“What horse? Oh, the mare that was out here the other day? She’s fine. Bruised sole, just like I thought.”
“Good,” Annie said. “I’m glad.”
I headed back toward town the way we had come until the first fork in the road and then took the left-hand turn. Annie didn’t seem to notice. She had rolled her window halfway down and was leaning back, her head against the seat. The breeze from the moving car ruffled her hair. Her face had the serious, almost wistful expression it had had in the library.
This road wasn’t as pretty as the one we’d taken down to the vet’s. It was lined with the debris that towns always have on their outskirts: storage units, car junkyards, old trailers with porches and dog kennels tacked on and a horse tethered out back.
“It’s beautiful out here, isn’t it?” I said to be saying something, anything to get her mind off whatever battlefield she was thinking about. “The waitress said a cold front was supposed to be coming in, but I don’t see any signs of it.”
I turned again, to the south; and ran right into the interstate.
“Is this the way we came?” Annie said when the six-lane road loomed up ahead.
“I thought I’d take the scenic route back,” I said, ignoring the I-95 sign and cutting over to US 1. “I saw the cat this morning. It was sitting in front of the coffee shop. I think it was waiting for you. Have you been feeding it?”
“I gave it one of those little cream containers this morning,” she said. “And some bacon. It looked hungry,” she added defensively.
“All cats look hungry,” I said, looking for road signs. I didn’t want to turn west until we were past Spotsylvania. “You realize you’re stuck with him for life. Or at least until something better comes along. He’d desert you in a minute for somebody with a sardine.”
“Desert,” she said, looking out the window. We were passing a field with a haystack in it. “They shot deserters, didn’t they? In the war.”
And there we were, right back in it, in a war she didn’t even call the Civil War anymore because it was so familiar to her, because she fought its battles every night.
“Not always,” I said. “A lot of deserters got clean away. To California. Speaking of California, Broun’s gone down to San Diego, so he’ll be in California a few more days, and the vet won’t have any information for us till Monday. Why don’t we drive over to Shenandoah this afternoon? See the Blue Ridge Mountains? There’s supposed to be a great place for fried chicken in Luray, be a nice change from the coffee shop. There’s really no reason to stick around Fredericksburg.”
We were going to run into the interstate again if we went much farther north. I turned left at the next road. It was State Highway 208. The road to Spotsylvania, I turned north onto a gravel road, then made three more turns, going north and west, trying to get as far from Fredericksburg as I could.
“What about
“The galleys? Broun and I can finish them after he comes home from California.”
“I think we should finish them,” she said. “I’d like to know how it ends.”
“Fine. We’ll finish them when we get back.” The road we were on jogged north and ran into a four-lane highway. I hoped I hadn’t managed to run into the interstate again. I hadn’t. It was US 3, and the towns in both directions were clearly marked with arrows. The Wilderness was that way, Chancellorsville the other. Take your pick.
“Maybe it is a good idea,” Annie said, looking at the signs. “To get away.”
“Great,” I said. I crossed the highway and went west at the next turn. “We’ll get some fresh air and some southern fried chicken, a little exercise. There are all kinds of hiking trails.”
“And no battlefields,” she said softly.
“You know what else is in that neck of the woods? Monticello. Thomas Jefferson’s plantation. We could spend the night in Luray and then drive down the Skyline Drive tomorrow and see Monticello.”
We could drive down to Monticello, and while we were there that big front would come in, and we would have to go south to avoid it, into North Carolina and then Georgia and finally Florida, where there hadn’t been any war.
“Monticello’s a great place,” I said, turning again onto what looked like a paved road. After the first mile, the asphalt gave way to gravel. “Jefferson made this great clock out of cannonballs. And curtains,” I added hastily. “Jefferson made his own curtains.” The gravel turned into dirt, and the road became so deeply rutted I was going to high-center the car if I didn’t turn around. I put the car in reverse.
There was barely room to turn in the narrow lane. On one side or the road the weeds grew up knee-high next to a ditch, and on the other was a thin stand of pines that had been planted almost to the edge of the road. I stretched my arm out over the back of Annie’s seat and started to back carefully so I wouldn’t end up in the ditch.
“The dreams all have messages,” Annie said.
“What?” I said, angry that something in this rutted lane, this pine woods, had made her think of the dreams again. I could no more get her out of the Civil War than I could get her out of the grave-filled circuit of Fredericksburg. I shifted into first again and killed the engine.
“I was thinking about what Dr. Barton said about the Egyptians. He said they believed that dreams were messages from the dead.”
“I thought we weren’t going to talk about the dreams again,” I said. I tried to start the car again and flooded it.
“Did you know that Abraham Lincoln dreamed about Willie after he died?” she said. I turned the ignition again, but Annie reached out to stop me. “Willie’s face came to comfort him in dreams, the book said. I think he’s dead, Jeff. I think the dreams are messages from the dead.”
I took my hand away from the keys. So it hadn’t been the sunken lane, the west wood after all.
“I thought you were right, that Lee was having the dreams during the Civil War and they were coming across time somehow, but yesterday, when I saw that postcard of his tomb at Lexington, I knew he was dead.” She was looking at me earnestly, her hand still on my arm. “Richard told me that dreams help you work through the things that happened to YOU, that they’re kind of a healing mechanism to help you get over grief and come to terms with the guilt you couldn’t deal with any other way, only if there’s too much guilt the dreams can’t handle it. That’s what he said was happening with me, but what if you had so much guilt and grief that you went on dreaming after you were dead?”
How many dreams would it take to heal Lee of Fredericksburg? Twelve thousand seven hundred and seventy? Lee’s dreams weren’t a “healing mechanism.” They were a burial detail, and how many dreams would it take to bury all those boys at Gettysburg who staggered back from Pickett’s Charge to collapse at Lee’s feet, how many dreams to bury all the boys in the bloody angles and sunken roads of Lee’s mind? Two hundred and fifty-eight thousand? A hundred years’ worth?
“You told me Lee was a good man,” Annie said, “and he is, Jeff, but he had to send all those boys back into battle, and they didn’t have any shoes and no ammunition. He knew they’d be killed, but he had to send them in anyway. He had to send his own son Rob back in. How could he stand it, all those boys killed and nobody even knowing what happened to them? I think they still haunt him, after all these years, even though he’s dead.”
“And so he haunts you.”
“No. It isn’t like that. I think he’s trying to atone.”
“By inflicting his nightmares on you?”
“He’s not inflicting them on me. It isn’t like that. I’m helping him sleep somehow. Even though he’s dead.”
“And in the meantime, what are the dreams doing to you?”
She didn’t answer.
“I’ll tell you what they’re doing. The dreams are getting worse, and they’re going to go on getting worse until we do something.” She started to protest. “Look, maybe you’re right. Lee’s dreaming in his tomb, and you’re letting him get some sleep by having the dreams, in which case it won’t matter where we go, the dreams will go right along with us. Only maybe not. Maybe it’s the battlefield that’s aggravating the dreams, and if we get away from it, the dreams will let up. The point is, you’re not getting any sleep, you’re not eating anything, and what good are you
