“The brochure says nobody knows what happened to the soldier that’s buried under this marker, but that isn’t true either. After the war, when he didn’t come back, the people who were waiting for him knew. His mother or his sweetheart or his daughter. They knew he was dead because he didn’t come back.”
“Some of the soldiers just never went home after the war. Some of them lit out for California and the gold mines, and they wrote letters home that got lost in the mails, and they weren’t dead after all.”
The wind had stopped and the snow was falling slowly, covering the numbers on the marker at our feet, burying the boys with their yellow hair and their outflung arms, blurring the charred pieces of paper they had pinned to their sleeves.
“What happens to Ben in The Duty Bound?” Annie asked.
I had no idea how Broun had ended the book. He had killed off Malachi and Toby and Caleb. Maybe he had an epidemic of typhoid in the last chapter and killed everybody else. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Does he die?”
“Die? Ben? He’s the hero. Of course he doesn’t die. He marries Nelly and they go back to Hillsboro and have ten kids and live happily ever after. Broun loves happy endings.”
The marker was completely covered with snow. You couldn’t even tell it was there in the path.
“I’m sorry I got you into all this Jeff,” she said, still looking at the marker. “I needed your help. I didn’t even think how it would be for you.” She looked up at me. “I had another dream.”
“When? This afternoon? Is that why you came out here by yourself?”
“Last night,” she said. “I didn’t tell you.”
“Because you didn’t want to wake me up?”
“Because I didn’t want to have the dream. Because I already knew what it meant.”
“You don’t have to tell me your dream,” I said. “Let me take you back to the inn. It’s starting to snow. You’ll catch pneumonia.”
“Did you know that when Willie Lincoln had pneumonia. Bud Taft held his hand the whole time?”
“Annie …”
“Bud fell asleep once, and Lincoln picked him up and carried him off to another room. He shouldn’t have done that. Willie might have called for him.”
“Bud was only a little boy,” I said.
“Right before he died, Willie clutched Bud’s hand and said his name.” She was still watching the snow sift down onto the graves. “What happened to Lee after the war?”
“He lived for years. He became president of Washington College. Miley came out and took his picture, and tourists came and pulled hairs out of Traveller’s tail. Lee said he looked like a plucked chicken. He took little girls for rides on Traveller and let them hang daisy chains on him. They lived for years.”
“I think the war is almost over,” she said. “I think that’s what my dream means.”
“Did you know Traveller saved Lee’s life up here?” I said, sounding like a frantic tour guide. “A shell burst and Traveller reared up on his hind legs or they’d both have been killed. The shell went right under them.”
She didn’t even hear me.
“I was asleep,” she said, looking at the snow falling on the graves. “In the dream. I was sleeping out under the apple tree in the bed I had when I was a little girl, only in the dream it had a green-and-white coverlet. I was asleep and the pharmacist came and woke me up and told me it was time to go and I got up and got dressed. I put on a dress with a red sash I had for Easter the year I was ten, and a blue cape. I knew I had to look as nice as possible, and at the last minute, when I was all dressed and they were all waiting for me, I stopped and made my bed. I asked the pharmacist to help me. He was getting dressed, too. He was putting his cuff links in, but he stopped to help me, and all the time we worked on the bed he was crying. ‘It’s time to go,’ he said. The whole time I was dreaming I had the feeling it was Easter Sunday.”
She stopped and turned to look at me, expectantly, waiting for me to help her. And I could no more help her than Ben could keep them from taking away Caleb’s body.
And what had I expected? I had brought her here to this town that was all graveyard and told her about other graveyards—Arlington and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg—and, as it that weren’t enough, I had read her a whole book on the subject of Duty, hundreds and hundreds of pages of people who had just signed up they didn’t know why, of people who had to see it through even though they hadn’t counted on getting kilt.
Where had I thought it would lead, this road “past the second Manassas, to Chancellorsville,” except here? I should have known from the beginning that to get her away from Arlington, to help her past Fredericksburg and Jackson’s death, past even Gettysburg, was bound to lead to this, that all the roads Traveller carried Lee over had to converge here in an apple orchard near Appomattox Court House. She had dreamed about an apple orchard in the very first dream, an apple orchard and a house with a porch. I should have known then.
Lee had lost a third of his men at Sayler’s Creek. The day after, April seventh. Grant wrote offering surrender terms. Sheridan was moving west and north to block Lee’s retreat at Appomattox Station, and Meade had the rear guard under attack. The infantry wasn’t strong enough to fight its way through. Its only chance was to try to escape to the west, into the mountains, slipping around the Union flank, and for the next two days they tried that.
