Lincoln's Dreams by Connie Willis
“John Goulding, Lieutenant, Sixteenth New York Cavalry,’” Annie read.
“These aren’t the soldiers who were originally buried here,” I said. “Those were all enlisted men. Officers were buried on the hill in front of the mansion.”
The second gravestone was covered with snow. I bent and wiped it off with my hand, wishing I’d worn gloves. “See? ‘Gustave Von Branson, Lieutenant, Company K, Third U.S. Vermont Volunteers.’ Lieutenant Von Branson wasn’t buried here till 1865, after Arlington had become a national cemetery.” I straightened up, rubbing my wet hand on my jeans, and turned around. “Then Commander Meigs had the enlisted men moved to—”
Annie was gone. “Annie?” I said stupidly and looked down the row of tombstones, thinking maybe she had gone past me, but she wasn’t there. She must have gone into the house, I thought. It must be open today after all.
I walked rapidly back along the gravel path and up the slick steps onto the porch. The wind was blowing snow up onto the brick-tiled porch and against the buff-colored pillars so they looked almost white.
I tried the door and then pounded on it. “Are you open?” I shouted, trying to see in through the windows. There weren’t any footprints on the porch except mine, but I kept on pounding for another full minute, as if I thought Annie might have gotten locked in, before my rational self told me she’d probably gotten cold and gone back to the car, and I went back around the house to see.
She wasn’t in the car, and the gift shop was locked up tight, and I gave up all pretense that I wasn’t worried and went tearing back to the front of the house to look down the hill at the lawn where the bodies had been buried.
The wind had picked up in the time it took me to get to the car and back, and I couldn’t see more than a few yards down the hill. “Annie!” I shouted.
I wasn’t sure I’d be able to hear her if she answered, but I shouted again, ready to take off down the hill, and then I caught a glimpse of gray moving between trees on the far side of Arlington House and took off running after her. She must be on the Custis Walk, the wide cement sidewalk that came up from the road below. It made a wide curve around the hill so the view of the house wouldn’t be spoiled, and I wondered as I ran if that was why they had moved the bodies, too, because they had spoiled the view.
The walk was hardly snowy at all, protected as it was by the big trees that were planted all along its length, and I took the cracked, uneven steps two at a time, trying to catch up with her, and found myself suddenly at the curved wall and marble terrace of the Kennedy Memorial. The eternal flame burned on the grave in the center of a circle of rough, smoke-charred stone, melting the snow around it as it fell.
I looked back up the hill. The snow was blowing almost horizontally across the hill and I couldn’t see Arlington House, but I could see Annie. She stood halfway up the hill behind a low wall, looking down at the snow-covered lawn where nothing was buried anymore. I must have gone right past her, missing the turnout in my headlong pitch down the stairs. She didn’t see me, standing there looking helplessly up at her, or the eternal flame that seemed to flinch away from the wet flakes of snow falling on it, but I could see her clearly in spite of the snow and the distance between us. I could see the expression on her face.
She had looked frightened last night, telling me her dream, but it was nothing compared to the terror in her face now. I could see them, the yellow-haired soldiers with their arms flung out across the snowy grass, their rifles still under them, and the ink on the scraps of paper pinned to their sleeves beginning to blur as the snow hit the paper and melted. I could see all of it, even the cat, reflected in Annie’s face, and I knew I had had no business bringing her out here.
“Annie!” I yelled, and sprinted up the steep slope, my shoes slipping on the icy grass. “Hold on!” I shouted as if I thought she might fall. “I’m coming!”
I scrambled over the pebbled cement wall. “I lost you,” I said, trying to get my breath. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she said, still looking down the hill. “Tell me about Robert E. Lee.”
The shoulders of her coat were covered with snow. Her hair was wet past curling. She must have been standing there the whole time I was looking for her.
“I had no business bringing you out here,” I said. “You’re going to catch your death of cold. Let’s go back to the car.”
