Connie Willis - Lincoln’s Dreams

The clerk grinned. “You looking for Mrs. Davis?” he said, emphasizing the Mrs. “She asked us to call her a taxi.”

A taxi? She wasn’t in a car with Richard, drugged and helpless, on her way back to Washington. She had taken a taxi to Arlington because I wouldn’t take her. “Did she say where she was going?”

“She didn’t say anything to me,” he said, still grinning. “When she called for the taxi, though, I heard her say she wanted to go out to Fredericksburg battlefield.”

I took the stairs two at a time, grabbed my car keys, and raced back out to the car and across town. But before I’d gone two blocks I knew I was too late.

Lincoln pardoned the sentries who fell asleep on duty, saying it was hard for farm boys to break their country habits. He wouldn’t pardon me. I had let Annie go out to the battlefield by herself, and it was starting to snow.

Lee never forgot his love for horses, even at the end. One of his chief concerns that last week, while Five Forks fell and Sheridan cut off all hope of escape to the north, was with the starving mules and horses. He had had to give their rations of parched corn to the men.

The morning of the surrender Colonel John Haskell rode up “like the wind” with news that Fitz Lee had learned of a road over which the army might still be able to escape. He had only one arm, and he couldn’t get his horse stopped until he was nearly a hundred yards past Lee. “What is it?” Lee cried, running up to the winded horse. “Oh, why did you do it? You have killed your beautiful horse!”

The blue taxi was sitting just outside the National Park gates. I tore up the terraced slopes to the cemetery. I didn’t even look for her in the Visitors’ Center or on the brick paths. There was only one place she was going to be.

She was standing on Marye’s Heights where Lee must have stood, the skirt of her gray coat whipping around her in the wind. It was snowing, stray angled flakes like rifle fire. Annie was holding a brochure but not looking at it. And what was she looking at? The flash and shine of sun on metal, the whipping of flags, the breathless hush before the men on the naked plain were cut to ribbons, the flags toppling one by one and the horses going down? Or the graves, terraced row on row below her?

I came up the last step, panting. “Are you all right?” I said, and had to take a breath every other word.

“Yes,” she said, and smiled at me, her face grave and kind.

“You should have woken me up,” I said. “I would have brought you out here.”

“You needed to get some sleep. I’ve been worried about you. You stay up with me all night and don’t get any sleep.”

She turned and looked down the long terraced slope at the graves.

“They didn’t build this cemetery until after the war,” I said, still having trouble getting my breath. “It isn’t like they buried the soldiers here after the battle. This wasn’t made into a national cemetery until 1865. A lot of the soldiers buried here probably didn’t even die in the war.”

She looked down at the brick path we were standing on. There were grave markers set into the path. She bent and swept snow off the granite square. “This is where the unknowns are buried, isn’t it?”

“None of these graves are Confederate dead,” I said. “They’re not even from the battle of Fredericksburg. The Confederate soldiers are all buried in the city cemetery.”

She stood up and looked at the brochure. “This says there are over twelve thousand unknown soldiers buried here,” she said, “but there aren’t really, you know. There aren’t any.”

I took the brochure away from her and pretended to read it. The snow was melting on it in big spots that blurred the ink.

“You said nobody knows what happened to the chicken, but it isn’t true,” she said. “I know what happened to it. It got killed. One of the soldiers wrung its neck for dinner.”

“You don’t know that. Maybe it ran away into the woods and became a wild chicken. Maybe some little girl found it and kept it for a pet.”

“The brochure says nobody knows what happened to the soldier that’s buried under this marker, but that isn’t true either. After the war, when he didn’t come back, the people who were waiting for him knew. His mother or his sweetheart or his daughter. They knew he was dead because he didn’t come back.”

“Some of the soldiers just never went home after the war. Some of them lit out for California and the gold mines, and they wrote letters home that got lost in the mails, and they weren’t dead after all.”

The wind had stopped and the snow was falling slowly, covering the numbers on the marker at our feet, burying the boys with their yellow hair and their outflung arms, blurring the charred pieces of paper they had pinned to their sleeves.

“What happens to Ben in The Duty Bound? ” Annie asked.

I had no idea how Broun had ended the book. He had killed off Malachi and Toby and Caleb. Maybe he had an epidemic of typhoid in the last chapter and killed everybody else. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Does he die?”

“Die? Ben? He’s the hero. Of course he doesn’t die. He marries Nelly and they go back to Hillsboro and have ten kids and live happily ever after. Broun loves happy endings.”

The marker was completely covered with snow. You couldn’t even tell it was there in the path.

“I’m sorry I got you into all this Jeff,” she said, still looking at the marker. “I needed your help. I didn’t even think how it would be for you.” She looked up at me. “I had another dream.”

“When? This afternoon? Is that why you came out here by yourself?”

“Last night,” she said. “I didn’t tell you.”

“Because you didn’t want to wake me up?”

“Because I didn’t want to have the dream. Because I already knew what it meant.”

“You don’t have to tell me your dream,” I said. “Let me take you back to the inn. It’s starting to snow. You’ll catch pneumonia.”

“Did you know that when Willie Lincoln had pneumonia. Bud Taft held his hand the whole time?”

“Annie…”

“Bud fell asleep once, and Lincoln picked him up and carried him off to another room. He shouldn’t have done that. Willie might have called for him.”

“Bud was only a little boy,” I said.

“Right before he died, Willie clutched Bud’s hand and said his name.” She was still watching the snow sift down onto the graves. “What happened to Lee after the war?”

“He lived for years. He became president of Washington College. Miley came out and took his picture, and tourists came and pulled hairs out of Traveller’s tail. Lee said he looked like a plucked chicken. He took little girls for rides on Traveller and let them hang daisy chains on him. They lived for years.”

“I think the war is almost over,” she said. “I think that’s what my dream means.”

“Did you know Traveller saved Lee’s life up here?” I said, sounding like a frantic tour guide. “A shell burst and Traveller reared up on his hind legs or they’d both have been killed. The shell went right under them.”

She didn’t even hear me.

“I was asleep,” she said, looking at the snow falling on the graves. “In the dream. I was sleeping out under the apple tree in the bed I had when I was a little girl, only in the dream it had a green-and-white coverlet. I was asleep and the pharmacist came and woke me up and told me it was time to go and I got up and got dressed. I put on a dress with a red sash I had for Easter the year I was ten, and a blue cape. I knew I had to look as nice as possible, and at the last minute, when I was all dressed and they were all waiting for me, I stopped and made my bed. I asked the pharmacist to help me. He was getting dressed, too. He was putting his cuff links in, but he stopped to help me, and all the time we worked on the bed he was crying. ‘It’s time to go,’ he said. The whole time I was dreaming I had the feeling it was Easter Sunday.”