Lincoln’s Dreams

was bending over the tongue of the caisson, his arms swinging lazily back and forth.

“I allus hated horses,” Malachi said in a strong, clear voice that Ben didn’t have any trouble hearing. “Danged gray gelding bit me in the backside when I was a young ’un, and I never trusted them since. ”

Ben was still holding on to the reins. He stepped back and pulled on them, and the horse’s head moved a little. Its neck looked impossibly long, lying there on the ground, like he had stretched it with his pulling. Ben tried again.

“Dang horse throwed a shoe and I got off to look at his hoof. No way he’d let me pick it up to look at it, so I bend over to see if mebbe he’s split the hoof,” he said. A bubble of blood and mucus showed in his nose. He sniffed and went on talking. “He takes a piece out of my britches and what’s under ’em. I stood up to supper for two weeks. ”

Ben dropped the reins and knelt down beside Malachi. He worked his hands under the horse’s flank and tried to lift it up a little. “Can you ease yourself out a ways?” he asked.

“You are allus lookin’ behind you after a thing like that, but I never expected a durn horse to come at me from the side.” A larger bubble of blood came out of the corner of his mouth and trickled into his beard.

“Malachi?” Ben said, even though he knew he was dead. He stood up. The fighting had moved farther south, toward Sharpsburg. Ben could hear the individual guns easily now. He looked back down at Malachi. One of his boots was sticking out from under the horse’s tail, and the other one was half under its leg. Ben knelt down and pulled the boot off Malachi wasn’t wearing socks, and there was a blue-black blister on the heel. Ben turned the boot upside down. He set the boot down next to Malachi and started to pull the other one off.

“You there!” a man on a horse said. It was the same lieutenant who’d told them to help pull the horses back. He waved his sword at Ben. “Come away from there! What’s your regiment? ”

The boot came free, and Ben straightened up, holding it. “I was looking… ”

“You were looking to get a new pair of boots. Get back to your regiment before I have you shot for looting!” He waved the sword close to Ben’s middle.

Ben felt around the inside of the boot and pulled out a damp square of paper. “You got no call to talk to me thataway,” he said. “I was just trying to help.” He knelt down and tucked the paper in the pocket of Malachi’s shirt and started down the hill toward the sound of shooting.

In the original version Ben had never found out what happened to Malachi. He had simply dropped out of sight, like how many soldiers at Antietam and Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville? “Did he die?” I had asked Broun after reading the first draft.

“Die? Hell, no, an old vet like Malachi was too tough to die. He hightailed it to California after Gettysburg.”

Broun had rewritten the scene because he was furious with me, but what was he trying to communicate? Was he supposed to be Malachi, struggling with a recalcitrant research assistant who wouldn’t cooperate even when it was for his own good, or was he supposed to be Ben, who was only trying to help and who got threatened with being shot as a looter for his pains? Broun had been angry with me that afternoon, but he’d been worried, too. He had asked me that afternoon if I was Richard’s patient, if I was taking any medication. Maybe he had written this chapter to show me he was worried about me, that he only wanted to help.

I looked at my watch. It was eleven-thirty, eight-thirty in California, and God only knew what time it was in northern Virginia or Pennsylvania or wherever the hell Lee was tonight. Annie sighed in her sleep and turned over. I put the chain on the door and moved the chair over between it and the bed. I stood there awhile, watching her sleep, wishing I could help, and then went on reading.

Ben carried wounded soldiers off the field all afternoon. Ben’s Union brother made it out of the East Wood and away from the Sunken Road before he was hit in the side. He lay still for a while in the hot sun and then crawled under a haystack and passed out. Around two-thirty an artillery shell set the haystack on fire, and he was burned alive.

“They can’t possibly hold that position,” Annie said. She sat up and swung her feet over the side of the bed. “I told him…” She stood up.

I glanced at the door, even though I had just fastened the chain, and took a protective step toward it, but she sat down on the side of the bed and put her arms around the wooden poster at the head of the bed. “My fault,” she said, so softly it was almost a sigh.

I tried to sit down next to her, but she pulled away, so I sat in the green chair and leaned forward, my hands between my knees. “Annie!”

“I know! I know!” she said bitterly. She stood up again, one arm still wrapped around the bedpost. “Where is he?” she asked, and turned to look at someone behind her. “He was supposed to tell Hood to bring up his division.”

She took a stiff, sleepwalker’s step toward the door to my room. “Try to reform your men among the trees,” she said kindly, as if she were speaking to a child.

“Annie?” I said quietly, moving so I was between her and the door, wishing I had chained the outside door of my room, too. “I know where we are. It’s Pickett’s Charge. Longstreet didn’t send the reinforcements up.”

She looked straight at me. “Don’t be discouraged,” she said. There was no emotion in her voice at all, but the look on her face was the look she had had at Arlington, looking down the hill at the bodies on the lawn. “It was my fault this time. Form your ranks again when you get under cover.”

It went on for half an hour like that. Sometimes she reached down, her hand almost touching the floor, and I thought she must be helping lift up a soldier who had fallen. Then I remembered that Lee had been on horseback. He had ridden Traveller down from his command post to meet the survivors and send them back to the safety of the woods. He must be reaching down to rest his hand on a private’s shoulder, to give his soldiers some encouragement as they limped past. “My fault,” Annie said softly, over and over. “My fault.”

And I had wanted her to dream Gettysburg to prove my theory. “It’s not your fault,” I said.

I took her arm, gently, and led her back to the bed, and she sat down and put her arms around the post again. “Too bad,” she said despairingly. “Oh, too bad.”

She wouldn’t let go of the post even after she was awake. “I was under the apple tree watching the house,” she said calmly, but her arms were still wrapped around the turned wood. “Only this time it wasn’t an apple orchard. It was a forest.”

“The point of woods,” I said. “At Gettysburg.”

“I knew it wasn’t really an apple orchard and that they weren’t really apple trees even though there were green apples on them. It was summer. It was so hot it was like an oven. I was wearing my gray coat, and I kept thinking I should take it off, but I couldn’t because I had to tell all the soldiers who kept coming past to get under the trees. They were trying to get up over the railing onto the front porch and it wasn’t a railing, it was more like a wall, but they couldn’t and I couldn’t see why they couldn’t get onto the porch because of all the smoke and then they’d come back into the apple orchard, all bloody. I said, over and over. This is my fault, this is my fault,’ to all of them as they came past.”

I sat beside her on the bed and told her what the dream meant, even though I was past believing I was helping her with my explanations any more than Richard had helped her with his theories and his sleeping pills.

She had told me that my explaining the dreams made them easier, but I had been doing that for a week, and the dreams had gotten steadily worse. Taking her to Arlington wasn’t going to help, either, and I wasn’t about to take her back within reach of Richard, but keeping her here in Fredericksburg wasn’t much better. Sooner or later she would decide she wanted to go out to the battlefield. To find what? A whole new batch of dreams? Spotsylvania? Petersburg? The Wilderness, where the wounded were burned alive? There were all sorts of wonderful possibilities. The war was only half over.

“Promise me you won’t try to stop me from having the dreams,” she had said that first day in Fredericksburg. And I had promised. Lee had made promises, too. “I could have taken no other course,” he had written Markie Williams. But when he saw boys of sixteen cut down like stalks of corn, when he saw them barefoot and bleeding and dead on their feet, didn’t he ever consider breaking his promise?

I felt suddenly too tired to even stand. I went back into my room, pushed the galleys off my bed onto the