“Richard says something happened to me when I was little, something I don’t remember, that’s causing me to have the dreams, and that the apple tree and the bodies and the cat are all symbols for what happened. He says the blank paper pinned to the soldier’s sleeve is a symbol for the message my subconscious is trying to send me only I’m too afraid to read it.”
“Robert E. Lee’s daughter had a cat named Tom Tita,” I said. “A yellow tabby. He was left behind accidentally when the Lees left Arlington. When a cousin, Markie Williams, went to Arlington to get some of their things and send them to the Lees, she found the cat. It had been locked in the attic, living on mice.”
“What happened to it?”
I stooped to pick up her gloves. “I don’t know.” I handed them back to her. “She didn’t say anything about taking it with her. I suppose she left it there with the Union soldiers who were occupying Arlington, I don’t know what happened to it.”
“I feel cold,” she said, and walked ahead of me back to the sidewalk and up to the house.
The porch wasn’t much protection. The snow was starting to pile up on the wooden steps and had blown across the hexagonal brick dies in curving drifts. “Why don’t we go sit in the car and talk?” I said. “It’s freezing out here.”
She sat down on a black painted bench. “Did you find that in a book?” she said. “About the cat?”
“In a letter,” I said.
“I could have read it, too, a long time ago, and forgotten I’d ever read it. I could have read somewhere that Arlington was Lee’s house and forgotten that, too.”
“Like Bridey Murphy,” I said. “She was hypnotized. She didn’t have dreams.”
“Richard says dreams aren’t really the way we remember them. That they’re emotions projected as images or symbols, but the second people wake up they try to hide the meaning of the dream from themselves by adding things and forgetting things so it means something else. Maybe that’s what I’m doing. I’m making them dead Union soldiers and they’re really something else.”
“What?” I said.
“I don’t know.”
“What kind of gun did the soldier have? The one you stepped on. You said he was still holding on to his rifle. What kind of rifle was it?”
“I think it was a toy gun,” she said. “It looked like a rifle, but it had a roll of paper caps in it, like a toy pistol.” She looked up at me. “Does that mean I shot somebody with a cap pistol in our apple orchard, and then made myself forget it?”
The snow was coming down like a curtain around us. I could barely see past the edge of the porch. “One of the guns used in the Civil War was the Springfield rifle. It fired a minie ball by using a paper roll of percussion caps, like the roll of caps in a toy pistol.”
“I had another dream last night,” she said.
“We can’t sit out here. You can tell me about it in the car,” I said, and stood up, offering her my hand. She took hold of it with her icy one, and I helped her up, wanting to grab both her hands and hold them against my chest, rubbing some warmth back into them, but she let go as soon as she was on her feet, and put her sodden gloves back on. We walked back to the car.
I started it and turned up the heater and the fan as far as they would go. I didn’t turn the windshield wipers on, and the collecting snow shut out the sight of the house and the garden and the graves.
“I was standing under the apple tree, only it was on a hill and down at the bottom of it was a stream, and where my house was supposed to be was the Presbyterian church that I went to when I was a little girl,” she said. She took off her gloves, started to twist them in her hands, and then stopped and stuck them in her pocket.
“It was afternoon, and Richard was there. He was wearing his slippers, and he was looking down the hill, but I couldn’t see what he was looking at, and I was angry that he was doing that instead of helping me look.” She stopped and stared at the blinded windshield.
“Helping you look for what?” I said.
“The message. There were supposed to be a hundred and ninety-one of them, but one of them was missing, and I said to Richard, ‘We’ve got to find it,’ but he wouldn’t put down the telescope, he just pointed down the hill and said, ‘Ask Hill. He knows where it is,’ and at first I thought he meant the hill we were standing on, but then I saw a man on a gray horse and I went down and said angrily, ‘Where is it?’ but he didn’t pay any attention to me either. He was trying to get down off his horse, but the horse had fallen forward, onto its knees sort of. Its knees were bent under…”
She tried to show me, but her elbows wouldn’t bend the right way, and I already knew how the horse had looked. I shut my eyes.
“He had one foot in the stirrup and he was trying to get his other leg over the saddlehorn, but he couldn’t, and after a while I went back up the hill to Richard and said, ‘We’ve got to find it.’ He didn’t answer me either because he was looking through his telescope past the church to the south. I was going to take the telescope away from him, but just then I saw what he was looking at. It was a whole line of Union soldiers, coming up from the south. I said, ‘Whose troops are those?’ and Richard handed the telescope to me, but my hands were bandaged and I couldn’t hold it, so I made him look again, and he said, ‘They’re Federals,’ and I said, ‘No. It’s Hill,’ and just then the man who’d been on the horse that was on its knees came riding up on another horse, only now he was wearing a red wool shirt, and I was so glad to see him because it meant that even though we couldn’t find it, he had still gotten the message.”
I didn’t say anything. I ran my hands around the rim of the steering wheel and thought about how I should take her home before the snow got any worse and we were both trapped up here.
“Maybe Richard’s right,” she said, “and whatever’s in that lost message is whatever it is I can’t remember.”
“What about the bandages on your hands? What about the Confederate soldiers in blue uniforms? And the number one hundred and ninety-one? What are they supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said lightly, and put her gloves back on. “Richard will have to tell me. He’s the psychiatrist.”
“Broun’s new book is about Antietam,” I said. “I’ve spent the last six months researching everything in print about that battle.”
And you know why my hands are bandaged?”
“Lee broke his right hand and sprained his left just before the march into Maryland. He was still wearing the splints and bandages at Antietam. Lee had sent an urgent message to A. P. Hill at Harper’s Ferry, telling him to bring his men up as fast as he could, so when he saw some soldiers coming up from the south he hoped it was Hill’s troops, but the soldiers were wearing blue uniforms.
“He asked one of his aides, ‘Whose troops are those?’ The aide told him they were Union soldiers and offered to let Lee use the telescope, but Lee held up his bandaged hands and said, ‘Can’t use it. What troops are those?’ The aide looked again, and this time he could see the Confederate battle flags.
“It was A. P. Hill’s men, just up from Harper’s Ferry after a forced march of seventeen miles. Hill was riding ahead of them. He was wearing a red shirt.” I gripped the steering wheel. “They were wearing Union uniforms they had taken from the Federal stores they captured at Harper’s Ferry.”
Annie turned and looked out the side window at the graves she couldn’t see. “I want to go home,” she said.
CHAPTER THREE
Lee didn’t buy Traveller “in the mountains of Virginia in the autumn of 1861,” as he wrote his cousin Markie Williams after the war, but he thought of the horse as his from that meeting on, calling him “my colt” when he saw him again in North Carolina and going out to the stables to visit him. The hostler complained that he was “always pokin’ ’round my horses as if he meant to steal one of ’em.”
Broun had called again, from New York, and left a message on the machine. The weather was even worse to the north. He hadn’t been to McLaws and Herndon yet, but he’d seen his agent, and she’d hit the roof about the
