Lincoln’s Dreams

CHAPTER EIGHT

Lee and Traveller were well matched. If Lee demanded more stamina and spirit than the average horse could give, Traveller had too much stamina and spirit for the average rider. He chafed at being reined in, had to be exercised strenuously, and had an uncomfortable, high trot. When Rob Lee had to ride him down to Fredericksburg for his father in 1862, he complained, “I think I am safe in saying that I could have walked the distance with much less discomfort and fatigue.”

It took me almost an hour to get her back to bed and sleeping more or less peacefully. I had tried to wake her up, even though I had read someplace that you weren’t supposed to wake sleepwalkers—or maybe that was one of Richard’s theories—but I couldn’t.

“Annie!” I said, and took hold of her hands. They were hot. “Wake up, Annie!”

“Is he dead?” she said, the tears running down her face and under her chin.

Is he dead? Who? General Cobb? He had died at Fredericksburg, but I wasn’t convinced we were still there. We could be anywhere. Armistead and Garnett had died at Gettysburg, A. P. Hill at Petersburg two weeks before the surrender. It could even be Lincoln.

“Who, Annie?”

Her nose was running from all the tears, but she didn’t make any effort to wipe it. I led her gently by the hand into the bathroom and got a Kleenex. “Tell me what’s happening,” I said gently and wiped her reddened nose. “Can you tell me, Annie?”

“My house is on fire.”

I dabbed clumsily at her cheeks with the wadded-up Kleenex. “What does the house look like, Annie?” I asked, and wiped her nose again.

She stared at our reflections in the mirror. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

I walked her back to her own bed and covered her up. She had stopped crying, but her lashes were matted with tears. The Kleenex was a sodden wad, but I wiped her nose again with it and tucked her in.

I stood beside the bed for a while, thinking she would wake up, but she didn’t. I reached for Freeman on the floor next to the green chair and tried to find a burning house. During the battle of Antietam, Longstreet had helped some women and children get their belongings out of a burning house in sharpsburg, but Lee hadn’t been there. In the weeks before the battle of Fredericksburg, most of the town had been burned down, but no one had been killed except for seventeen thousand soldiers.

“I had another dream,” Annie said, without any trace of tears in her voice. She sat up in the bed. “My house was on fire.” She shook her head as if to contradict what she was saying. “It was the same house as in the other dreams, but it wasn’t my house, and it wasn’t Arlington.”

“Whose house was it?”

“I don’t know. We were standing under the apple tree watching it burn, and a rider handed me a message. I couldn’t open it because I was wearing gloves, so I handed it to somebody who was standing beside me. It was the clerk here at the inn. He opened the message with one hand. There was something wrong with his other arm. When he opened the message, I saw it was a box of candles.”

I shut Freeman. I knew whose house was on fire now. “One of Lee’s aides risked his life to bring Lee a box of candles because he was having trouble reading the dispatches by the light of the campfire,” I said. “It’s the Chancellor house that’s on fire. We’re at Chancellorsville.”

“It isn’t a box of candles, though,” Annie said, looking at me the way she had looked at her own reflection in the mirror. “It’s a message.”

“The message is about Stonewall Jackson,” I said. “Lee’s right-hand man. He was injured at the battle of Chancellorsville. He had his arm amputated.”

“I sent a message back to Jackson, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” I said. I knew what was in that message, too. “Give Jackson my affectionate regards,” Lee had written. “Tell him to make haste and get well and come back to me as soon as he can. He has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right.”

Annie leaned back against the pillows, rubbing her wrist as if it hurt. “But he’s not going to get well, is he? He’s going to die.”

“Yes,” I said.

She lay down immediately, docilely, as if she were a child who had promised to go to sleep after a bedtime story, and I went back into my room and got a blanket and brought it into Annie’s room so I could spend the night in the green chair.

Jackson’s doctors had predicted a speedy recovery, but he developed pneumonia and died nine days later. Toward the end he was delirious much of the time. “Order A. P. Hill to prepare for action!” Jackson had said once. Lee had called out for Hill, too, when he lay dying of a heart attack seven years later. “Tell Hill he must come up!” he had said clearly. I wondered if they had dreamed of the same battle and which one it was, and if Annie was doomed to dream it, too.

At five I gave up trying to sleep and went into my room and read galleys, leaving the door open in case Annie woke up again. Ben and Malachi spent the rest of the morning and most of a chapter trying to find their regiment, and Robert E. Lee found his son Rob. He was standing on a little knoll by the road when Rob’s artillery unit came straggling past with the only gun they had left. They were filthy and exhausted, and Rob stopped in front of his father and said, “General, are you going to send us in again?”

