I peeled the paper off a straw and jabbed the ice in my lemonade with it. Did everybody in this whole damned town own stock in Fredericksburg battlefield? It’s a great place to visit. Seventeen thousand dead. There’s even an electric map, red lights for the mortally wounded soldiers, blue for the ones who froze to death. You can’t miss it. Take US 3 to Sunken Road, where the bodies are lying ten deep in front of the stone wall.

Annie was still looking at the counter where the pharmacist had drawn the map. In a minute she would say, “I want to go out to the battlefield, Jeff,” or worse, “I think we should go to Arlington,” and what excuse was I going to come up with this time?

“Do you think they’d have any aspirin in those little tins?” Annie said. “I didn’t bring any with me today, and I’ve got kind of a headache.”

“Sure,” I said. I slid off the stool and went to the back to ask the pharmacist. He was still on the phone. “You of all people should know I can’t prescribe without a doctor’s orders, Lila,” he said loudly. There was a long, frustrated pause, during which he stared at the phone.

I searched along the rack of medicine but didn’t find any tins. I grabbed a bottle of a hundred and took it back up to Annie. “Are you all right?” I broke the seal, dug out the wad of cotton, and shook two into her hand. She took them with a sip of lemonade. “Do you want to go back to the inn?”

“Yes,” she said.

I went back to the pharmacist and handed him three ones, holding up the bottle of aspirin where he could see it. “Especially not for you!” he shouted at Lila. “With your heart condition?” I waited some more. He looked up, finally, and nodded at me.

Annie was standing by the door waiting for me, the four volumes of Freeman in her arms. “Here. Let me take those,” I said, tucking them under my arm. I opened the door for her. “you want me to go back to the inn and get the car?”

“No, I’m fine, Jeff, really.” She smiled wearily. “I think Lee must be thinking about his daughter again.”

“I can go get the car,” I said, and then saw the blue Ford sedan let an elderly black woman out a block down and start toward us.

“Taxi!” I shouted, jumping out into the street as if I were trying to stop a runaway horse. “Taxi!”

The taxi driver pulled over and opened the back door for us. He was at least sixty, with a huge cigar and a stubbly beard that looked even sharper and more disreputable than Broun’s. I gave him the inn’s address, and he pulled out into the street.

“You two tourists?” he said over his shoulder. “You been out to the battlefield yet?”

CHAPTER TEN

Pickett’s Charge was the worst moment of the war for Lee. In spite of his telling his men, “Don’t be discouraged,” he had to have known the war was lost with it. Generals Garnett and Armistead were dead. General Kemper was mortally wounded, and there had been over twenty thousand casualties in three days. Even if the army managed to retreat safely into Virginia, it would never have the strength again for a major offensive. The long retreat to the apple orchard was beginning.

That night, worn out, Lee had tried to dismount and been unable to. A cavalryman leaned forward to assist him, but before he could reach him, Lee had gotten down by himself and stood leaning against Traveller. “Too bad!” he said. “Too bad! Oh, too bad!”

Annie slept fitfully all afternoon, not dreaming but not getting any rest either. At six I drove to McDonald’s and got hamburgers. She got up then, but she ate hardly anything, and afterwards she couldn’t get back to sleep. She walked the length of the room, back and forth, like a penned animal.

“Do you want to read galleys?” I asked, remembering that she’d said they helped keep her mind off the dreams, but she shook her head and went on pacing, stopping now and then to lean against the window. She looked dead on her feet. Her eyes were shadowed with fatigue, and there was hardly any color in her face.

“Do you think the library would be open tonight?” she asked.

“It closed at six,” I said. “We could go take in a movie. I could go get a paper and we could see what’s on.”

“No, I …” She went over to the bed and lay down. After a while she said sleepily, “When does it open in the morning?”

“The library? Nine,” I said, wanting to ask her what she wanted at the library but afraid I’d wake her up. She seemed to be asleep already.

I read Freeman awhile. I didn’t try to find out anything else about Annie Lee. There was no point. I had thought Annie would be glad we had finally found out why she was having the dreams, but she hadn’t even acted like she cared. And the information hadn’t helped her sleep.

When I got bored with Freeman, I picked up the galleys. Ben and Malachi ran into some of their own artillery and took cover behind it. I didn’t remember that. In the last version I’d read, they’d gotten separated, with Ben ending up on an ambulance detail, but in this version they were clear across the valley from where they should have been. I wondered if this was the scene Broun had written that afternoon after I’d accused him of being obsessed with the Lincoln book.

“Shouldn’t we ask somebody where our regiment is?” Ben asked.

Malachi pointed back across the cornfield to a road and a fence full of men. It wasn’t so smoky down there, and Ben could see the sun glinting off their bayonets. “They’re clear the hell over there, mebbe, and how do you conjure we get to ’em? We got ourselves separated and we’re gonna stay that way.”

Malachi shouted the whole speech, but toward the end of it Ben could only tell what he was saying by reading his lips. The noise of the guns was getting louder every minute, and the firings and the shells landing had stopped making separate sounds and were roaring, like thunder. Ben could only tell when the guns fired by the smoke.

“Come on!” Malachi said. Ben didn’t hear that either, but they started to run, keeping their heads down as if to protect them from the noise.

They ran straight into one of the guns. Its barrel had exploded and there were men lying on their backs in a circle around it. A man wearing a straw hat, and a boy were trying to free the horses from the caisson. A lieutenant rode up and shouted, “Pull those horses back!” and Ben wondered how he was able to make himself heard. “You two there! Help him!” he said, pointing his sword at the boy, who was struggling with the reins.

The man wearing the straw hat had unbuckled the harnesses, but the horses had gotten themselves tangled in it. One of the girth straps was wrapped around the nearer horse’s hind leg. The harder he strained the tighter it pulled.

Ben grabbed hold of the horse’s dragging reins and tried to steady him. Malachi got alongside the horse and began to push him back against the caisson. The man in the straw hat reached under to cut the strap. The horse whinnied and reared up.

“Dang your hide, you crazy fool,” Malachi shouted at the horse. “Do you want to get kilt?”

Ben stepped back out of the reach of the hoofs, grabbing for the reins. “Hold still, dang ya!” Malachi shouted.

There was a terrible roar. It surprised Ben that he could hear it. Dirt and grass and pieces of metal flew up in front of the caisson, and the horse came down on its front feet, hard, and pitched sideways onto Malachi. Ben ran over to him. The horse’s full weight was on his chest. “Dang your hide, you ugly plug!” Malachi said. “Get off ’n me.”

Ben got his hands under Malachi’s shoulders and tried to pull him out, but he couldn’t budge him. He stood up and called to the boy to come and help, but he couldn’t see him anywhere. The man with the straw hat was bending over the tongue of the caisson, his arms swinging lazily back and forth.