“Did he ever come back here?”
“I know a great place just across the bridge. Big fireplace. Great coffee. We can talk about Lee there.” I took hold of her arm. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
She gave no indication that she even felt my hand on her arm. “Did he come back here after the war?”
“No,” I said. “He saw it once. From a train window.”
She nodded as if I had confirmed something she already knew.
“Let’s at least go up on the porch of Arlington House. We’ll be out of the wind there.”
“He was a good person, wasn’t he? They always say that, that he was a good person, don’t they?”
I wanted to get her in out of the snow and out of her wet coat and sopping shoes and in front of a fire so she wouldn’t catch pneumonia, but I was never going to get her to budge until I had answered her questions. I let go of her arm. “He was a good person, I guess, if you can call anybody who directed the slaughter of two hundred and fifty thousand men good,” I said. “He was brave, dignified, forgiving, kind to children and animals. Everybody loved him, even Lincoln.”
“His soldiers loved him,” Annie said. She had taken off her gloves and was twisting them in her hands.
“Yes,” I said. “One time at Cold Harbor, a column of his soldiers saw him resting under a tree and passed the word that ‘Marse Robert’ was asleep. The whole column went past him practically on tiptoe so they wouldn’t wake him up. His soldiers loved him. His horse loved him.”
“Two hundred and fifty thousand men,” she said. “If he was a good man, how could he bear that, all those young boys? He wouldn’t ever be able to get over it, would he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe that’s why he can’t sleep. Because of all those boys.” She turned to look at me. “This is the house in my dream. In the dream it looks like my house, but it’s not my house. It’s this house. And it’s not my dream.” She turned and looked back down the hill at the Kennedy Memorial. The eternal flame, burning inside the circle of blackened stone, looked like a soldier’s campfire. “Tell me about the cat.”
“Did you ever have a cat? When you were a child?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” she said. She had dropped both gloves. Her hands, flat on the low rough wall, were red and wet.
“No.”
“Richard says something happened to me when I was little, something I don’t remember, that’s causing me to have the dreams, and that the apple tree and the bodies and the cat are all symbols for what happened. He says the blank paper pinned to the soldier’s sleeve is a symbol for the message my subconscious is trying to send me only I’m too afraid to read it.”
“Robert E. Lee’s daughter had a cat named Tom Tita,” I said. “A yellow tabby. He was left behind accidentally when the Lees left Arlington. When a cousin, Markie Williams, went to Arlington to get some of their things and send them to the Lees, she found the cat. It had been locked in the attic, living on mice.”
“What happened to it?”
I stooped to pick up her gloves. “I don’t know.” I handed them back to her. “She didn’t say anything about taking it with her. I suppose she left it there with the Union soldiers who were occupying Arlington, I don’t know what happened to it.”
“I feel cold,” she said, and walked ahead of me back to the sidewalk and up to the house.
The porch wasn’t much protection. The snow was starting to pile up on the wooden steps and had blown across the hexagonal brick dies in curving drifts. “Why don’t we go sit in the car a
She sat down on a black painted bench. “Did you find that in a book?” she said. “About the cat?”
“In a letter,” I said.
“I could have read it, too, a long time ago, and forgotten I’d ever read it. I could have read somewhere that Arlington was Lee’s house and forgotten that, too.”
“Like Bridey Murphy,” I said. “She was hypnotized. She didn’t have dreams.”
“Richard says dreams aren’t really the way we remember them. That they’re emotions projected as images or symbols, but the second people wake up they try to hide the meaning of the dream from themselves by adding things and forgetting things so it means something else. Maybe that’s what I’m doing. I’m making them dead Union soldiers and they’re really something else.”
“What?” I said.
“I don’t know.”
“What kind of gun did the soldier have? The one you stepped on. You said he was still holding on to his rifle. What kind of rifle was it?”
