She dreamed she stood on the porch of Arlington and argued with Richard, who was wearing slippers. The vet was in the dream, too. He handed Richard a message, and Richard tore it into little pieces and threw them on the ground.

“Who is the vet?” she asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Pickett maybe? Longstreet?”

“No,” she said bitterly. “Richard is always Longstreet.”

She dreamed about Gettysburg, the retreating soldiers sometimes coming back into the orchard from a burning house, sometimes carrying a chicken in their arms. She tried to reform them under the apple tree, but she couldn’t because Annie Lee was asleep under the tree.

There were no tears or sleepwalking during the dreams, and afterwards she recited her horrors to me gravely and I explained them as best I could, but she scarcely heard me. She seemed to be conserving all her strength for the dreams, lying perfectly still under the green-and-white coverlet. Her cheeks no longer burned, and when I touched her hands or her forehead, they were cold.

In the early hours of the morning I called the answering machine. Richard said, “Annie’s records show low levels of serotonin, which is indicative of a suicidal depression. The symbolism of her dream corroborates that. The rifle represents the desire to inflict harm, the dead soldier is obviously herself.”

“I was right about the Dreamtime thing,” Broun said. “They were a bunch of quacks. Imaginative quacks, though. They said the dreams were warnings sent by Willie Lincoln to his dad, and when I asked them how Willie Lincoln happened to be sending messages, and why, if they knew what was going to happen, the rest of the dead didn’t warn us of impending disaster, they came back with this theory that the dead normally sleep peacefully, but that Willie’s rest had been disturbed when Lincoln dug him up.

“I’m flying up to Sacramento Wednesday to a sleep clinic there. I’ll be home sometime Tuesday. I’ve got an autograph party Saturday in L.A. and an appointment on Monday. I hope you’re doing okay on the galleys, son. I’m going to be impossible to get in touch with for the next few days.”

“I know,” I said.

I didn’t get any sleep to speak of. “Did you manage to get some sleep, Jeff?” Annie asked at breakfast. She looked as it she hadn’t. Her face was pale and there were dark, bruised-looking shadows around her eyes. She sat stiffly in the booth, as if her back hurt, and occasionally rubbed her hand along her arm.

“Some. How about you?”

“I’ll be all right,” she said, and handed me the stack of manuscript. She let the waitress pour her some coffee while she tried to find the place we’d left off.

“You know that big front they were talking about?” the waitress said. “It got stalled over the Midwest for a few days, but now it’s moving again. We’re supposed to get six inches of snow tonight. Can you believe that? In April.”

“Where are we?” Annie said after she left.

“Page six-fifty-six,” I said. “Where it starts, ‘ “No,” Nelly said.’ Page six-fifty-six.” I separated the manuscript into two piles, one only fifty or so pages thick. We were almost done, and what would we do then while we waited for the dreams?

“No” Nelly said, (Annie read) “and Ben tried to come awake to help her, but it was like trying to roll out from under the horse that had fallen on Malachi.

“He’s dead,” Mrs. Macklin said. She sounded impatient, as if Nelly had done something stupid.

“I know he’s dead,” Nelly said, and the need in her voice brought Ben completely awake. He pushed himself up in the bed. Pain roared out from his ankle, and he opened and closed his mouth in little gasps, trying to keep from screaming, pinned down by the pain.

He turned his head and looked at Nelly, She was sitting on a wooden chair next to Caleb’s bed. She was holding Caleb’s hand, gently, as she had every night since he had been brought in. His fingers clung to hers, and his eyes were closed, but he didn’t look like he was asleep. He must have been dead the whole night.

“You can’t do anything for him,” Mrs. Macklin said, and took hold of Nelly’s wrist.

“Let go of her,” Ben said, and then had to breathe in and out rapidly again so the pain wouldn’t overtake him, “Leave her be.”

Mrs, Macklin ignored him. “Twenty men downstairs half dead and you sit here,” she said accusingly, “Let go of his hand.” Still holding Nelly by the wrist, she yanked her to standing, and Caleb’s arm came up smartly, as if he were saluting.

“No,” Nelly said desperately, “please,” and Ben lunged for Mrs. Macklin, but he didn’t make it. His foot got shot off again, worse than the first time, and he thought they must have had to cut it off at the knee.

When he opened his eyes to see, Nelly was still sitting beside the bed, but the boy’s body was gone, and somebody had laid a gray blanket over the ticking.

“I’m sorry,” Ben said.

Nelly rubbed her wrist. It looked red and puffy. “Do you know what he said to me yesterday?” she said. “He said that as long as I was holding on to him he had beautiful dreams.” She rubbed at her wrist, making it redder.

“You done the best you could,” Ben said. “He ain’t dreaming no more now anyways,” and he wanted to take her hand and hold tight, but he knew he’d be shot again before he reached the edge of the bed.

“I broke my promise,” she said.

“My friend Toby Banks that I told you about promised his mama he’d come home without a scratch on him. Some promises they just… you done the best you could. After he was,” he stopped and cast around for some way to say ‘dead,’ “after he was passed on to glory, he couldn’t feel whether you was holding on nohow.”

“Promise me you won’t reenlist when your foot gets better,” she said.

“I promise,” he said, but she went on sitting by the bed, rubbing her wrist.

After a while Mrs. Macklin came in and asked to look at Nelly’s wrist. “No,” Nelly said.

“It’s all swollen,” Mrs. Macklin said angrily. “I’m a nurse. It’s my duty to tend to …”

Nelly stood up, knocking the wooden chair over. “Don’t you talk to me about duty,” she said, cradling her arm like a baby against her, “not when you wouldn’t let me do mine.”

Annie stopped reading. “I want to go to Arlington,” she said.

We had been through all this before. “There’s no reason to go to Arlington. We know what the dreams mean. Lee blamed himself for Annie’s death. Maybe he thought it wouldn’t have happened if Annie had been at home, if they hadn’t had to leave Arlington. We even know what the message is. It’s the letter telling him Annie’s dead. There isn’t any reason to go back to Arlington.”

“I have to …” She didn’t finish what she was going to say. “The dreams are going in circles. It’s like when I kept dreaming about the cat, and then when we went out to Arlington, it helped.”

Helped who? I wondered. You or Lee? She was helping him have the dreams, helping him sleep in that marble tomb of his at Lexington, and what was he doing to her?

“I think he is trying to atone,” Annie had said. Lee had loved his daughter. Surely he wouldn’t do anything to hurt Annie. I wished I could believe that. I wished I could believe this atonement of his didn’t mean dragging Annie through the Civil War till both their hearts were broken.

“Look,” I said, “you heard what the waitress said. The weather’s supposed to get bad, and anyway the vet’s not back from his conference. I think we should wait till we hear from him. That way we can finish the galleys, too. We can take them up to New York and stop at Arlington on the way.”

The waitress brought our eggs. “It’s snowing in Charleston,” she said. “I just heard it on the radio.”

“See?” I said, as if that settled it.