Lincoln’s Dreams

“You still may have some Thorazine in your system.”

“I don’t see how,” she said. “Between you and the waitress I’ve drunk enough coffee today to get anything out of my system. You don’t have to worry about the Thorazine.”

“Okay,” I said, picking up the check. “Then I won’t.”

She stood up and looked across at the inn as if she were afraid of it. “Now all we have to worry about is the dreams.”

I went back to the table to leave the tip. Her paper napkin was lying on the seat of the booth. She had shredded it into tiny pieces.

When we got back to the room, I said, “I thought I’d read galleys in here for a while.” I pulled a green chair over near the foot of the bed, and went to my room to get the galleys, taking a while to gather up Broun’s copyedited manuscript and a couple of blue pencils so Annie could get ready for bed, and whistling the whole time so she’d know I was there.

When I came back in, she was already in bed, in a long-sleeved white nightgown, sitting up against the pillows, her hands clenched together.

“Is that Broun’s book about Antietam?” Annie asked.

“More or less,” I said. “He keeps making changes. That’s why I need to get these done before he comes back from California, so he’ll quit fooling with it.”

“What do you have to do with them?”

“Read them over. Look for mistakes, typos, missing lines, punctuation, that kind of thing.” I moved the chair closer to the bed so I could prop my feet on the end of it.

“Can I help?” She said it calmly enough, but the knuckles of her clenched hands were white. “Please. I don’t want to just sit here and wait to go to sleep.”

I put the galleys down. “Look, I don’t have to work on these right now. We could watch some TV or something.”

“Really, I’d like to help with the galleys. I think reading would take my mind off the dreams. Do we take different parts or do we read it out loud to each other?”

“Annie, I just don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Because it’s about Antietam?”

Because it’s about Lee’s bandaged hands and a horse with its legs shot off and dead soldiers everywhere. “Yes.”

“You read those out loud, don’t you?” she said. “That’s exactly the reason I should help you. I can see if Broun made any mistakes. After all, I was there.”

There was nothing I could say to that. I handed her the galleys and a blue proofreader’s pencil. “I’ll read from the copyedited manuscript and you follow along to make sure everything’s there and they haven’t left out a line. You can check for typos, too. Just mark an X in the margin, and I’ll go back and put in the proofreader’s marks.” I handed her a pencil and put my feet up on the footboard and began to read:

“What time is it, do you reckon?” Ben said. They were crouched in a cornfield a little behind the sunken road where all the fighting was. They had fired over the heads of the men in the road until they ran out of cartridges and then had begun working their way backwards between the rows of shredded corn, taking rifles away from dead and wounded men and firing them. It seemed like they had been doing it for hours, but there was so much smoke Ben couldn’t even see the sun. He wondered if maybe they had been here all day and the sun had gone down.

“It ain’t noon yet,” Malachi said. He had his hand under a soldier whose left shoulder had been shot off and who was lying face down in the broken corn stalks. He had yellow hair. His arm was lying on the ground beside him, still holding on to his Springfield. There was a scrap of cloth pinned to his sleeve with a stick. Ben put down his rifle and unpinned the cloth. It was a handkerchief.

Malachi turned him over and rummaged in his pockets. It was Toby.

“Come on,” Malachi said. “Looks like he ran out of minnies, too before they got him.” He thrust Ben’s rifle at him and yanked him backwards. “Listen. They’re bringing the guns up,” Malachi said, and Ben could feel the rough dirt shake under his feet.

“I have to…” Ben said and started forward again.

Malachi stood up and grabbed him by the back of his shirt. “What in tarnation do you think you’re doin’? ”

He showed the handkerchief to Malachi. “I gotta pin this back on Toby, How will they know who he is? How will his kin know what happened to him? ”

“They’ll have a right good idea, but they won’t find out from that,” he said, and jerked his finger at the handkerchief Ben looked at it. It was covered with soot from the powder so badly he couldn’t even make the letters out, “Now come on! What the hell you doin now? ”

“I know him,” Ben said, scrabbling in his pockets. “I know where he’s from. Do you got some paper? ”

A bullet kit Toby’s arm and gouged out another red hole, “Come on,” Malachi shouted, “or that gal back home’s gonna be findin’ out about you.” He took hold of Ben’s coat and yanked him back through the corn till they couldn’t see Toby anymore.

After a while the shooting let up a little and Malachi said, “Me, I stick my pertinents in my boots. ”

“They can shoot you in the foot, too,” Ben said.

“They can,” Malachi said, “but most likely you won’t get kilt straight off and you kin tell ’em who you are before you die. ”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We had no business reading that. ”

She was asleep. I took the galleys back from her and put in the proofreader’s marks till I began to feel sleepy myself, and then went and looked out the window a while at the Rappahannock. Union troops had camped on the far side of the river, no more than half a mile from here, their campfires hidden by the fog along the river, waiting for the battle to start. Everyone who had written about the Civil War, generals, platoon historians, journalists, said the waiting was the worst part. Once you were in the battle, they said, it wasn’t so bad. You did what you had to do without even thinking about it, but beforehand, waiting for the fog to lift and the signal to be given, was almost unbearable.

“It’s so cold,” Annie said. She sat up and tugged at the blankets with both hands, trying to pull them free of the foot of the bed.

“I’ll get a blanket,” I said, and then realized she was still asleep. She yanked hard on the coverlet and it came free.

“Get Hill up here,” she said, wrapping the flounced muslin around her shoulders and holding it together with one hand at her neck, as if it were a cape. “I want him to see this.” Her cheeks were flushed almost red. I wondered if she would be feverish if I touched her.

She let go of the coverlet and leaned forward as if looking at something. The coverlet slipped off her shoulders. “Bring me a lantern,” she said, and fumbled with the satin edge of the blanket.

I wondered if I should try to wake her up. She was breathing fast and shallowly, and her cheeks were as red as fire. She clutched the edge of the blanket in a desperate pantomime of something.

I moved forward to take the blanket away from her before she tore it, and as I did she looked directly at me with the unseeing gaze of the sleeping, and let go of it.

“Annie?” I said softly, and she sighed and lay down. The coverlet was bunched behind her neck, and her head was at an awkward angle, and I gently eased the coverlet out from under and pulled the blanket up over her shoulders.

“I had a dream,” Annie said. She was looking at me and this time she saw me. Her cheeks were still flushed, though not as red as they had been.

“I know,’ I said. I hung the coverlet over the end of the bed and sat down beside her. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

She sat up, tucking the pillow up against the headboard and pulling the muslin coverlet up over her bent knees. “I was standing on the porch of my house at night, looking down at the lawn. It was winter, I think, because it was cold, but there wasn’t any snow, and the house was different. It was on a steep hill, and the lawn was a long