“I think it was a toy gun,” she said. “It looked like a rifle, but it had a roll of paper caps in it, like a toy pistol.” She looked up at me. “Does that mean I shot somebody with a cap pistol in our apple orchard, and then made myself forget it?”
The snow was coming down like a curtain around us. I could barely see past the edge of the porch. “One of the guns used in the Civil War was the Springfield rifle. It fired a minié ball by using a paper roll of percussion caps, like the roll of caps in a toy pistol.”
“I had another dream last night,” she said.
“We can’t sit out here. You can tell me about it in the car,” I said, and stood up, offering her my hand. She took hold of it with her icy one, and I helped her up, wanting to grab both her hands and hold them against my chest, rubbing some warmth back into them, but she let go as soon as she was on her feet, and put her sodden gloves back on. We walked back to the car.
I started it and turned up the heater and the fan as far as they would go. I didn’t turn the windshield wipers on, and the collecting snow shut out the sight of the house and the garden and the graves.
“I was standing under the apple tree, only it was on a hill and down at the bottom of it was a stream, and where my house was supposed to be was the Presbyterian church that I went to when I was a little girl,” she said. She took off her gloves, started to twist them in her hands, and then stopped and stuck them in her pocket.
“It was afternoon, and Richard was there. He was wearing his slippers, and he was looking down the hill, but I couldn’t see what he was looking at, and I was angry that he was doing that instead of helping me look.” She stopped and stared at the blinded windshield.
“Helping you look for what?” I said.
“The message. There were supposed to be a hundred and ninety-one of them, but one of them was missing, and I said to Richard, ‘We’ve got to find it,’ but he wouldn’t put down the telescope, he just pointed down the hill and said, ‘Ask Hill. He knows where it is,’ and at first I thought he meant the hill we were standing on, but then I saw a man on a gray horse and I went down and said angrily, ‘Where is it?’ but he didn’t pay any attention to me either. He was trying to get down off his horse, but the horse had fallen forward, onto its knees sort of. Its knees were bent under …”
She tried to show me, but her elbows wouldn’t bend the right way, and I already knew how the horse had looked. I shut my eyes.
“He had one foot in the stirrup and he was trying to get his other leg over the saddlehorn, but he couldn’t, and after a while I went back up the hill to Richard and said, ‘We’ve got to find it.’ He didn’t answer me either because he was looking through his telescope past the church to the south. I was going to take the telescope away from him, but just then I saw what he was looking at. It was a whole line of Union soldiers, coming up from the south. I said, ‘Whose troops are those?’ and Richard handed the telescope to me, but my hands were bandaged and I couldn’t hold it, so I made him look again, and he said, ‘They’re Federals,’ and I said, ‘No. It’s Hill,’ and just then the man who’d been on the horse that was on its knees came riding up on another horse, only now he was wearing a red wool shirt, and I was so glad to see him because it meant that even though we couldn’t find it, he had still gotten the message.”
I didn’t say anything. I ran my hands around the rim of the steering wheel and thought about how I should take her home before the snow got any worse and we were both trapped up here.
“Maybe Richard’s right,” she said, “and whatever’s in that lost message is whatever it is I can’t remember.”
“What about the bandages on your hands? What about the Confederate soldiers in blue uniforms? And the number one hundred and ninety-one? What are they supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said lightly, and put her gloves back on. “Richard will have to tell me. He’s the psychiatrist.”
“Broun’s new book is about Antietam,” I said. “I’ve spent the last six months researching everything in print about that battle.”
And you know why my hands are bandaged?”
“Lee broke his right hand and sprained his left just before the march into Maryland. He was still wearing the splints and bandages at Antietam. Lee had sent an urgent message to A. P. Hill at Harper’s Ferry, telling him to bring his men up as fast as he could, so when he saw some soldiers coming up from the south he hoped it was Hill’s troops, but the soldiers were wearing blue uniforms.