Robert E. Lee had his arm in a sling. A courier was holding Traveller because Lee’s hands were too swollen for him to hang on to the reins, and all around them cornfields and woods were on fire, and Antietam Creek ran a rusty red.

“Yes, my son,” Lee said. “You all must do what you can to help drive these people back.” He told them to take the best horses and sent them back into battle.

I had left Freeman on Annie’s bed. I went in to get it. She was asleep on her stomach, one hand under her cheek, the other flung out across the book. I eased the book gently out from under her, and then went on sitting there, as if my presence could somehow protect her from the dreams.

She had made me promise to help her have the dreams. Well, I was helping, all right. She’d already had more dreams since she met me than she had ever had with Richard, drugs or no drugs, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do for her while she was having them. I couldn’t even wake her up.

Sitting here wasn’t helping her either. I needed to be awake and alert when she had the next dream, and I hadn’t had any real sleep since we got to Fredericksburg. But I didn’t want to get up and go in to bed. I don’t know what I wanted. Maybe for Annie to wake up, to open her blue-gray eyes and look at me. Not at smoke and horses and fallen boys, but at me. To look at me and smile and say sleepily, “You don’t have to stay here with me,” so I could say, “I want to.” And what did I want her to say to that? “I’m glad you’re here. I never have the dreams when you’re here”?

Annie murmured something and turned her face ever so slightly against the pillow. There weren’t any traces of tears left, though her nose was still red. Her hair had stuck to her cheek when the tears dried, and I brushed it back off her face. Her cheek felt warm to the touch. I laid my hand against it.

She frowned as if she were disturbed. I took my hand away. Her face softened at once. She sighed and turned onto her side, pulling her knees up, drawing into herself. Her breathing steadied.

I stood up, carefully, so as not to disturb her, and took Freeman into the other room and looked up Lee’s insomnia. He had had trouble sleeping throughout the war. “I fear I shall not sleep for thinking of the poor men,” he had written to his wife a week after Antietam. If he was ever able to get to sleep before midnight, his aides were under strict orders not to wake him up unless it was absolutely necessary. He had told them that to him one hour’s sleep before midnight was worth two hours’ after that time.

I fell asleep with the volume of Freeman still open on my chest and slept till after noon, and even though my sleep hadn’t come before midnight, it was still worth its weight in gold. I felt better than I had since before the trip to West Virginia, and able to think clearly for the first time about this whole mess. I had promised I would help Annie have the dreams. There was only one way to do that, and that was to figure out what was causing them.

I checked on Annie, who was still asleep. I shaved and got dressed, took a sheet of Fredericksburg Inn stationery out of the chiffonier, and started making a list of the dreams. Arlington first, and then Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville. The Lees had evacuated Arlington in May of 1861. I wasn’t sure of the date of the letter from Markie Williams that told what had happened to Tom Tita the cat, but it was sometime in 1861. Antietam was September 1862, Fredericksburg December of the same year, and Chancellorsville May of 1863. That meant the dreams were in chronological order, though they were telescoped in some way. Annie had dreamed almost a year of the war in one week, though she had dreamed about Arlington for over a year, with it only gradually becoming clearer. And there were important battles during that period of time that Annie hadn’t dreamed about at all.

I started another list on a second sheet of stationery, writing the dates of the dreams in one column and the drugs she had been taking when she had the dreams in a second column. The drugs had some connection with the dreams, though I didn’t know what it was. They had not suppressed REM sleep or kept her from dreaming at all, even though they were supposed to.

It was when Annie was on the Elavil that her dreams had suddenly become clearer, and the phenobarbital her family doctor had had her on apparently hadn’t worked at all to stop the Arlington dream. Thorazine had stopped the dreams, but she hadn’t had the storm of dreams Dr. Stone had predicted when she stopped taking it, and none of the dreams seemed to have any particular correlation with the drugs she was or wasn’t taking, so maybe there wasn’t a connection after all, and the timing of the dreams had more to do with when Lee managed to get a few hours of sleep than with the tranquilizers.

Annie was awake. I could hear her moving around, I folded up the lists and put them into my jeans pocket. I knocked on the half-open door and she opened it the rest of the way immediately.

“Have you been up forever?” she said, looking at her watch. She looked tired in spite of all the sleep. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw how late it was.”

“I could. I woke up starving to death. It’s a good thing they serve breakfast all day at the coffee shop. What say we go get some?” I pulled on my coat. “I want to go to the library this afternoon. I think I’ve got an idea of what’s causing the dreams.”

I told her about Lee’s insomnia at breakfast, and then we walked down to the library. I bought a notebook at the convenience store on the way. “I should probably be doing research on Lincoln’s dreams, too, in case the vet doesn’t find anything out,” I said.

