? Maybe we can catch the vet before he makes his rounds.”

We drove out and saw the vet. He was in the stable again, feeding some horses he was boarding. “I’m afraid I don’t have any information for you,” he said, forking a bundle of hay into one of the stalls. “I haven’t been able to get in touch with my sister yet, but I’m going to a conference on horse diseases in Richmond tomorrow, and I should be able to run down and see her then.”

I had been counting on his having already talked to her, so that I could say to Annie, “Well, we’ve done what we came to do. There’s no point in sticking around here.”

“When will you be back?” I asked.

He stopped and leaned on the pitchfork. “It
lasts through the weekend. I’ll probably come back Monday. Will you still be here?”

“If I’m not, I’ll call you on Monday.” Annie was looking at me. “We’ll still be at the inn. You’ve got the number, don’t you?”

“Yeah. Sorry you had to come all this way out here for nothing.” He filled a washtub with a hose. “I looked through some of my dad’s stuff on Akhenaten. There was nothing about him having dreams. Dad did have this one book on dreams and what the Egyptians believed about them, though. It was pretty interesting. They believed that dreams were messages from the gods or from the dead.”

“Messages?” Annie said. “What kind of messages?”

“All kinds. Advice, warnings, blessings. The gods could tell you who you were going to marry, whether you should take a trip, if you were getting sick and with what. If you were getting a fever you dreamed about one thing, if you were catching cold you dreamed about something else. They had it all written down in this dream book, what everything meant.”

The vet’s wife came to the door to tell him he was wanted on the phone.

“I’ll call you when you get back from your conference,” I said.

“Is the horse all right?” Annie said. “She didn’t get lockjaw, did she?”

“What horse? Oh, the mare that was out here the other day? She’s fine. Bruised sole, just like I thought.”

“Good,” Annie said. “I’m glad.”

I headed back toward town the way we had come until the first fork in the road and then took the left-hand turn. Annie didn’t seem to notice. She had rolled her window halfway down and was leaning back, her head against the seat. The breeze from the moving car ruffled her hair. Her face had the serious, almost wistful expression it had had in the library.

This road wasn’t as pretty as the one we’d taken down to the vet’s. It was lined with the debris that
towns always have on their outskirts: storage units, car junkyards, old trailers with porches and dog kennels tacked on and a horse tethered out back.

“It’s beautiful out here, isn’t it?” I said to be saying something, anything to get her mind off whatever battlefield she was thinking about. “The waitress said a cold front was supposed to be coming in, but I don’t see any signs of it.”

I turned again, to the south; and ran right into the interstate.

“Is this the way we came?” Annie said when the six-lane road loomed up ahead.

“I thought I’d take the scenic route back,” I said, ignoring the I-95 sign and cutting over to US 1. “I saw the cat this morning. It was sitting in front of the coffee shop. I think it was waiting for you. Have you been feeding it?”

“I gave it one of those little cream containers this morning,” she said. “And some bacon. It looked hungry,” she added defensively.

“All cats look hungry,” I said, looking for road signs. I didn’t want to turn west until we were past Spotsylvania. “You realize you’re stuck with him for life. Or at least until something better comes along. He’d desert you in a minute for somebody with a sardine.”

“Desert,” she said, looking out the window. We were passing a field with a haystack in it. “They shot deserters, didn’t they? In the war.”

And there we were, right back in it, in a war she didn’t even call the Civil War anymore because it was so familiar to her, because she fought its battles every night.

“Not always,” I said. “A lot of deserters got clean away. To California. Speaking of California, Broun’s gone down to San Diego, so he’ll be in California a few more days, and the vet won’t have any information for us till Monday. Why don’t we drive over to Shenandoah this afternoon? See the Blue Ridge Mountains? There’s supposed to be a great place for fried chicken in Luray, be a nice change from the
coffee shop. There’s really no reason to stick around Fredericksburg.”

We were going to run into the interstate again if we went much farther north. I turned left at the next road. It was State Highway 208. The road to Spotsylvania, I turned north onto a gravel road, then made three more turns, going north and west, trying to get as far from Fredericksburg as I could.

“What about
The Duty Bound?
” she asked.

“The galleys? Broun and I can finish them after he comes home from California.”

“I think we should finish them,” she said. “I’d like to know how it ends.”

“Fine. We’ll finish them when we get back.” The road we were on jogged north and ran into a four-lane highway. I hoped I hadn’t managed to run into the interstate again. I hadn’t. It was US 3, and the towns in both directions were clearly marked with arrows. The Wilderness was that way, Chancellorsville the other. Take your pick.

“Maybe it is a good idea,” Annie said, looking at the signs. “To get away.”

“Great,” I said. I crossed the highway and went west at the next turn. “We’ll get some fresh air and some southern fried chicken, a little exercise. There are all kinds of hiking trails.”

“And no battlefields,” she said softly.

“You know what else is in that neck of the woods? Monticello. Thomas Jefferson’s plantation. We could spend the night in Luray and then drive down the Skyline Drive tomorrow and see Monticello.”

We could drive down to Monticello, and while we were there that big front would come in, and we would have to go south to avoid it, into North Carolina and then Georgia and finally Florida, where there hadn’t been any war.

“Monticello’s a great place,” I said, turning again onto what looked like a paved road. After the first mile, the asphalt gave way to gravel. “Jefferson made this great clock out of cannonballs. And curtains,” I added hastily. “Jefferson made his own curtains.”
The gravel turned into dirt, and the road became so deeply rutted I was going to high-center the car if I didn’t turn around. I put the car in reverse.

