I took my hand away from the keys. So it hadn’t been the sunken lane, the west wood after all.

“I thought you were right, that Lee was having the dreams during the Civil War and they were coming across time somehow, but yesterday, when I saw that postcard of his tomb at Lexington, I knew he was dead.” She was looking at me earnestly, her hand still on my arm. “Richard told me that dreams help you work through the things that happened to YOU, that they’re kind of a healing mechanism to help you get over grief and come to terms with the guilt you couldn’t deal with any other way, only if there’s too much guilt the dreams can’t handle it. That’s what he said was happening with me, but what if you had so much guilt and grief that you went on dreaming after you were dead?”

How many dreams would it take to heal Lee of Fredericksburg? Twelve thousand seven hundred and seventy? Lee’s dreams weren’t a “healing mechanism.” They were a burial detail, and how many dreams would it take to bury all those boys at Gettysburg who staggered back from Pickett’s Charge to collapse at Lee’s feet, how many dreams to bury all the boys in the bloody angles and sunken roads of Lee’s mind? Two hundred and fifty-eight thousand? A hundred years’ worth?

“You told me Lee was a good man,” Annie said, “and he is, Jeff, but he had to send all those boys back into battle, and they didn’t have any shoes and no ammunition. He knew they’d be killed, but he had to send them in anyway. He had to send his own son Rob back in. How could he stand it, all those boys killed and nobody even knowing what happened to them? I think they still haunt him, after all these years, even though he’s dead.”

“And so he haunts you.”

“No. It isn’t like that. I think he’s trying to atone.”

“By inflicting his nightmares on you?”

“He’s not inflicting them on me. It isn’t like that. I’m helping him sleep somehow. Even though he’s dead.”

“And in the meantime, what are the dreams doing to you?”

She didn’t answer.

“I’ll tell you what they’re doing. The dreams are getting worse, and they’re going to go on getting worse until we do something.” She started to protest. “Look, maybe you’re right. Lee’s dreaming in his tomb, and you’re letting him get some sleep by having the dreams, in which case it won’t matter where we go, the dreams will go right along with us. Only maybe not. Maybe it’s the battlefield that’s aggravating the dreams, and if we get away from it, the dreams will let up. The point is, you’re not getting any sleep, you’re not eating anything, and what good are you going to be to Lee if you pitch headlong down a flight of stairs some night?”

I started the car. “I think we should go to Shenandoah, get some rest, eat some fried chicken, get away from the dreams for a while, and if we can’t get away from them, try to ignore them. You’re not deserting. You’re just getting away for a little while. On furlough.” I was lying. It I managed to get her out of here I would never let her come back.

“Clean away,” Annie said, and I wondered if she knew I was lying, if she wanted to get away, too.

“We won’t talk about the dreams, we won’t think about the dreams, we’ll go hiking and eat fried chicken and look at the Blue Ridge Mountains. All right?”

She sighed, a long, surrendering sigh. “All right,” she said.

I drove back onto gravel, onto pavement, and out onto the road we had come up on. A mile up it turned into a county road, and a few miles after that onto a two-lane highway with a long, straight stretch of road.

It could have been summer. Some of the trees were already in full leaf, and it was unbelievably warm. There weren’t any clouds at all in the sky, not even above the line of blue in the west where we could already see the Blue Ridge Mountains. I speeded up, anxious to put as much distance as I could between us and Fredericksburg. It was past lunchtime, but we would eat later, when we were closer to Shenandoah.

“This is more like it,” I said, resting my arm on the open window. “I thought for a while there we were never going to see a highway again.” I had told Annie we weren’t going to talk about the dreams, but that was easier said than done. The dreams were all we’d thought about for days. I couldn’t talk about the battlefield, or Lee, or Lincoln either, who had been afflicted with bad dreams, too. And I could hardly tell her carefree college-days stories about my old roomie Richard, I said, sounding more than ever like the park ranger. “Broun and I got lost on a back road like that one time when I first came to work for him. He wanted me to take some pictures of the country around Antietam, but he was convinced I’d get lost, so he came with me and got us both stuck in a mud puddle. We had to walk out and get a tow truck. He wouldn’t even let me do that by myself. He was like that the whole first year I worked for him.”

“Not letting you do anything?” Annie said. “Why not?”

“I don’t know. He’d never had a research assistant before, and I guess he was used to doing everything himself. He was just starting The Duty Bound, and there was tons of research to do on Antietam, but he insisted on doing it all, especially the stuff at the battlefield. I thought when we got there he’d let me do at least some of the legwork for him, but he wouldn’t. He traipsed around the battlefield, taking notes like crazy, snapping pictures, stretching out flat on his back so he could get what he called ‘the soldier’s eye view—’”

I stopped and glanced anxiously at Annie, but she was watching the scenery, still smiling. Her blonde hair was blowing in the wind, and she brushed it out of her face.

“He cut his foot wading across Antietam Creek,” I went on. “On an old tin lid. It bled like crazy. His foot, not the lid. He had to have a tetanus shot and twelve stitches, and he still wouldn’t let me take over.”

Outside of Remington, the two-lane highway connected with the state highway to Culpepper. I cut south again.

“So here he is, hobbling around, trying to run things—”

“Like Longstreet,” Annie said.

“And he announces he’s going to Springfield. His publishers called and they want him to check the epigraph he used on the last book, so he’s going all the way to Springfield to see what’s written on Lincoln’s tomb or some damn thing, and I blew up. I said, ‘What in the hell did you hire me for? You won’t let me do anything, not even go look at some damned dead bodies.’”

Oh, Richard would have a heyday with this conversation. “Those are obviously Freudian slips,” he would say in his Good Shrink voice. “The subconscious is speaking, bringing up subjects the conscious mind wants to avoid.”

“So did he let you go to Springfield for him?” Annie asked, looking like she was unaware of the slips, Freudian or otherwise. She had taken my advice to heart. She was relaxing, getting away, even though I didn’t seem able to.

“He let me go to Springfield, but he kept calling me on the car phone on the trip out, reminding me to look at this and remember to ask that. He left messages at my motel and made me call every night and dictate my notes onto that damned answering machine of his. He just about drove me crazy. And then I don’t know what happened. Maybe he decided he hadn’t hired an incompetent idiot or something. He quit pestering me and let me do the research he’d sent me to do and from then on he let me do what he’d hired me to, which was to help him.”

I didn’t know till I got to the end of that instructive little story that that was what it was. My subconscious was calling for attention, all right, banging on the door to be let out, “He still does a lot of his own research,” I said, as if to convince myself that I hadn’t just been lecturing Annie on the subject of letting me take over, letting me help her. I have your best interests at heart.

“Maybe he had trouble giving up the research because he loved it,” Annie said.