Connie Willis: Lincoln’s Dreams

“I think it was a toy gun,” she said. “It looked like a rifle, but it had a roll of paper caps in it, like a toy pistol.” She looked up at me. “Does that mean I shot somebody with a cap pistol in our apple orchard, and then made myself forget it?”

The snow was coming down like a curtain around us. I could barely see past the edge of the porch. “One of the guns used in the Civil War was the Springfield rifle. It fired a minié ball by using a paper roll of percussion caps, like the roll of caps in a toy pistol.”

“I had another dream last night,” she said.

“We can’t sit out here. You can tell me about it in the car,” I said, and stood up, offering her my hand. She took hold of it with her icy one, and I helped her up, wanting to grab both her hands and hold them against my chest, rubbing some warmth back into them, but she let go as soon as she was on her feet, and put her sodden gloves back on. We walked back to the car.

I started it and turned up the heater and the fan as far as they would go. I didn’t turn the windshield wipers on, and the collecting snow shut out the sight of the house and the garden and the graves.

“I was standing under the apple tree, only it was on a hill and down at the bottom of it was a stream, and where my house was supposed to be was the Presbyterian church that I went to when I was a little girl,” she said. She took off her gloves, started to twist them in her hands, and then stopped and stuck them in her pocket.

“It was afternoon, and Richard was there. He was wearing his slippers, and he was looking down the hill, but I couldn’t see what he was looking at, and I was angry that he was doing that instead of helping me look.” She stopped and stared at the blinded windshield.

“Helping you look for what?” I said.

“The message. There were supposed to be a hundred and ninety-one of them, but one of them was missing, and I said to Richard, ‘We’ve got to find it,’ but he wouldn’t put down the telescope, he just pointed down the hill and said, ‘Ask Hill. He knows where it is,’ and at first I thought he meant the hill we were standing on, but then I saw a man on a gray horse and I went down and said angrily, ‘Where is it?’ but he didn’t pay any attention to me either. He was trying to get down off his horse, but the horse had fallen forward, onto its knees sort of. Its knees were bent under…”

She tried to show me, but her elbows wouldn’t bend the right way, and I already knew how the horse had looked. I shut my eyes.

“He had one foot in the stirrup and he was trying to get his other leg over the saddlehorn, but he couldn’t, and after a while I went back up the hill to Richard and said, ‘We’ve got to find it.’ He didn’t answer me either because he was looking through his telescope past the church to the south. I was going to take the telescope away from him, but just then I saw what he was looking at. It was a whole line of Union soldiers, coming up from the south. I said, ‘Whose troops are those?’ and Richard handed the telescope to me, but my hands were bandaged and I couldn’t hold it, so I made him look again, and he said, ‘They’re Federals,’ and I said, ‘No. It’s Hill,’ and just then the man who’d been on the horse that was on its knees came riding up on another horse, only now he was wearing a red wool shirt, and I was so glad to see him because it meant that even though we couldn’t find it, he had still gotten the message.”

I didn’t say anything. I ran my hands around the rim of the steering wheel and thought about how I should take her home before the snow got any worse and we were both trapped up here.

“Maybe Richard’s right,” she said, “and whatever’s in that lost message is whatever it is I can’t remember.”

“What about the bandages on your hands? What about the Confederate soldiers in blue uniforms? And the number one hundred and ninety-one? What are they supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know,” she said lightly, and put her gloves back on. “Richard will have to tell me. He’s the psychiatrist.”

“Broun’s new book is about Antietam,” I said. “I’ve spent the last six months researching everything in print about that battle.”

And you know why my hands are bandaged?”

“Lee broke his right hand and sprained his left just before the march into Maryland. He was still wearing the splints and bandages at Antietam. Lee had sent an urgent message to A. P. Hill at Harper’s Ferry, telling him to bring his men up as fast as he could, so when he saw some soldiers coming up from the south he hoped it was Hill’s troops, but the soldiers were wearing blue uniforms.

“He asked one of his aides, ‘Whose troops are those?’ The aide told him they were Union soldiers and offered to let Lee use the telescope, but Lee held up his bandaged hands and said, ‘Can’t use it. What troops are those?’ The aide looked again, and this time he could see the Confederate battle flags.

“It was A. P. Hill’s men, just up from Harper’s Ferry after a forced march of seventeen miles. Hill was riding ahead of them. He was wearing a red shirt.” I gripped the steering wheel. “They were wearing Union uniforms they had taken from the Federal stores they captured at Harper’s Ferry.”

Annie turned and looked out the side window at the graves she couldn’t see. “I want to go home,” she said.

Lee didn’t buy Traveller “in the mountains of Virginia in the autumn of 1861,” as he wrote his cousin Markie Williams after the war, but he thought of the horse as his from that meeting on, calling him “my colt” when he saw him again in North Carolina and going out to the stables to visit him. The hostler complained that he was “always pokin’ ’round my horses as if he meant to steal one of ’em.”

Broun had called again, from New York, and left a message on the machine. The weather was even worse to the north. He hadn’t been to McLaws and Herndon yet, but he’d seen his agent, and she’d hit the roof about the scene. She’d told Broun that the galleys had already gone to press and there was no way they’d be willing to stop the presses for a scene Broun’s editor hadn’t even okayed, but Broun was going to try anyway. He’d be home tonight if the weather let up. Otherwise, he’d come back tomorrow morning.

“I want you to call your friend Richard and see if he knows anything about prodromic dreams.” He spelled the word, and then, as if he knew what he was asking was impossible, he said, “Or better yet, call Kate at the library and see if you can get a bibliography on them. And see if you can find out where Willie Lincoln’s buried. Lincoln dreamed about Willie after he died. I’m determined to run this dream thing to ground.”

I looked at the books lying jumbled on the shelves under the African violets. Broun must have been at them again after he straightened them up. There was a biography of Lincoln lying open on top. I rescued a Freeman from the mess and then put it down again.

I wondered what Annie was doing. I hoped she had gotten out of her wet clothes and taken a hot bath, had something to eat, gone to bed, but I had an image of her standing, like myself, looking out at the snow, still in her gray coat, dripping all over the carpet like I was, and beginning to shiver.

I picked up the biography of Lincoln and went up to the study to put it away. The phone rang.

“I want you to stay away from Annie,” Richard said.

“Are you asking me as her doctor or her boyfriend?”

“I’m not asking you at all. I’m telling you. Stay away from her. You had no business taking her out to Arlington.”

“She asked me to drive her out,” I said. “She told me she asked you to take her, and you refused. So I figure you had your chance.”