Connie Willis: Lincoln’s Dreams

“Didn’t you have any symptoms?” I demanded of him. He was lying in the hospital bed, propped up against the pillows.

“A little indigestion,” he said. “Or what I thought was indigestion.”

“Didn’t your arm hurt? Or your wrist?”

“No,” he said. “I thought I’d eaten too much.”

“Didn’t you dream anything?”

“I was awake when I had it, son,” he said gently.

“Before the attack, I yelled.” “What did you dream about?”

Broun’s doctor pulled me out into the hall. “I know you’re under a lot of stress, but so is he.” He looked at Broun’s chart. “And so am I. I don’t want him having a third heart attack on me.”

“A third?” I said.

“Of course,” he said, still frowning at the chart. He looked up and saw the expression on my face. “Why, the old son of a gun! He never told you, did he? It was three years ago,” he pulled back several pages on the chart, “in September. September twenty-eighth. You were out of town, I think. He said he called you.”

Three years ago in September I had been in Springfield, looking at Lincoln’s tomb and being driven crazy by Broun, and halfway through the trip the calls had stopped, the messages had stopped, and when I got home, he was willing to let me do his legwork for him.

“How bad was the first one?” I asked.

“Bad enough to scare him. He was convinced he was going to die. That’s why I believed he’d told you.” He let the pages fall back and tucked the chart under his arm. “Now, I’ll agree he needs yelling at for not telling you, but as his doctor I’m not going to let you back in to see him unless you promise not to mention this heart attack thing to him until he’s in better shape than he is right now. He must have had his reasons for not telling you about the heart attack.”

“Yeah,” I said.

I went back into the room and apologized for yelling at him. “I didn’t have any dreams before my heart attack,” Broun said. “I didn’t have any warning at all.”

“Annie did,” I said. “The dreams were trying to warn her. Only she wouldn’t listen.”

He leaned back against the pillows. “If I’d dreamed I was in a boat before my heart attack, traveling toward a shadowy, indefinite shore, I wouldn’t have listened either. If Lincoln was letting me dream his dreams for him, there is nothing on this earth I would let stop me. Not even somebody I loved.”

“Even if you ended up having a heart attack? Even if it killed you?”

“Even then,” he said softly. “Maybe she’s all right. Maybe she went to see a doctor when she got home, like she promised.”

Broun started back to work on the Lincoln book as soon as he was out of the hospital, in direct defiance of doctor’s orders. “I’m going to finish this damn book if it kills me,” he said, scratching at his unshaven chin. He was trying to grow another beard.

“Which it will at this rate,” I said. “At least let me do the legwork for you.”

“Fine,” he said, and sent me to the White House to take notes on the purple-hung Guest Room where Willie Lincoln died and the stairs Lincoln had descended in his dream and the East Room, where Willie’s coffin and then his father’s had lain.

I was having a new dream now. In it, I dreamed I woke and heard the sound of crying, but when I went downstairs I couldn’t see anyone. There was a guard standing at the door of the solarium, and I asked him, “Who is dead in the White House?” but when he turned around to answer me, it wasn’t the guard at all, it was Annie. She was wearing her gray coat, and she looked beautiful, fresh and rested.

“Are you all right?” I asked her. “Did you go see a doctor?”

“A doctor?”

“A doctor,” I said urgently. “The dreams were a warning.”

“I know. They were trying to warn us about Broun’s heart attack, but we didn’t understand them. We were looking at all the wrong clues.”

“Broun isn’t going to have another heart attack, is he?”

She shook her head. “The dreams have stopped.”

“And you’re all right?”

She smiled at me, a sweet smile with no sadness in it. “I’m fine.”

In April, Broun was hospitalized again with chest pains. “I’ve been thinking about what caused Annie’s dreams,” he said, lying against the pillows. He was refusing to let the nurses near him for fear they might shave his beard, and he looked terrible, grubby and disreputable. “Do you remember Dreamtime?”

“The quacks in San Diego?”

“Yes,” he said. “Remember they had that theory that the dead sleep peacefully until something disturbs them, like Willie Lincoln being dug up, and then they start dreaming. Well, what if something like that happened with Lee? What if they moved his body and that’s what started him dreaming?”

“Lee’s body hasn’t been moved,” I said. “It’s still buried in the chapel at Lexington.”

“Maybe the dreams weren’t because of the angina. Maybe they started because his body was disturbed some way. Was his daughter Annie’s body moved?”

“No. She’s still buried in North Carolina where she died.”

He lay silently for a while, glaring at the door whenever a nurse passed, and then said, “They moved Lincoln’s body. First they moved it to Springfield on the funeral train, stopping at every damned one-horse town and whistle stop along the way.” He pushed himself up against the pillows, and the line on the EKG screen behind his head spiked suddenly. “And then there was that kidnap plot and the guard moved him out of the tomb and buried him in a passage of the Memorial Hall.”

“Annie didn’t have Lincoln’s dreams,” I said calmly, reasonably, watching the screen. “They were Lee’s dreams.”

“In 1901, they moved Lincoln back into the tomb again. He was moved four times altogether, not counting the funeral train.” The screen jerked in sharp, dangerous lines. “What if those Dreamtime quacks were right, and all that jostling woke him up?”

“They weren’t Lincoln’s dreams,” I said. “They were Lee’s.”

“Maybe,” he said, sitting up with a motion that sent the EKG lines to the top of the screen. “I want you to bring me some books.”

He asked for books the next three days, and by the end of the week he had half his library in his hospital room. “I’ve got it all worked out,” he said. He was able to sit up by then without setting off the EKG. “They were Lincoln’s dreams.”

He had it all worked out. Lincoln had been the one who had dreams, not Lee, and their dreams wouldn’t have been all that different. They would both have dreamed about Gettysburg and Appomattox. Lincoln had known about Special Order 191 before Lee did, and the cat didn’t have to be Tom Tita, did it? It could have been one of Lincoln’s kittens. Lincoln loved kittens. He had it all worked out.

“What if they were Lincoln’s dreams?” I said when I couldn’t take it anymore. “What would that prove?”

“Lincoln tried to save Willie’s pony from the burning stable. That’s what the house on fire really is, not Chancellorsville.”

“They weren’t Lincoln’s dreams, damn it,” I shouted. “They were Lee’s.”

“I know,” he said quietly, and the EKG line above his head went right oft the screen. “I know they’re not Lincoln’s dreams.”

“Then why did you do all this?”

“Because then she’d be all right. If they were warnings from Lincoln, they wouldn’t have been about apple orchards, they’d have been about boats. I thought if I could make them Lincoln’s dreams, then that would mean she was all right.”

“He’s in no shape to be upset,” Broun’s doctor said. He had yanked me out into the hall again and down to an empty room. The EKG had set off an alarm at the nurses’ station that brought everybody running.