Lincoln's Dreams by Connie Willis
“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.
CHAPTER TWELVE
At 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.
Ben gulped the laudanum down.
“I am willing to dance with you this very day,” Caleb said, grabbing for Nelly’s hand. “We shall push the beds back against the wall. Miss Nelly, and you,” he waved his hand at Ben, “shall play us a jig tune.”
“Nelly! Come away from there!” a woman’s voice said. She came and stood at the foot of the bed where Ben could see her. It was the woman who had hit his foot bringing him up the stairs.
“Have one of the others do that!” she barked. “We got another wagonload coming in, and here you are flirting with the menfolks.” She glared at Caleb. “You woke every soul in the house with your screaming last night.”
He grinned at her. “I dreamed Miss Nelly wouldn’t marry me,” he said.
“You can’t marry Nelly,” Ben tried to say. “I love her.”
Nelly set the bottle of laudanum down on the chair and went out of Ben’s range of vision. Caleb swung his legs over the side of the bed and leaned across to pick up the bottle. “I dreamed Miss Nelly said she wouldn’t marry me and old Mrs. Macklin said she would.” He winked at Ben. “It was a nightmare, that’s what it was.”
I watched Annie read, her head bent over the manuscript so I could see the part in her hair. “It’s the war,” Broun had said when I had refused to believe that Ben could fall in love with Nelly after only one day in the hospital. “A spoonful of laudanum, and Ben will do anything for her,” I had said, and Broun had answered, “People did things like that in a war, fell in love, sacrificed themselves.”
Maybe it was the war. We had been through a lot together—Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville and Brandy Station. I had explained her dreams to her, held her hand while she slept, dried her tears. All that was bound to produce feelings of camaraderie, affection. But I knew it wasn’t true. I had loved her since the moment I saw her standing there in the solarium in her gray coat.
I insisted on finding a restaurant that served fried chicken, as if that had been why we intended to go to Shenandoah. Annie brought home a drumstick wrapped in a napkin for the cat.
“You’ll kill it with kindness,” I told her. “You’re not supposed to feed them chicken bones,” but the cat was nowhere to be found. It had come out to the car when we got back in the afternoon, meowing reproaches, but now it wasn’t on the outside steps or over in front of the coffee shop.
“He’ll be back,” I said. “Cats always come back.”
“Tom Tita didn’t. He was locked in. He couldn’t get out.”
“The cat isn’t locked in. He’s probably found some other pushover to feed him, that’s all. You notice Tom Tita didn’t try very hard to get out. He was perfectly happy in the attic with all those mice, and when Markie Williams let him out he didn’t go racing back to Lee. He didn’t even miss Lee as long as the Union soldiers would feed him.”
“Lee missed him,” she said. “Cats don’t have any sense of loyalty, do they?”
“Their first loyalty is t
“You’re right,” she said. “Somebody’s taking care of him, and he’s fine,” but she stripped the meat off the drumstick and left it in a little pile at the bottom of the steps before we went in.
She went to bed at eight, and I tried to call Broun at the Westgate in San Diego again. There was no answer. I called the answering machine.
“I’m still in San Diego, Jeff,” Broun said. “I didn’t get in to see the endocrinologist. He was called out of town. I’m going to a place called Dreamtime while I wait for him to get back. Probably a bunch of Quacks, but you never know.” I waited, thinking there’d be a message from Richard, but there wasn’t
Annie tapped lightly on my door. “I had a dream about a chicken,” she said.
“Are you sure this is one of Lee’s dreams and not just something you ate?” I asked her, giddy with relief that I hadn’t inflicted Brandy Station on her.
“I’m sure,” she said. She leaned against the door. She was wearing the blue robe over her nightgown, and her eyes were bluer than I had ever seen them. Her short hair was tangled from sleeping on it. She looked beautiful. “The chicken was on the porch of my house. She acted like she belonged there. Did Lee have a chicken?”
“He had a horse,” I said. “He had a cat. I refuse to believe he had a chicken. It sounds to me like this dream is one of your own, brought on by that southern fried chicken we had for dinner. I told you I was giving you bad dreams.”
She went back to bed. I put the chain on the door and moved the chair over next to it, balanced the book on the arm. I corrected galleys for a while, read Freeman for a while, napped for a while, but I couldn’t sleep in spite of the fact that I had had maybe three hours sleep in the last two nights. It was a good thing.
Annie got out of bed, put on her robe, and tied the belt, all so calmly I thought she was awake. She pushed the chair out of the way. The book thumped onto the carpeted floor, making less noise than I thought it should. She reached for the chain.
“Where are you going, Annie?” I said quietly.
“My fault,” she said. She unfastened the chain.
“It’s not your fault. Let’s go back to bed.” I hooked the chain and led her carefully back to bed, my hand barely touching her arm. She didn’t resist at all. She stopped next to the bed and took off her robe.
“What happened to them?” she asked.
The chicken? Tom Tita? Or all those yellow-haired boys?
“We’ll find them,” I said. She got into bed and lay down. I covered her up. Fifteen minutes later we went through the whole thing again. After I had her back in bed, I wedged the chair under the doorknob and waited.
It took half an hour that time, and then she stood up again, put her robe on, tied the belt, and tried to move the chair. It wouldn’t budge. She turned and looked at me. “What happened to them?” she said angrily, as if I had hidden them from her.
“We’ll find them,” I said, and started back to the bed, my hand lightly on her arm, but halfway there she stopped and took two steps toward the windows.
“My fault,” she said softly. “My fault.”
We were at Gettysburg again, in the woods that were like an oven, watching the soldiers struggle back from Pickett’s Charge.
“My fault,” she whispered, took a few faltering steps forward, and sank down on her knees, her face in her hands.