“I’ll do that for you,” Annie said. “What do you want me to look for?”

“Anything on his acromegaly, which won’t be in the indexes because nobody knew what he had. Any references to his having headaches or bouts of depression. And anything you can find out about Willie’s death.”

“Willie. That was his son that died during the war?” she asked.

I nodded, “Yeah. He was Lincoln’s favorite child. Lincoln could hardly stand it after he died.”

We went into the library and looked around for the biographies. I hadn’t paid much attention to the library when I’d come here to look up Thorazine the day before yesterday, except to notice that it had been a school before it was a library, one of those square three-story buildings built in the early 1900s.

It could have been beautiful, with its high, sashed windows and oiled wooden floors, but it seemed almost determinedly drab. The hardwood floors had been covered with speckled tile and a carpet that looked like the Union army had marched over it. Stiff, patched shades had been pulled down over the windows so that the only light of any use was the sharp fluorescent light from tubes in the ceiling.

I’d spent a lot of time in libraries, and I usually preferred the old-fashioned ones with their dusty stacks to the modern plastic-and-plants “multimedia resource centers,” but I would have been glad to see a little updating in here.

The room the biographies were in was off to the side and up a few steps, an old classroom probably, though the blackboards had been replaced by bookshelves. I put my notebook down on the scratched wooden table and went to see what they had in the Ls. There were exactly two books on Lincoln: Thomas’s Abraham Lincoln and an ancient leather-bound book by someone whose name I didn’t even recognize.

I handed them to Annie. “We’re in the South now. We’re lucky they’ve got any books on him at all.”

She took the books back to the table, and I got down on all fours to see what they had on Lee. It might have been the South, but I didn’t do much better. I went out to the desk, asked where the history section was, and got directed to a little alcove located a half-flight up from the reference section where I had found the drug compendium.

Since I was already there and I knew where Annie was, I took the opportunity to look up phenobarbital in the dated drug compendium. It said about what I expected it to, that it was a tranquilizer and worked by suppressing REM sleep. Barbiturates were addictive, especially when used over a long period of time, and maybe that was why Richard had been so upset about Annie’s family doctor prescribing it, but phenobarbital was comparatively mild, and it didn’t have nearly the number of contraindications and warnings that Elavil had had, let alone Thorazine.

I went up into the alcove. It was labeled “Virginiana,” and was about as sparse as the biographies lad been, which didn’t make any sense. Fredericksburg was a major battle, and we were within shooting distance of Spotsylvania, Chancellorsville, and the Wilderness. This should be a main source library for those battles, at least, and, since researchers would inevitably come here, for the rest of the Civil War as well.

I gathered up what I could find on the three battles Annie had dreamed so far and took them back up to the biography room. The librarian, a sharpish-looking woman who would have been at home teaching school there in the old ruler-rapping days, gave me a suspicious glance but made no attempt to stop me.

Annie had the books open and had torn some pages out of my notebook to take notes on. She looked up and smiled when I came in and then bent back over the book, her light hair swinging forward across her cheeks. I sat down opposite her and tried to find out Lee’s sleeping habits.

Lee’s “precious hours” of sleep between nine and midnight couldn’t account for the dreams Annie had had late at night or during the day, but she had said that she’d started having those only after she began staying awake to avoid the dreams. And maybe Lee had tried to grab a few hours here and there to compensate for his sleepless nights.

Lee had “slept little” the night before Antietam, and, according to General Walker, who had seen him sitting on Traveller in midstream when he took his division across, Lee had been there all night, supervising the retreat across the Potomac.

On the night before Fredericksburg, that same night that the aurora borealis lit up the sky and the Union messenger stumbled into Confederate lines, Lee had kept his staff up working all night. At dawn he had ridden out to inspect the pits dug by the work parties overnight. None of the books mentioned whether Lee had gotten some rest after the battle was over, though it was obvious from these accounts that he must have been ready to collapse with fatigue.

Dr. Stone had said that when the body was deprived of REM sleep, it made it up with a vengeance. Was that what the dreams were? Had Lee, worn out from the strain of battle and a lack of sleep, experienced a storm of dreams?

I couldn’t find the same clear-cut pattern with Chancellorsville. Jackson had been wounded on May second, and as soon as Lee found out about it, he wrote him, “I would I were wounded in your stead.” The message of the amputation of his arm arrived on the night of the fourth. There was no mention of Lee’s having insomnia that night, though it was hard to imagine him getting a good night’s sleep after news like that. On the fifth, word came that Jackson was recovering, and he definitely slept well that night, under a fly-tent at Fairview.

