Connie Willis: Lincoln’s Dreams

“I don’t know,” I said. I pushed the blankets aside and laid her open suitcase on the bed. “You muttered something about being cold a couple of times. It was cold in here. I put some more blankets on you and I wrapped you up in the bedspread.”

“I’m still a little cold,” she said, and shivered. She began taking things out of the closet and putting them in the suitcase, and I noticed that now that she was awake she was using both hands, but she moved a little stiffly, as if her back hurt.

“I’ll go check us out downstairs,” I said.

“Wait a minute. What about Dr. Barton? Weren’t you going to wait till he got back?”

“He called,” I said. “His sister said their father never mentioned any dreams.” I shut the door and went down the stairs, thinking how easy that had been, as easy as emptying a capsule into her food. For her own good.

I went across the street to the phone booth in the coffee shop and called the hospital. “I have a friend who’s sick,” I said, and then stopped. I would never get her to a hospital. They would want to know the name of her doctor, they would have a thousand forms and while I was filling them out she would call a taxi and disappear.

I called the Sleep Institute and asked for Dr. Stone. “I’m sorry,” the receptionist said. “Dr. Stone’s in California. Can I take a message?” I called Broun’s hotel in L.A. He had checked out. I asked the clerk whether Broun had mentioned where he was going, and he repeated, “Mr. Broun has checked out.”

He had checked out, and I didn’t know where his autograph party was being held today or who the neurologist was he was going to see on Monday, and he wouldn’t be home till Tuesday, which was three days from now.

Annie insisted on having lunch at the coffee shop so she could say goodbye to the redheaded waitress, but she was not there. Her little girl was sick, the manager told us. “Tell her goodbye for me,” Annie said and went on reading galleys as if we were not now cut off from everyone, the rear guard destroyed at Sayler’s Creek, Sheridan already at Appomattox Station, and Meade in the rear and coming up fast. Grant already writing the terms of surrender.

“No,” Nelly said when he told her, and he could hear the desperation in her voice, but this time he was the cause of it and there was nothing he could do. “The army won’t take you. You can’t even march. ”

“I’m walking pretty good,” Ben said. “Mebbe they won’t take me now, but there’s a time when they will and be glad of me. ”

“Why are you doing this? ”

“I gotta. I don’t know why. It’s the same as when I signed up. I just gotta. ”

“I will never know what happened to you,” she said.

“I been thinkin’ on that,” he said. He pulled a piece of folded paper out of his shirt pocket. “Friend of mine told me to put my name and my kin in my shoe, but that didn’t do no good. The boot was shot clean off and the paper with it. I want you should keep this. ”

‘“What good will that do? ”

Ben thought of her sitting by Caleb’s bed, holding his dead hand. “After the war’s over, you show them this paper and you point at one of them bodies and say, ‘That’s him,’ and they’ll put my name on a grave and write my kin, so’s they’ll know what happened to me. ”

“All right,” she said.

After he was gone she opened up the paper and read it. “Toby Banks,” it said. “Big Sewell Mountain, Virginia. ”

Annie stopped.

“I did have a dream,” she said. “I remember it now. I think I was in our church, the Presbyterian church on Main Street back home, and they were taking up the collection, only it wasn’t a church service. It was a meeting of some kind.”

A vestry meeting. At Grace Church.

“I don’t remember very much of it. It wasn’t like the other dreams.” Some of the panic came back in her face as she tried to remember. “It was cold. I remember thinking I should have worn my other coat and wishing they’d stop arguing so I could go home.”

They had been arguing over a raise of fifty-five dollars for the minister. The meeting had gone on for three hours, and finally Lee had said, “I will give that sum,” just so it could be over. Lee had only worn his military cape, and he walked home through the chilly rain.

The family was waiting for him at the tea table. He sat down heavily on the sofa, cradling his left arm, and his wife said, half-joking, “Where have you been? You’ve kept us waiting a long time,” and asked him to say grace. He stood up and looked as though he were trying to say something, and then collapsed onto the sofa.

“What is it?” Annie said.

“It’s probably Dunker Church at Antietam. Let’s go.”

“I didn’t say goodbye to the cat.” She insisted on going around to the outside steps. It wasn’t there, and the scraps of chicken were half-buried in the snow. “What if something happened to it, Jeff?” Annie said, rubbing her wrist.

“Nothing happened to it. It’s holed up someplace nice and warm, in an attic full of mice maybe. There’s no sense waiting around for it to come back. Come on. Let’s go.”

She slept the whole way up as if she had been drugged. She didn’t even wake up when I stopped at a filling station just outside Woodbridge. It was raining there, a chilly, autumn-feeling rain that might turn to snow any minute.

I went inside and called the answering machine again. “Pay dirt,” Broun said. “I knew I was on the right track.” I hadn’t erased the messages. I listened to the whole message repeat itself, trying to pick up some clue to where Broun was.

Broun’s agent said, “I told McLaws and Herndon the galleys would be in by Monday at the latest. If you can’t reach Broun, they’ll have to go in as is.”

“You have to call me immediately,” Richard said. I had hung up on him before, but now I listened to the message hoping that Broun had called again to tell me where he was, afraid to fast-forward for fear I’d go right over it and miss it. “I just got the test results back from the lab. There’s a problem with the EKG. I don’t know for sure what it is. Have you noticed any chest pains? Any pains in the wrist or the back or down the arm? If it’s unstable we could be looking at a myocardial infarction anytime. You’ve got to come back immediately.” There were no more messages. The machine ran on to the end and then switched off by itself.

Broun’s West Coast agent’s number was busy. I bought a cup of coffee to go and went back out to the car. Annie was still asleep, curled up in the passenger seat with her left arm cradled against her body. Her short hair was brushed back off her flushed cheeks. I took the lid off the Styrofoam cup, put the cup between my knees, and started the car. Annie shifted slightly and brought her other arm up to support her left arm. “Strike the tent,” she said.

I turned off the car. After a while I opened the door and poured the coffee out onto the ground and went back inside and called Richard.

After the surrender, Lee was offered the job of president of a little college in Lexington. He rode up on Traveller to arrange for a home for his family. “He starts tomorrow,” his wife wrote, “on horseback because he prefers it that way and besides, does not like to part even for a time from his beloved steed, the companion of many a hard-fought battle.”

In Lexington he rode Traveller every day, stopping to give rides to little girls and to talk to the students. Lucy Long, the mare that had been stolen, was found and bought back, and one of Lee’s daughters would accompany him on the mare when he exercised Traveller. As time went on Traveller’s hard trot fatigued him more and more, and when he went on a speaking tour, he took the train. “Tell him I miss him dreadfully and have repented of our separation but once,” Lee wrote his wife, “and that is the whole time since we parted.”