“What is it, Annie?” I said, squatting beside her. “Is it Gettysburg? Is it Pickett’s Charge?”
She took her hands away from her face and sat back on her heels, staring blindly at whatever it was.
“Can you wake up, Annie? Can you tell me what you’re dreaming?”
She stretched her hand out toward something on the floor in front of her and then drew it back. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”
She knelt there for over an hour, me squatting beside her until my legs cramped and I had to switch positions, talking to her, trying to wake her up, trying to get her back to bed. In the end I picked her up and carried her, placing her arms around my neck so she wouldn’t fall back, unfastening them when I had her in bed.
“What happened to them?!’ she asked when I covered her up.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but I’ll find out. I promise.”
Five minutes later she stood up again, put on her robe, and went over to the door.
“Annie, you’ve got to wake up,” I said tiredly.
She stopped pushing on the chair, straightened up, looked at the door, at me. “Did I do it again? Did I go outside?”
“You were trying your darnedest to,” I said. “Where were you? Gettysburg?”
“No,” she said, sitting down in the chair. “I was at Arlington again. It had snowed, like in the first dream, and I was looking for the cat. He was out under the apple tree, and I went out to get him, and I stepped on something. It was a Union soldier. He was lying face-down, with his rifle underneath him, and his name pinned to his sleeve.”
She was clutching the tie belt of her robe the way she had clutched the African violet in Broun’s solarium that first night. “I bent down to unpin the paper, but when I did, it wasn’t a blue uniform sleeve, it was white. And then I saw it wasn’t a dead soldier, it was a girl in a white nightgown, asleep under the apple tree.”
She didn’t ask me where it was or what the dream meant. She sat for a while in the chair, looking toward the middle of the room as if she could still see the apple tree and the girl asleep under it.
“I’m sorry I was sleepwalking again, Jeff,” she said. “Maybe you should tie me to the bed.” She took off her robe and lay down, her arms stiffly at her sides, as if she were willing herself not to walk in her sleep.
She lay that way the rest of the night. I didn’t know if she was asleep. She didn’t move when I picked up Freeman from where it had fallen on the floor and went into my room to get the other three volumes, when I locked the connecting door to my room and pulled the desk across it, or when I moved the lamp over by the green chair so I could read by its light.
There weren’t very many index references to Annie Lee, in spite of her having been Lee’s favorite daughter. I looked up the last one first. “I have always promised myself to go, and I think if I am to accomplish it, I have no time to lose,” he had written his son Rooney in 1870. “I wish to witness Annie’s quiet sleep.” She had died during the war at White Sulphur Springs, North Carolina. She was twenty-three years old.
“He was a good man,” Annie had said. His soldiers loved him, his children loved him, and he had had to sacrifice them all to the war, even his favorite daughter. Annie Lee had died of a fever, but she was as much a casualty of the Civil War as any soldier, dying young and far away from home. At least Lee had had the comfort of knowing where she was buried. He had gone to visit her grave in 1870. “I wish to witness Annie’s quiet sleep.”
Poor man. When he had gotten the letter of her death, he had not shown any outward emotion. He had read the letter and then gone on answering his official correspondence with his aide. But when the aide had come back into the tent a few minutes later, he found Lee weeping.
It was four o’clock, one in California. I called Broun at the Westgate in San Diego, at the L.A. number. I called directory assistance and got the number for Dreamtime. There was no answer anywhere.
Just before dawn, Annie got out of bed and put on her blue robe. I put out a restraining hand, afraid she was sleepwalking again. She went over to the window. “Did you find out what the dream meant?” she asked.
I told her about Annie Lee. “She died in 1862,” I said. “Right before Fredericksburg.”
“Willie Lincoln died in 1862. He was Lincoln’s favorite son,” she said, hugging her arms to herself. “What did she die of?”
“I don’t know. A feve
“Poor man,” she said, and I wondered which man she meant, or if she would know if I asked her.
We spent the morning trying to sleep, gave up, and went to see the last tourist attraction in town, Hugh Mercer’s apothecary shop. We looked at silverplated pills and brown glass laudanum bottles and handwritten prescriptions for curing fevers.
We spent the rest of the day in the library. Annie took notes on Lincoln. I read Lee’s letters and tried to find out what Annie had died from. Nobody seemed to know. I found the chicken, though. Its name was little Hen. She had walked uninvited into Lee’s tent one day, and Lee had kept her for over a year. She laid an egg under Lee’s camp cot every day and sat on Traveller’s back, which delighted the soldiers.
We looked for the cat after dinner, but it was nowhere to be found. The neat pile of chicken scraps Annie had left for it was still on the step. “It’s probably holed up someplace warm,” I said. “It’s supposed to turn cold tomorrow.” We went back to the room, and I barricaded the doors, as if I thought I could somehow keep the dreams out.
I needn’t have bothered. Annie didn’t sleepwalk. She lay quietly, and watching her I thought the dreams must not be as bad, though when she told me about them, they were worse than ever.
Her house was on fire and a rider handed her a message which she tried to open with one hand. The message was wrapped around three cigars, and she couldn’t open it because her hands were bandaged. She handed it to the redheaded waitress and she couldn’t open it either, there was something wrong with her arm, and it wasn’t the waitress, it was a girl in a white nightgown and the message wasn’t wrapped around cigars, it was a letter, and Annie was afraid to read it.
She dreamed she stood on the porch of Arlington and argued with Richard, who was wearing slippers. The vet was in the dream, too. He handed Richard a message, and Richard tore it into little pieces and threw them on the ground.
“Who is the vet?” she asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Pickett maybe? Longstreet?”
“No,” she said bitterly. “Richard is always Longstreet.”