On the morning of the seventh, Jackson began to get worse, and by afternoon he was lost in delirious dreams, calling out for A. P. Hill and telling the infantry to move up. “Do your duty,” he told the doctor who was dosing him with mercury and opium. “Prepare for action.” On Sunday he said clearly, out of the final dream of some battle. “Let us cross over the river and rest under the trees,” and died.

Annie closed both the Lincoln books. “Would they have anything else on Lincoln?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “They might have something in the reference section. It’s downstairs.”

She nodded and left, taking her notes with her.

I started through the biographies of Lee, wishing I had brought Freeman with me. The first book was arranged so hopelessly I never even found Chancellorsville, let alone any references to Lee’s insomnia, but the second one, so old the pages were edged in gilt, and written in indecipherably flowery language, said, “When Lee received the dreadful news that the doctors’ ministrations were to no avail and that Jackson was sinking fast, he turned to that last, best source of hope in times of trouble. All night he prayed fervently on his knees for Jackson’s recovery.”

He had been up all one night praying and probably had slept badly three or four nights before that because of worrying about Jackson. There was definitely a pattern. During each of the events Annie had dreamed about, Lee had gone without sleep for several days in a row. Maybe when he did finally sleep, he experienced the storm of dreams that Dr. Stone had described. Dr. Stone had called them powerful, frightening dreams. Could they have been powerful enough to have blasted their way across a hundred years to Annie? And if they had, why was she having them one right after the other? Jackson had died five months after the battle of Fredericksburg.

I looked at my watch. It was four-thirty. I piled the books up and took them back downstairs. Annie was in the reference section with a large book spread open in front of her. They must have had something alter all. I went up into the alcove and put the books back on the shelves where they belonged so they would be there if I needed them again and not on a cart guarded by that fierce-looking librarian, and found a book on Gettysburg.

It weighed a ton. I didn’t try to carry it back up to the biographies room or even get it up onto a table. I just laid it open on the floor and bent over it, trying to see if the same pattern of lack of sleep persisted with Gettysburg. Gettysburg was the next Dig battle after Chancellorsville, but Annie wasn’t dreaming all the battles. I needed to see if the same conditions for dreaming had occurred during that battle.

There was a full page of references to Lee in the index. I tried looking them up, keeping one hand in the index page and going down the two-column pages with a finger of my other hand, hoping Lee’s name or the word sleep would jump out at me. At five-fifteen I gave up. It was in there, every word ever written about Gettysburg had to be in there, which was the whole problem. There was too much stuff to sort through, the way the vet’s bay had had too many symptoms. Lee’s insomnia was lost in the sheer volume of facts. I hefted the book back onto its shelf and went to look for Annie.

She wasn’t in the magazine section. I looked along the stacks and found her finally back in the biographies room. She had let up one of the shades and was looking out the window in the direction of the Rappahannock.

“I think I’ve figured out what’s causing the dreams,” I said.

She turned around. She looked tired, as if she had been up all night instead of a few hours.

“I think you were right when you said you were helping Lee sleep,” I said. “I think that may be exactly what you’re doing.”

We went out the arched green doors and down the cement steps. It must have rained while we were inside because the library’s asphalt parking lot was covered with puddles, but the sky was as clear as when we went inside, paling to lavender with the evening. The air smelled like apple blossoms.

“You said he couldn’t sleep,” I said. “You were right. He apparently suffered from insomnia through the whole war, and during the battles he didn’t sleep at all.” I explained my theory to her as we walked back to the inn, telling her about Dr. Stone’s storm of dreams and the pattern I’d discovered in her dreams.

“I still think the drugs you took are somehow connected to all this, but I haven’t figured out how yet,” I said. “You said your family doctor put you on phenobarbital. Did you notice any change in the dreams while you were on it?”

“No,” Annie said, looking in the direction of the inn two blocks away. The black cat was coming out to meet us, highstepping its way along the wet sidewalk.

“How long were you on the phenobarbital?” I asked.

The cat meowed a greeting that sounded like a complaint. Annie knelt to pick it up. “Did you know that when Willie Lincoln had pneumonia he kept calling for the boy across the street?” she said. “His name was Bud Taft. He came and held Willie’s hand and sat with him the whole time, did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“One night while Bud was with Willie, Lincoln came in and said, ‘Better go to bed. Bud,’ and Bud said, ‘If I go, he will call for me.’”

The cat struggled to be let down. Annie put it back on the sidewalk, and it stalked off, offended. Half a block away, it sat down on the sidewalk and began to lick its white paws.

“You didn’t happen to find out where Willie Lincoln was buried, did you?” I said.

“I thought he was buried at Arlington.”

“Nope. And I don’t know where he was buried.”

Annie looked at the cat. “Maybe nobody knows,” she said.

When we came up even with the cat, it stood up and walked alongside us all the way back to the inn.