I looked at my watch. It was four-thirty. I piled the books up and took them back downstairs. Annie was in the reference section with a large book spread open in front of her. They must have had something alter all. I went up into the alcove and put the books back on the shelves where they belonged so they would be there if I needed them again and not on a cart guarded by that fierce-looking librarian, and found a book on Gettysburg.
It weighed a ton. I didn’t try to carry it back up to the biographies room or even get it up onto a table. I just laid it open on the floor and bent over it, trying to see if the same pattern of lack of sleep persisted with Gettysburg. Gettysburg was the next Dig battle after Chancellorsville, but Annie wasn’t dreaming all the battles. I needed to see if the same conditions for dreaming had occurred during that battle.
There was a full page of references to Lee in the index. I tried looking them up, keeping one hand in the index page and going down the two-column pages with a finger of my other hand, hoping Lee’s name or the word sleep would jump out at me. At five-fifteen I gave up. It was in there, every word ever written about Gettysburg had to be in there, which was the whole problem. There was too much stuff to sort through, the way the vet’s bay had had too many symptoms. Lee’s insomnia was lost in the sheer volume of facts. I hefted the book back onto its shelf and went to look for Annie.
She wasn’t in the magazine section. I looked along the stacks and found her finally back in the biographies room. She had let up one of the shades and was looking out the window in the direction of the Rappahannock.
“I think I’ve figured out what’s causing the dreams,” I said.
She turned around. She looked tired, as if she had been up all night instead of a few hours.
“I think you were right when you said you were helping Lee sleep,” I said. “I think that may be exactly what you’re doing.”
We went out the arched green doors and down the cement steps. It must have rained while we were inside because the library’s asphalt parking lot was covered with puddles, but the sky was as clear as when we went inside, paling to lavender with the evening. The air smelled like apple blossoms.
“You said he couldn’t sleep,” I said. “You were right. He apparently suffered from insomnia through the whole war, and during the battles he didn’t sleep at all.” I explained my theory to her as we walked back to the inn, telling her about Dr. Stone’s storm of dreams and the pattern I’d discovered in her dreams.
“I still think the drugs you took are somehow connected to all this, but I haven’t figured out how yet,” I said. “You said your family doctor put you on phenobarbital. Did you notice any change in the dreams while you were on it?”
“No,” Annie said, looking in the direction of the inn two blocks away. The black cat was coming out to meet us, highstepping its way along the wet sidewalk.
“How long were you on the phenobarbital?” I asked.
The cat meowed a greeting that sounded like a complaint. Annie knelt to pick it up. “Did you know that when Willie Lincoln had pneumonia he kept calling for the boy across the street?” she said. “His name was Bud Taft. He came and held Willie’s hand and sat with him the whole time, did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“One night while Bud was with Willie, Lincoln came in and said, ‘Better go to bed. Bud,’ and Bud said, ‘If I go, he will call for me.’”
The cat struggled to be let down. Annie put it back on the sidewalk, and it stalked off, offended. Half a block away, it sat down on the sidewalk and began to lick its white paws.
“You didn’t happen to find out where Willie Lincoln was buried, did you?” I said.
“I thought he was buried at Arlington.”
“Nope. And I don’t know where he was buried.”
Annie looked at the cat. “Maybe nobody knows,” she said.
When we came up even with the cat, it stood up and walked alongside us all the way back to the inn.
CHAPTER NINE
Lee’s affection for Traveller was obvious. “If I were an artist like you,” he wrote his cousin Markie Williams, “I would draw a true picture of Traveller…. Such a picture would inspire a poet, whose genius could then depict his worth and describe his endurance of toil, hunger, thirst, heat, cold, and the dangers and sufferings through which he has passed. He could dilate on his sagacity and affection, and his invariable response to every wish of his rider. He might even imagine his thoughts through the long night marches and days of battle through which he has passed. But I am no artist.”
When Michael Miley took Lee’s photograph, Lee insisted that he be mounted on Traveller, “just as we went through the four years of war together.”
We went back to the inn after dinner and waited for Lee’s aides to deliver some last message so that he could take off his boots and settle onto his camp cot and go to sleep.
Annie rechecked the galleys that I had read the night before, and I got out my trusty Freeman and started in on Gettysburg. It was impossible for me to believe that Lee wouldn’t dream about this, the worst battle of the war, the end of the war really for the Confederacy, though Broun would fight me on that.
He claimed that Antietam was the decisive battle, that with the failure of Lee’s push into Maryland the war was effectively over for the Confederacy, even though there were three more years of killing left and Lee knew it.
Whether it was or not, and, more important, whether Lee was aware of it, he certainly knew it at Gettysburg a year later, and if anything would have given him bad dreams, it was that misbegotten battle. The high-water mark of the Confederacy. Lee made it all the way into Pennsylvania before the Union army stopped him, and then for three days he unleashed one assault after another that made it look like he could win after all.
On the morning of the third day, Lee met with Longstreet outside a schoolhouse. Longstreet didn’t like Lee’s plan of attack. Later Longstreet claimed he had said, “It is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position,” and had considered the matter settled. Lee never blamed anybody but himself for the failure of Pickett’s Charge, but when his aide Colonel Venable said bitterly that he’d distinctly heard Lee direct Longstreet to send up Hood’s division in support, Lee had said, “I know! I know!”
Lee’s plan was to send Pickett’s men directly on a frontal assault at the Union center, and it almost worked. Pickett’s men made it up to the famous bloody angle of a stone wall and held it for almost twenty minutes, without any support at all, in spite of the fact that this time it was Fredericksburg in reverse, Lee’s men in an open field marching toward a defended ridge. But Longstreet didn’t send up the supporting divisions, and they couldn’t hold the wall. When the soldiers began to fall back, Lee rode down to meet them and send them back to Seminary Ridge, speaking encouragingly to nearly every man who passed.
“Try to reform your division in the rear of this hill,” he had told Pickett, and Pickett had said, “General Lee, I have no division.”
Annie went to sleep around ten, the covers pulled up over her shoulders as if she were cold. I called the answering machine, and Richard gave me his new theory, this one about sexual guilt and repressed Oedipal attachments.
I had felt all along that these calls, these theories, were leading somewhere, that they were all part of a pitch to persuade me to bring Annie back, but now I was not so sure. The theories didn’t fit together. Sometimes they even contradicted each other, and he jumped from one to another with the same quiet urgency of a man recounting a dream. He still used his Good Shrink voice, but, listening to him, I had the feeling that it was not me he was trying to convince, but himself.