Too fond of it. Was that what the dreams were all about? Was Lee so fond of it he couldn’t let go of it, even in dreams? No, of course not. He had said that in the morning, when the plain was full of flags and bugle calls and sunlight glinting off the barrels of Springfield rifles.
That night the wounded had lain there where the souvenir shops and the Visitors’ Center were now, freezing to death, and Lee’s barefoot, threadbare soldiers had gone down the hill and over the stone wall that would have been black with blood and icy to the touch. Of course they had to put up a new one. The Confederates had gone down the hill and over the wall and taken their uniforms, with the names pinned to the sleeves, their boots with the names stuffed in the toes. And nobody, not even Lee, could have been fond of war at that point.
I could not possibly let Annie come out here. She had been here already in her dreams, had seen the bodies lying there on the cold ground, had seen the aurora borealis do its bloody dance in the northern sky, but she hadn’t seen the rows of granite markers, and she hadn’t seen the Roll of Honor or heard the ranger read the entries cheerfully, enthusiastically, not even aware of the horror of what he was saying. A lot of times they’d buried horses along with the bodies.
Maybe I couldn’t stop the dreams, but I could protect her from this. And that meant getting her out of Fredericksburg, where well-meant waitresses and pharmacists and taxi drivers drew maps on drugstore counters in their eagerness to get us out here. I went down the hill and into the Visitors’ Center.
The ranger was behind the information desk, emptying a metal wastebasket into the trash can. “I found that grave number for you,” he said, brushing his hands together. He opened a thick, leather-bound book to a page he had marked with a scrap of paper. “They’re listed alphabetically by quartermaster team.”
He turned the book toward me, and I read down the fine-printed page. “Found Wilderness battlefield. Three bodies. Found Charis farm, in cornfield. Two skulls. Found Chancellorsville battlefield. Two bodies.”
“Here it is,” the ranger said, twisting his body around so he could read the numbers. “Two forty-three.” He pointed to a line near the bottom of the page. “Found Lacey’s farm, in apple orchard. Four skulls and parts.”
Found in apple orchard. Four skulls and parts. “It has something to do with the soldier with his name pinned to his sleeve,” Annie had said, trying to get at the meaning of the dreams. But it wasn’t one yellow-haired boy with his name too blurred to read. It was so many it took them years to dig up all the bodies buried in cornfields and under apple trees and put them here, so many they couldn’t bury them separately, they had to bury them all together under one marker.
“Do you know of any good tourist attractions away from Fredericksburg?” I said. “Someplace we could go today? Say within a hundred miles of here.”
He pulled a brochure out from under the desk. “The Wilderness battlefield is only
“Not the Wilderness. Not anything to do with the Civil War.”
He reached under the counter again, looking bewildered, and came up with a road map of Virginia. “Well, there’s Williamsburg, of course. It’s about a hundred miles.” He spread out the map on the counter. “Shenandoah National Park is about a hundred and twenty.” He pointed. “It’s got a lot of beautiful views and hiking trails. I don’t know what the weather’s like to the west, though. There’s supposed to be a big front coming in.”
I leaned over the map. There was no way out of Fredericksburg. To the south, Sayler’s Creek blocked our way to Richmond; to the north we would have to cross the Antietam. Chancellorsville and the Wilderness were between us and Shenandoah on US 3. But if we went south, not so far that we would run into Spotsylvania, and kept to the back roads till we were west of Culpepper, where the battle of Cedar Mountain had been fought, we might be able to do it.
“Is there anything else I can do for you?” the ranger asked eagerly. “There’s a guided tour at eleven.”
“No, thanks.” I folded up the map. “How many unknown soldiers were there altogether?”
“Here, you mean? There are twelve thousand seven hundred and seventy buried in Fredericksburg National Cemetery,” he said as if it were a point of pride. “They’re all Union soldiers, of course.”
“How many altogether? In the whole war?”
“The whole war? Oh, I have no idea. I’m not even sure there’s any way. He took a pencil out of his pocket and began writing oh the battlefield brochure. “All right. We have twelve thousand seven hundred seventy here, and there are eleven hundred and seventy Confederate unknowns in the Confederate Cemetery, and then Spotsylvania.” He wrote down a figure and then reached under the counter again and brought up a stack of brochures. “The Unknowns of the Civil War Memorial at Arlington has two thousand one hundred and eleven ….” He shuffled through the brochures, turned one over. “There are four thousand, a hundred and ten at Petersburg. Gettysburg has nine hundred and seventy-nine unknowns in the cemetery proper, but of course there are more graves on the battlefield. Most of the Confederate dead were moved to Richmond and Savannah and Charleston after the war and buried in mass graves there.”
He riffled through the brochures again. “It all depended on who won the battles, of course. For the loser, over eighty percent would be unknown at any one battle.” He started adding up the figures. “I’d say between a hundred and two hundred and fifty thousand unknown dead altogether, but if you want a more accurate number …”
“Never mind,” I said, and got in the car and went to get Annie.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Traveller only let Lee down once. It was on the march into Maryland, right before Antietam. Lee had been sitting on a log, holding Traveller’s reins loosely in his hands. It was raining, and Lee was wearing a poncho and rubber overalls. Someone shouted, “Yankee cavalry!” and Traveller started. Lee stood up to grab his bridle and tripped over the poncho. He caught himself on his hands. One of his wrists was broken and the other was severely sprained. At Antietam his hands were still in splints.
Annie wasn’t at the inn or the coffee shop. The redheaded waitress, still disapproving, said she had told her to tell me she was at the library, and I thanked her with such obvious relief that she was probably convinced we had had some kind of lovers’ quarrel.
Annie was in the reference section, the L encyclopedias spread out around her in a half-circle, most of them open to a picture of Lincoln’s careworn face, but she wasn’t looking at them. She was staring at the orange-painted bookcases across from her and not seeing them, thinking hard about something. I hoped the something wasn’t Gettysburg.
“Good morning,” I said, sounding like the inanely cheerful park ranger. “I didn’t think you’d be up this early.”
She made a reflexively protective gesture toward the book in front of her, and then shut it before I could see the page it was open to.
“I want to go out and see the vet,” I said. “Maybe he’s heard from his sister.”
“All right.” She closed the other books and stacked them on top of the book in front of her. “Let me just put these away.”
“I’ll help you,” I said, and grabbed for the bottom three books before she could pile the others on top of them. The top two were encyclopedias. The bottom one was the drug compendium I had used to find out about Thorazine. “What are you looking up in here?” I asked. “Are you all right? You’re not having any side effects from the Thorazine, are you?”
“I’m fine,” she said, turning away to put the other encyclopedias back on the shelves. “I wanted to know it the Thorazine was causing the headaches I’ve been having, but it isn’t. Did you go out to the battlefield this morning?”