Connie Willis: Lincoln’s Dreams

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 and talk?” I said. “It’s freezing out here.”

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?”