Lincoln’s Dreams

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Lee only lasted two weeks after the rainy afternoon in Grace Church. For most of that time he lay in silence or dozed. Outside it rained, and the rivers around Lexington rose till it was impossible for Rob to make it to his bedside. For several nights the aurora borealis lit up the sky, as it had at Fredericksburg. Lee talked very little though he sometimes muttered in his dreams, but when the doctor told him, “You must make haste to get well; Traveller has been standing so long in the stable that he needs exercise,” he only shook his head, unable to speak.

He died on the twelfth of October, saying, “Strike the tent,” and then moving off to some old battle, leaving Traveller behind. Traveller walked in the funeral procession, his head bent, his saddle and bridle covered with black crepe. Then he was taken home to his stable to wait out the end. Did he dream of Lee? I wonder. Do horses dream?

When I got home, Broun was still sitting on the loveseat in the solarium. The Siamese had jumped up on his lap, and he had set the answering machine down on the loveseat beside him so he could pet the cat.

He stood up as soon as I came in, dumping the cat on the floor to come and put his arm around my shoulders. He didn’t ask me what had happened, and because he didn’t, because he didn’t say, “How could you let her go like that? She’s sick. She needs a doctor,” I told him I had taken her to the Metro station, and then I told him everything else.

He didn’t say, “They’re only dreams,” or tell me any of the theories he had picked up in California. He only said quietly, “It was a terrible war, the Civil War. So many young people… I had no business going to California. Out on a wild goose chase after Lincoln’s dreams when I should have been here.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said, and went up to bed even though it was still early afternoon, and slept for two days. When I woke up, an electrician was there, fixing the wires on the answering machine, putting it back in the wall.

“In case she calls,” Broun said.

I took the galleys up to New York. When I got back, we started the Lincoln’s dreams novel. I did Broun’s legwork for him, drove him places, looked up obscure facts that didn’t matter to anyone, and dreamed of Annie.

While we were in Fredericksburg, I had not had any dreams at all, as if Annie were dreaming enough for both of us, but now I dreamed nearly every night, and in the dreams Annie was fine. I dreamed that she had left a message on the answering machine. “I’m fine,” she said. “I didn’t want you to worry.”

“Where are you?” I asked, even though I knew it was only a message, that she wasn’t really there. I had never been able to break myself of the habit of replying to people who were not there, and if I could not, how did I think Annie could, Lee whispering to her night after night, telling her his dreams?

“I’m fine, Jeff,” she told me in the dream. “They’re taking good care of me.” It was not a message. It was really her on the phone, and she was fine, fine. She had gone home to that house with the wide porch and the apple tree and when she got there she had gone to see the doctor. “I thought you were afraid they’d stop the dreams,” I said into the phone.

“I was, but then I thought about what you said about Tom Tita. What good would it have done for me to follow Lee through the Civil War? I would just have gotten myself killed. My first loyalty was to myself.”

“That was what you meant in the message,” I said, clutching the receiver. “That was what you meant when you wrote Tom Tita’s name.”

“Of course,” she said. “What did you think the message meant?”

“That you were locked in. That you couldn’t get out.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “They’re taking good care of me.”

We worked on the book all summer. In the fall, The Duty Bound came out, and we went to New York to promote the book. “I’m glad to see Broun looking so well,” his agent told me at the McLaws and Herndon reception. “I was afraid all that running around in California would be too much for him, but he looks wonderful. I also can’t tell you how relieved I am to see that book in print,” she said, jabbing her finger at a stand-up display card of The Duty Bound. “Did you know he called me after the galleys were in and wanted to change the ending? He wanted to have Ben and Nelly get married. Can you believe that?”

“When did he do that?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. After you brought the galleys up. Luckily, he called me first and not McLaws and Herndon. I managed to convince him it wouldn’t work at all.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Well, I mean, it was obvious from the very beginning she was in love with that boy who died, what was his name?”

We were in New York till after Christmas, doing autograph signings and talk shows. On the day we got home, while I was next door getting the Siamese cat back from Broun’s neighbor, Broun had a heart attack. It was very small. There was hardly any damage. He was only in the hospital a week, and he seemed more upset about the fact that a battle-ax of a nurse had shaved his beard off than he did about the heart attack.

“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.

“I know,” I said.

“You look as bad as he does,” he said. “How are you sleeping?”

