the right thing, trying to get her to sleep, or if I was only letting her in for more nightmares. I knew how Lee felt sending his son Rob back in at Antietam. I had told her I would try to get some sleep, too, but I doubted if I’d be able to. I was too worried about her. I took my shoes off and settled down in the green chair with the acknowledgments sheets for
“I’m going to the battlefield, Jeff,” Annie said, bending over me. She had on her gray coat. “Go ahead and sleep.”
“Are they open at night?” I said. I sat up, spilling the acknowledgments everywhere. I had fallen asleep and she had dreamed about Fredericksburg again. “I don’t think they’re open at night.”
“It’s three o’clock,” she said, and picked up her purse and the room key. “Go back to sleep.”
It was almost dark in the room. She had turned on the lamp by her bed. Three o’clock. I couldn’t let her go out to the battlefield in the middle of the night. I had to get up and get dressed and go with her.
“I’ll go with you,” I said, and bent over to put on my shoes. “Wait for me.”
“Go back to sleep,” she said, and shut the door behind her.
I stood up, still convinced that it was three o’clock in the morning and surprised to find myself dressed. I must have slept through the afternoon and on into the night while Annie dreamed about Fredericksburg or worse. Asleep on duty. They shot soldiers for that.
I grabbed my coat and racketed down the outside stairs to the little parking lot, but the car was still there. She wasn’t in it. I stood looking around the parking lot for a long, stupid minute, trying to think where she had gone and waking up to the fact that it was not the middle of the night.
It was getting dark out, and some cars had their lights on. The weather the waitress had predicted had come in. It was windy, and the sky was a gray blanket of cloud. The waitress was right, I thought, and would have given anything if she’d been hovering by my shoulder waiting to pour me a cup of coffee to wake me up.
And where was Annie? What if she hadn’t gone out to the battlefield at all? What if she’d caught a bus to Arlington? What if she’d taken off altogether, afraid I was going to try to stop the dreams, afraid I was going to put Thorazine in her food like Richard?
Richard. He had called Broun’s agent. Who else had he called? Nobody knows where we are, I thought desperately. But what if Annie had told Richard her second dream after all, and he had recognized it as Antietam? And when we weren’t in Antietam, he had gone on to the next battle? Which was Fredericksburg.
I raced back up the stairs, across the hall, and down to the desk. “Did you see a man in here, about my height, dressed like a doctor?”
The clerk grinned. “You looking for Mrs. Davis?” he said, emphasizing the
A taxi? She wasn’t in a car with Richard, drugged and helpless, on her way back to Washington. She had taken a taxi to Arlington because I wouldn’t take her. “Did she say where she was going?”
“She didn’t say anything to me,” he said, still grinning. “When she called for the taxi, though, I heard her say she wanted to go out to Fredericksburg battlefield.”
I took the stairs two at a time, grabbed my car keys, and raced back out to the car and across town. But before I’d gone two blocks I knew I was too late.
Lincoln pardoned the sentries who fell asleep on duty, saying it was hard for farm boys to break their country habits. He wouldn’t pardon me. I had let Annie go out to the battlefield by herself, and it was starting to snow.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Lee never forgot his love for horses, even at the end. One of his chief concerns that last week, while Five Forks fell and Sheridan cut off all hope of escape to the north, was with the starving mules and horses. He had had to give their rations of parched corn to the men.
The morning of the surrender Colonel John Haskell rode up “like the wind” with news that Fitz Lee had learned of a road over which the army might still be able to escape. He had only one arm, and he couldn’t get his horse stopped until he was nearly a hundred yards past Lee. “What is it?” Lee cried, running up to the winded horse. “Oh, why did you do it? You have killed your beautiful horse!”
The blue taxi was sitting just outside the National Park gates. I tore up the terraced slopes to the cemetery. I didn’t even look for her in the Visitors’ Center or on the brick paths. There was only one place she was going to be.
She was standing on Marye’s Heights where Lee must have stood, the skirt of her gray coat whipping around her in the wind. It was snowing, stray angled flakes like rifle fire. Annie was holding a brochure but not looking at it. And what was she looking at? The flash and shine of sun on metal, the whipping of flags, the breathless hush before the men on the naked plain were cut to ribbons, the flags toppling one by one and the horses going down? Or the graves, terraced row on row below her?
I came up the last step, panting. “Are you all right?” I said, and had to take a breath every other word.
“Yes,” she said, and smiled at me, her face grave and kind.
“You should have woken me up,” I said. “I would have brought you out here.”
“You needed to get some sleep. I’ve been worried about you. You stay up with me all night and don’t get any sleep.”
She turned and looked down the long terraced slope at the graves.
“They didn’t build this cemetery until after the war,” I said, still having trouble getting my breath. “It isn’t like they buried the soldiers here after the battle. This wasn’t made into a national cemetery until 1865. A lot of the soldiers buried here probably didn’t even die in the war.”
She looked down at the brick path we were standing on. There were grave markers set into the path. She bent and swept snow off the granite square. “This is where the unknowns are buried, isn’t it?”
“None of these graves are Confederate dead,” I said. “They’re not even from the battle of Fredericksburg. The Confederate soldiers are all buried in the city cemetery.”
She stood up and looked at the brochure. “This says there are over twelve thousand unknown soldiers buried here,” she said, “but there aren’t really, you know. There aren’t any.”
I took the brochure away from her and pretended to read it. The snow was melting on it in big spots that blurred the ink.
“You said nobody knows what happened to the chicken, but it isn’t true,” she said. “I know what happened to it. It got killed. One of the soldiers wrung its neck for dinner.”
“You don’t know that. Maybe it ran away into the woods and became a wild chicken. Maybe some little girl found it and kept it for a pet.”
“The brochure says nobody knows what happened to the soldier that’s buried under this marker, but that isn’t true either. After the war, when he didn’t come back, the people who were waiting for him knew. His mother or his sweetheart or his daughter. They knew he was dead because he didn’t come back.”
“Some of the soldiers just never went home after the war. Some of them lit out for California and the gold mines, and they wrote letters home that got lost in the mails, and they weren’t dead after all.”
The wind had stopped and the snow was falling slowly, covering the numbers on the marker at our feet, burying the boys with their yellow hair and their outflung arms, blurring the charred pieces of paper they had pinned to their sleeves.
“What happens to Ben in
I had no idea how Broun had ended the book. He had killed off Malachi and Toby and Caleb. Maybe he had an epidemic of typhoid in the last chapter and killed everybody else. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Does he die?”
“Die? Ben? He’s the hero. Of course he doesn’t die. He marries Nelly and they go back to Hillsboro and have ten kids and live happily ever after. Broun loves happy endings.”
The marker was completely covered with snow. You couldn’t even tell it was there in the path.
“I’m sorry I got you into all this Jeff,” she said, still looking at the marker. “I needed your help. I didn’t even think how it would be for you.” She looked up at me. “I had another dream.”
“When? This afternoon? Is that why you came out here by yourself?”
