Lincoln’s Dreams

brown bottle on a chair, Ben could see the part in her hair. She was wearing an apron and a gray dress that looked like it had faded from blue.

“Course I kin sit up for you,” the boy named Caleb said. He was sitting up on top of the covers. “For you I could git up out of this bed and go dancing, but would you dance with me? No. You’re breeding my heart. Miss Nelly, you know that, don’t you? ”

“I do not think you are quite ready for dancing yet,” Nelly said, pouring the laudanum into a tin spoon. Caleb’s leg was bandaged with heavy white strips of linen, but Ben could see that there wasn’t a foot there at all. He wondered if he himself had a foot.

Ben gulped the laudanum down.

“I am willing to dance with you this very day,” Caleb said, grabbing for Nelly’s hand. “We shall push the beds back against the wall. Miss Nelly, and you,” he waved his hand at Ben, “shall play us a jig tune. ”

“Nelly! Come away from there!” a woman’s voice said. She came and stood at the foot of the bed where Ben could see her. It was the woman who had hit his foot bringing him up the stairs.

“Have one of the others do that!” she barked. “We got another wagonload coming in, and here you are flirting with the menfolks.” She glared at Caleb. “You woke every soul in the house with your screaming last night. ”

He grinned at her. “I dreamed Miss Nelly wouldn’t marry me,” he said.

“You can’t marry Nelly,” Ben tried to say. “I love her. ”

Nelly set the bottle of laudanum down on the chair and went out of Ben’s range of vision. Caleb swung his legs over the side of the bed and leaned across to pick up the bottle. “I dreamed Miss Nelly said she wouldn’t marry me and old Mrs. Macklin said she would.” He winked at Ben. “It was a nightmare, that’s what it was. ”

I watched Annie read, her head bent over the manuscript so I could see the part in her hair. “It’s the war,” Broun had said when I had refused to believe that Ben could fall in love with Nelly after only one day in the hospital. “A spoonful of laudanum, and Ben will do anything for her,” I had said, and Broun had answered, “People did things like that in a war, fell in love, sacrificed themselves.”

Maybe it was the war. We had been through a lot together—Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville and Brandy Station. I had explained her dreams to her, held her hand while she slept, dried her tears. All that was bound to produce feelings of camaraderie, affection. But I knew it wasn’t true. I had loved her since the moment I saw her standing there in the solarium in her gray coat.

I insisted on finding a restaurant that served fried chicken, as if that had been why we intended to go to Shenandoah. Annie brought home a drumstick wrapped in a napkin for the cat.

“You’ll kill it with kindness,” I told her. “You’re not supposed to feed them chicken bones,” but the cat was nowhere to be found. It had come out to the car when we got back in the afternoon, meowing reproaches, but now it wasn’t on the outside steps or over in front of the coffee shop.

“He’ll be back,” I said. “Cats always come back.”

“Tom Tita didn’t. He was locked in. He couldn’t get out.”

“The cat isn’t locked in. He’s probably found some other pushover to feed him, that’s all. You notice Tom Tita didn’t try very hard to get out. He was perfectly happy in the attic with all those mice, and when Markie Williams let him out he didn’t go racing back to Lee. He didn’t even miss Lee as long as the Union soldiers would feed him.”

“Lee missed him,” she said. “Cats don’t have any sense of loyalty, do they?”

“Their first loyalty is to themselves. What good would it have done Tom Tita to follow Lee through the Civil War? He would just have gotten himself killed. And the Union soldiers took good care of him, the way somebody’s taking good care of this cat right now.”

“You’re right,” she said. “Somebody’s taking care of him, and he’s fine,” but she stripped the meat off the drumstick and left it in a little pile at the bottom of the steps before we went in.

She went to bed at eight, and I tried to call Broun at the Westgate in San Diego again. There was no answer. I called the answering machine.

“I’m still in San Diego, Jeff,” Broun said. “I didn’t get in to see the endocrinologist. He was called out of town. I’m going to a place called Dreamtime while I wait for him to get back. Probably a bunch of Quacks, but you never know.” I waited, thinking there’d be a message from Richard, but there wasn’t

Annie tapped lightly on my door. “I had a dream about a chicken,” she said.

“Are you sure this is one of Lee’s dreams and not just something you ate?” I asked her, giddy with relief that I hadn’t inflicted Brandy Station on her.

“I’m sure,” she said. She leaned against the door. She was wearing the blue robe over her nightgown, and her eyes were bluer than I had ever seen them. Her short hair was tangled from sleeping on it. She looked beautiful. “The chicken was on the porch of my house. She acted like she belonged there. Did Lee have a chicken?”

“He had a horse,” I said. “He had a cat. I refuse to believe he had a chicken. It sounds to me like this dream is one of your own, brought on by that southern fried chicken we had for dinner. I told you I was giving you bad dreams.”

She went back to bed. I put the chain on the door and moved the chair over next to it, balanced the book on the arm. I corrected galleys for a while, read Freeman for a while, napped for a while, but I couldn’t sleep in spite of the fact that I had had maybe three hours sleep in the last two nights. It was a good thing.

Annie got out of bed, put on her robe, and tied the belt, all so calmly I thought she was awake. She pushed the chair out of the way. The book thumped onto the carpeted floor, making less noise than I thought it should. She reached for the chain.

“Where are you going, Annie?” I said quietly.

“My fault,” she said. She unfastened the chain.

“It’s not your fault. Let’s go back to bed.” I hooked the chain and led her carefully back to bed, my hand barely touching her arm. She didn’t resist at all. She stopped next to the bed and took off her robe.

“What happened to them?” she asked.

The chicken? Tom Tita? Or all those yellow-haired boys?

“We’ll find them,” I said. She got into bed and lay down. I covered her up. Fifteen minutes later we went through the whole thing again. After I had her back in bed, I wedged the chair under the doorknob and waited.

It took half an hour that time, and then she stood up again, put her robe on, tied the belt, and tried to move the chair. It wouldn’t budge. She turned and looked at me. “What happened to them?” she said angrily, as if I had hidden them from her.

“We’ll find them,” I said, and started back to the bed, my hand lightly on her arm, but halfway there she stopped and took two steps toward the windows.

“My fault,” she said softly. “My fault.”

We were at Gettysburg again, in the woods that were like an oven, watching the soldiers struggle back from Pickett’s Charge.

“My fault,” she whispered, took a few faltering steps forward, and sank down on her knees, her face in her hands.

“What is it, Annie?” I said, squatting beside her. “Is it Gettysburg? Is it Pickett’s Charge?”

She took her hands away from her face and sat back on her heels, staring blindly at whatever it was.

“Can you wake up, Annie? Can you tell me what you’re dreaming?”

She stretched her hand out toward something on the floor in front of her and then drew it back. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

She knelt there for over an hour, me squatting beside her until my legs cramped and I had to switch positions, talking to her, trying to wake her up, trying to get her back to bed. In the end I picked her up and carried her, placing her arms around my neck so she wouldn’t fall back, unfastening them when I had her in bed.

“What happened to them?!’ she asked when I covered her up.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but I’ll find out. I promise.”

Five minutes later she stood up again, put on her robe, and went over to the door.

“Annie, you’ve got to wake up,” I said tiredly.

She stopped pushing on the chair, straightened up, looked at the door, at me. “Did I do it again? Did I go outside?”