“I’m not,” I said. If I slept I dreamed about Annie. She was standing on the porch of Arlington with her arms around my neck, crying, and I kept saying over and over, “I don’t want you to leave.”

“Would you like me to prescribe something for you? To help you sleep?”

“What did you have in mind? Thorazine?”

He didn’t get the joke. He pulled out a prescription pad. “Who’s your regular doctor?”

“I don’t have one. Do you want my family doctor? He’s in Connecticut.”

“I don’t like to prescribe without seeing a patient’s records.” He wrote busily on the prescription pad. “I’ll give you something mild for now and then wait till I have your records to put you on anything stronger. You don’t have any health problems I should know about, do you? Diabetes, heart condition?”

“No.” I told him my doctor’s name. “How long will it take to get the records?”

“Depends. If they’re computerized, we’ll have them in a few days. If not, it could take several weeks. Why? Are you having that much trouble sleeping?”

“No,” I said and pocketed the prescription with out looking at it. But Annie had been having trouble sleeping. She had been having so much trouble sleeping that Richard had put her on Elavil right away. He hadn’t done an EKG. He had told me in that phone message that the EKG was just back from the lab, but EKGs didn’t have to go to the lab. Broun’s doctors read his as they came off the machine. He had said Annie’s records showed a functional heart murmur, but how could they when it took two weeks to a month to get the records? Annie had told me he put her on Elavil right away. Richard hadn’t done an EKG, and he hadn’t waited for the records from her family doctor. The Elavil had made the dreams worse, but Richard hadn’t taken her off the Elavil then. He had taken her off of it when her records came, when he saw she had a minor heart condition and he had had no business putting her on Elavil in the first place.

He had panicked and called me, only I wasn’t there. I was in West Virginia. What if I had been there? Would he have told me the truth, that he had been so frantic with worry that he had made a terrible mistake, that when he had seen the dreams and what they did to Annie, all he could think about was stopping them and how the hell could he wait for the family doctor’s records when they might take a month to get there? Or would he have used his Good Shrink voice on me even then?

Why had he put her on the Thorazine? To try to stop the dreams? Thorazine could have stopped a train, and it wasn’t contraindicated. (Now: Sudden death apparently due to cardiac arrest, has been reported, but there is not sufficient evidence to establish a relationship between such deaths and the administration of the drug.) Or did he give it to her to keep her from going back to the Institute, from telling Dr. Stone he’d given her a medicine that was explicitly contraindicated for heart patients? Why didn’t Longstreet send his troops up at Pickett’s Charge?

Lee never gave any indication after the war that he considered Longstreet’s actions at Gettysburg as anything more than “the error of a good soldier.” But after the battle, when Colonel Venable said bitterly, “I heard you direct General Longstreet to send Hood’s division up,” Lee had blamed him. And I blamed Richard. I’m trying to do my duty as a doctor. I have your best interests at heart.

I took the prescription out of my pocket and looked at it. Broun’s doctor had written a prescription for Elavil.

In July Broun finally let his doctor perform the bypass he had been resisting. He came through it fine, jubilant because nobody had shaved his beard off while he was under the anesthetic, but he didn’t show any interest in working on the Lincoln book.

He sent me to Springfield, complaining that he couldn’t go any farther with the book till he knew where Willie Lincoln had been buried. I spent nearly a month there trying to find out, and then came back and started through the grave registries of the D.C. cemeteries. I had had the prescription for the Elavil filled while I was in Springfield. It stopped the dreams completely, repressing REM sleep the way it was supposed to.

Broun still wasn’t doing any work on the book, even though Willie Lincoln’s burial site was a fact he could add after he got it. He had me do a lot of research he never even bothered to look at, and in the fall he started having chest pains again.

In October he insisted I take him out to the Lincoln Memorial. “I don’t think this is a good idea,” I said. “It has steps. You know you’re supposed to take it easy on steps.”

He climbed the steps, shaking off my assistance, and went into the memorial to look at the statue of Lincoln. “You know what theory nobody came up with in all that traipsing around California?” he said, looking at Lincoln sitting in the big marble chair with his too-big ears and wide nose and his too-long legs, his too-large hands resting on the marble armrests. “That he was lying about the dreams.”

“Lying?” I said.

“He loved the Union,” he said. “He would have done anything he could to save it, even if it meant trumping up some dream about a boat and a shadowy shore to keep the Cabinet off his back.” His words echoed in the cold room. “He would have sacrificed his own son to save his precious Union.”

