Connie Willis: Lincoln’s Dreams

Though she was dead.

It took me a long time to get back to the road, high-stepping like a cat among the snowy graves, and an even longer time to drive home. When I got there, Broun was in the solarium, watering his African violets.

I stood against the door, still in my coat, watching him spill water out of the already-full pots onto the table. He will never look like Lincoln. The heart attacks have aged and somehow saddened his face, and his beard, which has finally, after almost two years, grown in the way he wanted it, is nearly white. He looks like Lee.

I wondered why I had never noticed it before, why I had kept instead the image I had had of him the night of the reception, of someone sharp and disreputable and not to be trusted. He has been nothing but kind to me. And one snowy night he sold me to Annie, who was having someone else’s dreams.

“Jeff’ll take good care of her,” Broun had said, like a man trying to make a deal, “won’t you, Jeff?”

And I had said, “I’ll take good care of her. I promise.”

I think some part of me has blamed him for that all this time, in spite of the fact that he has been nothing but kind, loves me as much, I think, as Lincoln loved Willie, is down here now not because the violets need watering, but because he wondered where I was, because he didn’t know what had happened to me.

I have blamed him for something that wasn’t even his fault. It was love at first sight for both of them, wasn’t it? Didn’t Lee call him “my colt” even before he bought him?

I belonged to her from the minute I saw her standing there in her gray coat, and she took me, her faithful, following companion, from Fredericksburg to Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and finally to Appomattox, and then left me behind.

“I had no business sending you out there,” Broun says.

I cannot answer. I stand there by the door with my head down, winded, blown. Poor Traveller. Did he know that Lee was dead, or, poor dumb animal that he was, had he waited every day for two years for him to come back?

“What happened?” Broun says, alarmed. “What’s wrong?”

“I have picked up a nail.”

CONNIE W ILLIS has won six Nebula Awards (more than any other science fiction writer), six Hugo Awards, and for her first novel, Lincoln’s Dreams , the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her novel Doomsday Book won both the Nebula and Hugo Awards, and her first short-story collection. Fire Watch , was a New York Times Notable Book. Her other works include To Say Nothing of the Dog Bellwether, Impossible Thing, Remake, Uncharted Territory, Miracle and Other Christmas Stories , and Passage. Ms Willis lives in Greeley, Colorado, with her family and is hard at work on her next novel.