“Promise me you won’t try to stop me from having the dreams,” she had said that first day in Fredericksburg. And I had promised. Lee had made promises, too. “I could have taken no other course,” he had written Markie Williams. But when he saw boys of sixteen cut down like stalks of corn, when he saw them barefoot and bleeding and dead on their feet, didn’t he ever consider breaking his promise?
I felt suddenly too tired to even stand. I went back into my room, pushed the galleys off my bed onto the floor, and went to bed.
I slept till six-thirty. Three-thirty in California. Too early to call Broun. I went over to the coffee shop and read galleys, letting the redheaded waitress fill my coffee cup whenever it got halfway down, till it was a uniform, undrinkable temperature.
D.H. Hill’s horse got its legs shot off, Ben found his regiment, and they marched south and east toward Sharpsburg. Lee tried to look through a lieutenant’s telescope but couldn’t because his hands were bandaged. A.P. Hill came riding up in a red wool shirt to save the day, and Ben got shot in the foot.
At nine I called Broun’s hotel from the pay phone in the coffee shop. He had checked out.
I went back to the room and let myself in through my door. Annie was asleep, clutching her pillow the way she had the bedpost. I called the answering machine. “You’re probably wondering where I went,” Broun said. “I’m in San Diego. At the Westgate. I came here to see an endocrinologist. The psychiatrist put me onto him. He’s an expert on hormonal imbalances in the brain. Call me if you need anything, son.”
“I’m trying to,” I said. I called the Westgate in San Diego. A recorded voice asked who I was trying to call, and when I told it, it rang Broun’s room. He wasn’t there.
I wondered where he really was. He could be meeting with the endocrinologist, or standing in line at LAX, or be someplace else altogether, and his kind, gruff voice would still say, “I’m in San Diego at the Westgate.” The plane to San Diego could nave crashed and it still wouldn’t have made any difference. That voice would still have talked to me. I wondered if that was what was happening here, if the dreams were some kind of prerecorded message left by Lee, and he wasn’t there at all.
I went and got the car. Take Lafayette Boulevard to Sunken Road. You can’t miss it. The pharmacist had been right about that. There were signs everywhere: highway signs for US 3, small brown National Park Service signs every block or so on Lafayette Boulevard, a big brown sign at the entrance, a “Closed After Dark” sign next to the iron gates, Fredericksburg Historic Tour marker Number 24, a white “National Cemetery” sign. Sunken Road was marked with a regular green-and-white street sign. I pulled into Sunken Road and parked across from the Visitors’ Center. It was after nine, which meant the Visitors’ Center and, presumably, the library were open, but I didn’t go in. I went up the hill to see the graves.
It wasn’t as bad as I had thought it would be. The hill was terraced into grassy shelves just wide enough for a row of graves, and at the top the carved headstones sloped down and away in neat rows toward a flag anchored with pyramids of decorative solid shot, but the hill wasn’t even half as high as the hill at Arlington, hardly high enough to be called a ridge.
The plain below, where all the bodies had lain, was covered with grass and trees and criss-crossed with brick paths. Azaleas and ivy had been planted around the Visitors’ Center. It looked like somebody’s backyard.
Well, that was the kind of war the Civil War had been, wasn’t it? A backyard war, fought in cornfields and on front porches and across rutted country lanes, a homey little war that had killed two hundred and four thousand boys and men outright and four hundred thousand more with dysentery and amputated arms and bilious fever. But in spite of the neat rows of graves stretching away like points on a radius, it didn’t look like anybody had ever been killed here. And it didn’t look like Arlington.
At the top of the hill I took the brick path that led along its edge to a large sign that turned out to be a painting of Lee looking through binoculars out over the battlefield. Next to it was a brick pillar with a speaker in it. I pushed the button for the know-nothing tourist’s guided tour.
“At this spot on Marye’s Heights,” the deep, authoritative voice said, “General Robert E. Lee stood, commanding the battle of Fredericksburg.” It sounded like Richard on the answering machine. I let the voice ramble on while I looked at the graves on the edge.
They were marked with granite squares maybe six inches across. There were two numbers on each square. The one nearest me read 243, and then a line, and below that the number 4. I scribbled the numbers down on a piece of paper so I could ask what they meant.
“Good morning,” a brown-hatted ranger said. He came up beside me, carrying a plastic trash sack. “Did you need in to the Visitors’ Center? I was out checking the grounds, so I locked it up, but I can go open it. We’ve been having problems with kids geting in at night.” He pulled a beer can out of the back to show me and then dropped it back in. “The first tour’s at eleven. Are you looking for a particular grave?”
“No,” I said. “I just wanted to see the battlefield from up here.”
“It’s hard to imagine there was ever a battle here, isn’t it? The artillery were all along this ridge, and there were sharpshooters down behind that stone wall, where the road is. It’s not the original wall, by the way. General Robert E. Lee commanded the battle from up here,” he said with the enthusiasm of someone who’s never been in a war. “He watched the Union army coming up from the river there,” he pointed across the trees and roofs of Fredericksburg toward the Rappahannock, “and he said, ‘It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.’”
“What do the numbers on the unmarked graves mean?”
“Those are the graves’ registration numbers. After the war there were bodies buried all over this area from the battles of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania and the Wilderness. When the battlefield was made into a national cemetery, quartermaster teams were sent around to disinter the bodies and rebury them here. The numbers tell where the bodies were found.”
I took out the piece of paper I’d written the numbers on and unfolded it. “Can you tell me about this one?” I said. “Two hundred forty-three, and under that there’s a line and the number four.”
“Two hundred forty-three is the registration number. The four is the number of bodies.”
“The number of bodies?”
“That were found in the original grave. Or parts of bodies. It was hard to tell, sometimes, how many soldiers there really were. Some of the bodies had been buried for three years.”
Like Willie Lincoln, I thought irrelevantly. Maybe he had been buried in a field somewhere, and then a quartermaster’s team had dug him up and sent him home with his father’s body to Springfield.
“At Chancellorsville they found a grave full of arms and legs. They figured it must have been near a field hospital where they were doing amputations. And lots or times they’d buried horses along with the bodies.”
“How did they arrive at these numbers, then?”
“Skulls. It was a grisly business,” he said cheerfully. “If you’d like to come down to the Visitors’ Center, I can look up that grave number for you.”
“No,” I said. “I think I’ll stay up here awhile.”
“It is beautiful up here, isn’t it?” he said. He tipped his broad-brimmed hat to me and went back along the brick path and down the hill, stopping once to pick up a scrap of paper by one of the graves.
It was beautiful up here. The spreading town with its blue and gray roofs and blossoming trees hid where the plain had been, and below, where the infantry had been cut down by the rifles behind the stone wall, there was a line of ragtag souvenir shops selling postcards and Confederate flags. There was no sign of the dead horses that had littered the field, the wounded Union soldiers taking cover behind them because there was no other cover. “It is well that war is so terrible,” Lee had said, watching it, “or we should grow too fond of it.”