“He asked one of his aides, ‘Whose troops are those?’ The aide told him they were Union soldiers and offered to let Lee use the telescope, but Lee held up his bandaged hands and said, ‘Can’t use it. What troops are those?’ The aide looked again, and this time he could see the Confederate battle flags.
“It was A. P. Hill’s men, just up from Harper’s Ferry after a forced march of seventeen miles. Hill was riding ahead of them. He was wearing a red shirt.” I gripped the steering wheel. “They were wearing Union uniforms they had taken from the Federal stores they captured at Harper’s Ferry.”
Annie turned and looked out the side window at the graves she couldn’t see. “I want to go home,” she said.
CHAPTER THREE
Lee didn’t buy Traveller “in the mountains of Virginia in the autumn of 1861,” as he wrote his cousin Markie Williams after the war, but he thought of the horse as his from that meeting on, calling him “my colt” when he saw him again in North Carolina and going out to the stables to visit him. The hostler complained that he was “always pokin’ ’round my horses as if he meant to steal one of ’em.”
Broun had called again, from New York, and left a message on the machine. The weather was even worse to the north. He hadn’t been to McLaws and Herndon yet, but he’d seen his agent, and she’d hit the roof about the scene. She’d told Broun that the galleys had already gone to press and there was no way they’d be willing to stop the presses for a scene Broun’s editor hadn’t even okayed, but Broun was going to try anyway. He’d be home tonight if the weather let up. Otherwise, he’d come back tomorrow morning.
“I want you to call your friend Richard and see if he knows anything about prodromic dreams.” He spelled the word, and then, as if he knew what he was asking was impossible, he said, “Or better yet, call Kate at the library and see if you can get a bibliography on them. And see if you can find out where Willie Lincoln’s buried. Lincoln dreamed about Willie after he died. I’m determined to run this dream thing to ground.”
I looked at the books lying jumbled on the shelves under the African violets. Broun must have been at them again after he straightened them up. There was a biography of Lincoln lying open on top. I rescued a Freeman from the mess and then put it down again.
I wondered what Annie was doing. I hoped she had gotten out of her wet clothes and taken a hot bath, had something to eat, gone to bed, but I had an image of her standing, like myself, looking out at the snow, still in her
I picked up the biography of Lincoln and went up to the study to put it away. The phone rang.
“I want you to stay away from Annie,” Richard said.
“Are you asking me as her doctor or her boyfriend?”
“I’m not asking you at all. I’m telling you. Stay away from her. You had no business taking her out to Arlington.”
“She asked me to drive her out,” I said. “She told me she asked you to take her, and you refused. So I figure you had your chance.”
“Annie’s emotionally unstable. By taking her out there, you could have sent her into a complete psychotic break.”
“Like that nutso Lincoln?” I said. “You told Broun old Abe was heading for a psychotic break because he’d dreamed, of all things, about his own assassination. Are you trying to tell me that anybody who dreams about the Civil War is crazy?”
“She’s not dreaming about the Civil War.”
“Then where in the hell did the Union soldiers come from?”
“You did this, didn’t you? While I was upstairs talking to Broun, you were filling her head with a lot of nonsense about soldiers being buried in the front lawn out at Arlington, encouraging this neurotic fantasy of hers. You told her Robert E. Lee had a cat, didn’t you?”
“He did have a cat.”
“And as soon as you told Annie that, she told you the cat in her dream was exactly like Robert E. Lee’s cat, didn’t she?”
I didn’t answer him. I was thinking of Annie clutching the African violet and saying, “Did Robert E. Lee have a cat? A yellow cat? With darker stripes?”
“During dream recall the dreamer’s extremely suggestive,” Richard said. “Anything that’s told to the dreamer then can influence his memory of the dream. It’s called secondary elaboration.”
“Like telling her she’d shot somebody with a cap pistol?” I said. “The Springfield rifle had a percussion cap, did you know that? It looked just like a kid’s cap pistol. The Springfield rifle was used in the Civil War.”