There was barely room to turn in the narrow lane. On one side or the road the weeds grew up knee-high next to a ditch, and on the other was a thin stand of pines that had been planted almost to the edge of the road. I stretched my arm out over the back of Annie’s seat and started to back carefully so I wouldn’t end up in the ditch.

“The dreams all have messages,” Annie said.

“What?” I said, angry that something in this rutted lane, this pine woods, had made her think of the dreams again. I could no more get her out of the Civil War than I could get her out of the grave-filled circuit of Fredericksburg. I shifted into first again and killed the engine.

“I was thinking about what Dr. Barton said about the Egyptians. He said they believed that dreams were messages from the dead.”

“I thought we weren’t going to talk about the dreams again,” I said. I tried to start the car again and flooded it.

“Did you know that Abraham Lincoln dreamed about Willie after he died?” she said. I turned the ignition again, but Annie reached out to stop me. “Willie’s face came to comfort him in dreams, the book said. I think he’s dead, Jeff. I think the dreams are messages from the dead.”

I took my hand away from the keys. So it hadn’t been the sunken lane, the west wood after all.

“I thought you were right, that Lee was having the dreams during the Civil War and they were coming across time somehow, but yesterday, when I saw that postcard of his tomb at Lexington, I knew he was dead.” She was looking at me earnestly, her hand still on my arm. “Richard told me that dreams help you work through the things that happened to YOU, that they’re kind of a healing mechanism to help you get over grief and come to terms with the guilt you couldn’t deal with any other way, only if
there’s too much guilt the dreams can’t handle it. That’s what he said was happening with me, but what if you had so much guilt and grief that you went on dreaming after you were dead?”

How many dreams would it take to heal Lee of Fredericksburg? Twelve thousand seven hundred and seventy? Lee’s dreams weren’t a “healing mechanism.” They were a burial detail, and how many dreams would it take to bury all those boys at Gettysburg who staggered back from Pickett’s Charge to collapse at Lee’s feet, how many dreams to bury all the boys in the bloody angles and sunken roads of Lee’s mind? Two hundred and fifty-eight thousand? A hundred years’ worth?

“You told me Lee was a good man,” Annie said, “and he is, Jeff, but he had to send all those boys back into battle, and they didn’t have any shoes and no ammunition. He knew they’d be killed, but he had to send them in anyway. He had to send his own son Rob back in. How could he stand it, all those boys killed and nobody even knowing what happened to them? I think they still haunt him, after all these years, even though he’s dead.”

“And so he haunts you.”

“No. It isn’t like that. I think he’s trying to atone.”

“By inflicting his nightmares on you?”

“He’s not inflicting them on me. It isn’t like that. I’m helping him sleep somehow. Even though he’s dead.”

“And in the meantime, what are the dreams doing to you?”

She didn’t answer.

“I’ll tell you what they’re doing. The dreams are getting worse, and they’re going to go on getting worse until we do something.” She started to protest. “Look, maybe you’re right. Lee’s dreaming in his tomb, and you’re letting him get some sleep by having the dreams, in which case it won’t matter where we go, the dreams will go right along with us. Only maybe not. Maybe it’s the battlefield that’s aggravating
the dreams, and if we get away from it, the dreams will let up. The point is, you’re not getting any sleep, you’re not eating anything, and what good are you going to be to Lee if you pitch headlong down a flight of stairs some night?”

I started the car. “I think we should go to Shenandoah, get some rest, eat some fried chicken, get away from the dreams for a while, and if we can’t get away from them, try to ignore them. You’re not deserting. You’re just getting away for a little while. On furlough.” I was lying. It I managed to get her out of here I would never let her come back.

“Clean away,” Annie said, and I wondered if she knew I was lying, if she wanted to get away, too.

“We won’t talk about the dreams, we won’t think about the dreams, we’ll go hiking and eat fried chicken and look at the Blue Ridge Mountains. All right?”

She sighed, a long, surrendering sigh. “All right,” she said.

I drove back onto gravel, onto pavement, and out onto the road we had come up on. A mile up it turned into a county road, and a few miles after that onto a two-lane highway with a long, straight stretch of road.

It could have been summer. Some of the trees were already in full leaf, and it was unbelievably warm. There weren’t any clouds at all in the sky, not even above the line of blue in the west where we could already see the Blue Ridge Mountains. I speeded up, anxious to put as much distance as I could between us and Fredericksburg. It was past lunchtime, but we would eat later, when we were closer to Shenandoah.

“This is more like it,” I said, resting my arm on the open window. “I thought for a while there we were never going to see a highway again.” I had told Annie we weren’t going to talk about the dreams, but that was easier said than done. The dreams were all we’d thought about for days. I couldn’t talk about the battlefield, or Lee, or Lincoln either, who had been afflicted with bad dreams, too. And I could
hardly tell her carefree college-days stories about my old roomie Richard, I said, sounding more than ever like the park ranger. “Broun and I got lost on a back road like that one time when I first came to work for him. He wanted me to take some pictures of the country around Antietam, but he was convinced I’d get lost, so he came with me and got us both stuck in a mud puddle. We had to walk out and get a tow truck. He wouldn’t even let me do that by myself. He was like that the whole first year I worked for him.”