So now it was cryptomnesia, and I represented Broun. This morning it had been a revenge fantasy and Broun had represented Annie’s dreams. And before that it had been a psychotic break and a half-buried trauma and a murder in the orchard with a cap pistol, and who knew what it would be the next time Richard called, and never in all these calls a word about the Thorazine he had given her.
Did he honestly think he could talk me into bringing Annie back with all this psychiatric gibberish? Maybe he was the crazy one and all this talk about Annie’s repressed guilt and my obsession and Lincoln’s impending nervous breakdown was nothing but—what was the proper psychiatric term? —projection.
I called Broun at the number he had given me before he left for California. “How’s it going?” I asked. “Did you get in to see your prophetic-dreams expert?”
“This morning. He told me time and space aren’t real, that they only exist in the conscious part of our brain, and down in the subconscious there’s no such thing as a space-time continuum. He said everything that’s ever happened or is going to happen is already in our subconscious, and it comes out in dreams.” He talked the way he always had, as if we had never had that fight about California. “Then he says most people have to wait for dreams to tell them what’s going to happen, but he can tell me my future right now just by putting me to sleep and watching my rapid eye movements.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said I’d already dreamed I didn’t give money to phony fortune-tellers, and since it had already happened there wasn’t any way I could change it.”
“And what did he say?”
“I didn’t wait to find out. I wish I could dream what was going to happen. Then I wouldn’t get stuck listening to cock-and-bull stories like that. Where are you, at home?”
“No,” I said. “I’m in Fredericksburg. The phone rang off the hook yesterday, and I decided I wasn’t going to get any work done, so I came down here. I think I might stay awhile. At least until McLaws and Herndon figure out where I am. There isn’t any snow here.”
“I won’t tell a soul where you are, son. Let McLaws and Herndon talk to the answering machine. That’s what the damned thing’s for. How’re you coming on the galleys?”
“Fine. I looked up your Dr. Barton. He died last fall, but I talked to his son. He couldn’t remember his father talking about any unusual dreams. He’s going to call his sister and ask her. Oh, by the way, I’ve got another dream for your collection. Lincoln had a dream the night before he died. He told his Cabinet about it. He dreamed he was in a boat.”
“‘A singular and indescribable vessel,’” Broun said. “I know.”
“You knew about the boat dream?” I said. “Then why didn’t you tell me?”
There was a silence at the other end so long that I had plenty of time to think of all the things we hadn’t told each other in the last week. I wondered what would happen if I told him I thought the fortune-teller was right, and down in Annie’s subconscious Lee was fighting the Civil War. Would he call that a cock-and-bull story, too?
“Are you all right?” he asked. “Are you taking care of yourself?”
“I’m sleeping till noon every day,” I said, “and don’t worry about the galleys. I’m over halfway through the book already.”
“I’m not worried about the galleys,” he said.
After I hung up I went and woke Annie up. We drove down to Bowling Green for dinner. Annie didn’t show any of the tension I’d seen the day before, and the color in her cheeks was back to normal. Even after we got back to the inn and were reading galleys up in her room, me in the green chair and she sitting cross-legged on the bed, she was relaxed and interested.
“Why don’t you go ahead and go to bed, Jeff?” she said at a little after eleven. “You didn’t get much sleep last night. I don’t think I’ll have a dream.”
“Okay,” I said. “Call me if you need me.”
I left the door of the room open and the light beside the bed on. I took off my shoes and settled down with the book I’d bought in Bowling Green. It was a pop history moment-by-moment account of the day Lincoln died, but it had a long description of the Cabinet meeting.
Lincoln had told his boat dream before the meeting started, while they were still waiting for Stanton. Grant said he was worried about Sherman, and Lincoln said not to worry, that he had had a sign, and told them his dream. He said he had had the same dream before every victory in the war and named Antietam and Gettysburg and Stone River.
Grant, who didn’t believe in dreams, said Stone River wasn’t his idea of a victory and a few more victories like that would have lost the war, and Lincoln said, “It must relate to Sherman. I know of no other important event which is likely just now to occur.”
I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to twelve. I turned off the light. What if Grant had believed in dreams? Would he have been able to figure out where the danger lay in time to bring up reinforcements, to set up a line of defenses that would have stopped John Wilkes Booth?
He didn’t believe in dreams. He knew a cock-and-bull story when he heard one, even when Lincoln was the one telling it. But I wondered if, afterwards, he ever dreamed that Cabinet meeting?
“My house is on fire,” Annie said.
I turned on the light. She was standing in the door in her white nightgown, holding the galleys. She came over to the bed and handed them to me. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” she said, and the tears streamed down her unseeing face. “Isn’t he?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lee and Traveller were well matched. If Lee demanded more stamina and spirit than the average horse could give, Traveller had too much stamina and spirit for the average rider. He chafed at being reined in, had to be exercised strenuously, and had an uncomfortable, high trot. When Rob Lee had to ride him down to Fredericksburg for his father in 1862, he complained, “I think I am safe in saying that I could have walked the distance with much less discomfort and fatigue.”
It took me almost an hour to get her back to bed and sleeping more or less peacefully. I had tried to wake her up, even though I had read someplace that you weren’t supposed to wake sleepwalkers—or maybe that was one of Richard’s theories—but I couldn’t.
“Annie!” I said, and took hold of her hands. They were hot. “Wake up, Annie!”
“Is he dead?” she said, the tears running down her face and under her chin.
Is he dead? Who? General Cobb? He had died at Fredericksburg, but I wasn’t convinced we were still there. We could be anywhere. Armistead and Garnett had died at Gettysburg, A. P. Hill at Petersburg two weeks before the surrender. It could even be Lincoln.
“Who, Annie?”
Her nose was running from all the tears, but she didn’t make any effort to wipe it. I led her gently by the hand into the bathroom and got a Kleenex. “Tell me what’s happening,” I said gently and wiped her reddened nose. “Can you tell me, Annie?”
“My house is on fire.”
I dabbed clumsily at her cheeks with the wadded-up Kleenex. “What does the house look like, Annie?” I asked, and wiped her nose again.
She stared at our reflections in the mirror. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
I walked her back to her own bed and covered her up. She had stopped crying, but her lashes were matted with tears. The Kleenex was a sodden wad, but I wiped her nose again with it and tucked her in.
I stood beside the bed for a while, thinking she would wake up, but she didn’t. I reached for Freeman on the floor next to the green chair and tried to find a burning house. During the battle of Antietam, Longstreet had helped some women and children get their belongings out of a burning house in sharpsburg, but Lee hadn’t been there. In the weeks before the battle of Fredericksburg, most of the town had been burned down, but no one had been killed except for seventeen thousand soldiers.