“He didn’t sacrifice Willie,” I said. “He loved Willie. He would never have done anything to hurt him. Willie died of typhoid.”

“He should have been home taking care of him instead of off gallivanting around some battlefield,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” I said. “He wasn’t off gallivanting. He was right there by Willie’s side the whole time.”

“I never should have gone to California,” Broun said, still looking at Lincoln. “I should have stayed home.”

“It isn’t your fault,” I said.

Broun let me help him back down the stairs. At the bottom he turned and looked back up at the memorial. “It’s been over a year, hasn’t it?”

“A year and a half,” I said.

I was almost out of the Elavil. I called Broun’s doctor and asked him if I could refill the prescription. “Is it helping you sleep?” he asked me. “You’re not having any side effects, are you?”

“No,” I said.

“Your records are here. I want to check them, and then if everything’s okay I’ll call it in for you. By the way, is Broun still interested in Lincoln’s dreams?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, if he is, there’s a paper by a psychiatrist he might be interested in, a Dr. Madison. He has a theory that you can dream yourself into ulcers or asthma—”

“Or a heart attack?”

“Yeah. Interesting theory.” He read me the title of the paper and the journal he’d read it in. “It says here Dr. Madison’s degree is from Duke University. You went to Duke, didn’t you? Maybe you know him. Richard Madison?”

Longstreet became quite successful after the war, in spite of Southern criticism that the failure of Pickett’s Charge had been his fault, becoming president of a cotton factory and then an ambassador to Turkey. He wrote articles and a book, and in them he defended his actions at Gettysburg until I think finally he convinced even himself that he had done the right thing and was not to blame for anything that had happened.

“No,” I said. “I don’t know him.” I started taking the Elavil two at a time.

After that trip to the Lincoln Memorial, Broun had put the Lincoln book aside, boxing up all the research and the rough draft and having me carry it up to the attic for him. I spent most of my time at the library. I was still trying to find out where Willie Lincoln was buried, even though Broun wasn’t interested anymore. I checked all the grave registries in the towns around Washington and even called Arlington, thinking maybe Commander Meigs had buried Willie in the front lawn of Lee’s house.

I ran out of Elavil again, but I didn’t call the doctor back. I didn’t dream very much, and when I did, Annie wasn’t in the dreams. I dreamed of a place I’d never seen before, a place with green hills and white fences. For some reason, I thought it was in West Virginia.

In February I found out what had happened to Willie Lincoln. He had been buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, in a vault belonging to William Thomas Carroll, a clerk of the Supreme Court and a friend of the Lincolns.

The information was in a biography of Mary Todd Lincoln at the branch library, and when I read it, I slammed the book shut, grabbed it up, and went running out. Alarms clanged, and Kate ran out on the steps and shouted after me, “Jeff, are you all right?” I didn’t answer her. I leaped in the car and went tearing out to the cemetery.

The narrow roads between the graves were blocked with snow so deep most of the gravestones were buried, but I got out of the car and walked through the snow to the tomb and looked at it, as if I thought Willie was still there, as if I thought, disturbed out of his sleep, he would tell me where Annie was and what had happened to her.

But he wasn’t there. He was in Springfield, lying beside his father. I had thought that finding his grave would tell me what had happened to Willie, but I already knew that, didn’t I? It was the same thing that had happened to all of them—Ben and Tom Tita and Little Hen. They had died in the war. Willie’s pony had been burned alive and Annie Lee had died of a fever, but they were Civil War dead, and they were all buried together at Fredericksburg, along with Stonewall Jackson’s arm, under a numbered granite square no larger than a scrap of paper. I knew what had happened to all of them except Annie. And Traveller. So I walked back through the snow and went home and sot out Freeman.

I knew that Traveller had outlived Lee because I remembered reading that he was part of Lee’s funeral procession, but there was no mention of him after that in the last chapter of Freeman and nothing at all about him in Davis or even Robert E. Lee, Jr.’s recollections of his father.

I went downstairs to the solarium and found Sanborn’s Robert E. Lee, I went back up to the study and sorted through the stacks of books Broun had piled on his desk and the leather chair, looking for any mention of Traveller. Pierson mentioned almost in passing that Traveller had been boarded out at a friend’s farm because Mrs. Lee was too ill to care for him. Lovesey’s Man and Horse said he had “lived on for two years, waiting faithfully for the master who would never come again.” Hinsdale said he was kept on at the stable Lee had built for him until he picked up a nail, contracted lockjaw, and had to be shot.

I looked at that for a while and then went back to the last chapter of Freeman, though I already knew everything there was to know: Traveller had had the misfortune to outlive the person he loved, he had waited for nearly two years, and where he had been those two years didn’t matter any more than where Willie Lincoln had spent those last three years of the war, and then he had died. Freeman couldn’t tell me any more than that, but I went back anyway, writing down the page numbers after “Traveller” in the index as if they were the Roll of Honor numbers on some soldier’s grave, because I couldn’t face the idea that Freeman, who had loved Lee enough to write four volumes about him, would have forgotten Traveller, and he hadn’t.

It was in one of the appendices in volume one. He wrote that Traveller had died of lockjaw and been buried on the grounds of Washington and Lee University. His bones had been disinterred by the Daughters of the Confederacy and put in the basement of the Lee Memorial Chapel. Near Lee’s tomb.

In March I took Broun to see his doctor, and he got a clean bill of health.

“He told me I could do anything I wanted, climb stairs, write a book,” he said on the way home. “I want to write a book about Robert E. Lee.” He waited to see what I would say.

“And Traveller,” I said.

“Of course Traveller.”

We started work on the new book. Broun sent me out to Arlington to take notes on the porch and the parlor and the attic where Tom Tita had been imprisoned. There was going to be a military funeral in the afternoon, and they had blocked off the drives. I had to park the car in the visitors’ parking lot and walk up the hill. It was a warm day, the first one in over two months, and the snow that had fallen in February was just now starting to melt. The water ran in rivers along the curving drives.

Custis Walk was blocked off, too. I had to cut across the grass to get to Arlington House. I made it as far as the grave. The workmen had trampled the snow down till you could see the grass in places. They had used a backhoe to dig the grave, heaping dirty snow at the sides, and it was melting, too, and running across the grass and the snow in muddy rivulets.

The workmen had gone off to eat lunch or smoke a cigarette. They had left a metal clipboard lying under a tree on the far side of the grave, with a piece of paper clipped to it. It would have the name of who the grave was for written on it, and I wanted to walk over to the tree and read it, but I was afraid that I would not be able to get back, that the ground would give way, and I would step on all their mangled bodies.

“It has something to do with Arlington and the unknown soldier and a message,” Annie had said, trying to understand the dreams. “I think he was trying to atone,” and I should have asked her, “How is he trying to atone?” instead of shouting at her. Because of course the dreams were an atonement.

He was trying to warn her. His daughter Annie had died, and he hadn’t been able to do anything to save her. He hadn’t been able to save any of them. Stonewall Jackson or the ragged soldiers he had to keep sending back into battle, or the Confederacy. But he could save Annie. She reminded him of his daughter, and she was twenty-three years old. He was trying to warn her.

The dreams were terrifying, full of images of death and dying. They were meant to frighten her, to make her go see a doctor before it was too late, a warning as clear, as easy to interpret as Lincoln’s dreams of himself in a coffin, only nobody saw it. Except Annie, and she wouldn’t listen.

“It’s the war,” Broun had said. “People do things like that in a war, sacrifice themselves, fall in love.” They had been together night after night, through battle after heartbreaking battle. She was bound to fall in love with him, wasn’t she? And then, even though she knew the dreams were a warning, even though the warnings got plainer and more terrifying, Lee willing even to dream Appomattox again, to dream his own death for her, to warn her, she couldn’t leave him.

She had stayed with him to the end, as she had promised, and when the snow melted a little more I would be able to see her body, face-down, her arm flung out, still holding on to her Springfield rifle. I leaned against the backhoe, unable to stand.

I could see the square white subway entrances looking like gravestones and beyond them, across the river, the square white tomb of the Lincoln Memorial. I thought about the statue inside, Lincoln sitting with his long legs planted in front of him and his hands on the arms of the chair, looking like a man who has lost a child.

Lincoln had gone out to the cemetery in Georgetown and had the vault opened twice, trying, I think, to convince himself that Willie was really dead, but it hadn’t helped. It hadn’t helped, and he couldn’t sleep, and his grief nearly drove him insane. Until finally, in Broun’s words, Willie’s face had come in dreams to comfort him. As Annie’s face had come to comfort me, though she was dead.

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.”