At dawn on April ninth. Palm Sunday, they attempted to break out near Appomattox Station, but the attack failed. Lee met with his officers in an apple orchard outside Appomattox Court House and told them he had arranged to meet with General Grant. The surrender terms were signed in the house of Wilmer McLean, a man who had originally lived near Manassas Junction. After the second battle of Bull Run, he had moved to the little village of Appomattox Court House, “where the sound of battle would never reach them.” The house was a two-story brick farmhouse. It had a covered wooden porch that ran the length of the building.
“We can’t stay out here in this snow,” I said. “It’s getting dark. Why don’t we go have some supper? Our waitress won’t know what to do with herself if we’re not there to have our coffee cups refilled.”
Annie’s uncovered hair was getting wet. It curled up around her face.
“Please,” she said, and held her hand out to me, and she was as far away from me as Ben had been from Nelly, distanced not so much by the dead man between them as by his own pain.
Maybe Annie was right, and the dream meant the war was almost over. Maybe the dreams were almost over, too, and we could both go home together, paroled. At Appomattox Lee had gotten Grant to let the men keep their horses.
“It’s not Easter,” I said, looking down across the graves, past the souvenir shops and the roofs and trees to the line of river, wondering if Lee had been thinking of Traveller when he asked Grant not to confiscate the horses. “It’s Palm Sunday.”
Lee had gotten up and dressed in his best, his dress uniform and a red sash and his blue military cape because, as he said, he was likely to be taken prisoner. “There is nothing left for me to do but go and see General Grant,” he told his officers, “and I would rather die a thousand deaths.” Lee asked advice of Longstreet and the other officers, and then mounted Traveller and rode to the McLean house. Along the way he saw Sam McGowan, his staff officer, struggling out of his muddy clothes and into a dress uniform, weeping like a child.
Annie and I went back down the hill, she holding my hand, the terraced steps already slippery, the graves hardly visible in the coming dark. The taxi was still there, its motor running and its windshield wipers going, the driver waiting patient as a horse.
I sent him home and took Annie to the coffee shop and told her about the last days before the surrender. Our waitress poured us cups of coffee that steamed the windows up so we couldn’t see out into the snowy darkness.
“They say it’s supposed to warm up tomorrow and turn into rain, but I don’t believe it,” she told us. “I hope yo
u aren’t going anywhere.”
“No,” I said, and wished it were true. “We aren’t going anywhere.”
I took Annie up to the room and put her to bed. “I’ll be right here,” I said, as if she were going away, and held her hand till she fell asleep. Then I finished the acknowledgments and went and stood by the window and waited.
She lay perfectly still under the coverlet, one hand resting on her chest, the other at her side, her cheeks pale as marble. After a long time, she sat up in the bed, the green-and-white sprigged muslin over her hunched knees like a crinoline, and put her hands over her face.
“What is it?” I asked. “What did you dream?”
She looked up at me and tried to speak, her eyes full of tears.
“Did you dream about Appomattox?” I asked.
She nodded, looking straight ahead, the tears welling up, and she didn’t have to tell me what she had dreamed. I knew.
They met in the parlor of the McLean house in the early afternoon. Grant told Lee that they’d met before in Mexico and that he would have known him anywhere. He apologized to Lee for being in a field uniform and muddy boots. He and Lee discussed the terms of surrender, Grant doing his best to “let ’em up easy,” as Lincoln had ordered him to.
Lee told Grant that in the Confederate army the cavalry and artillery units owned their own horses, and asked that they be allowed to keep them since most of the men were small farmers and would need them for the spring planting. Arrangements were made to feed Lee’s army from Union supplies. The terms of surrender were drawn up and signed.
When it was all over, Lee came out of the house and stood by Traveller while the orderly buckled the bridle. Lee slipped Traveller’s forelock over the brow-band and smoothed it, absently patting the gray’s forehead. Then he mounted the horse that had carried him from “Fredericksburg, the last day at Chancellorsville, to Pennsylvania, at Gettysburg, and back to the Rappahannock” and rode back to the apple orchard to tell his men. “Men, we have fought through the war together,” he told them, “and I have done the best I could for you.”
The men, boys most of them, barefoot and hungry and dead on their feet, his men crowded around him, yelling out, “We’ll go on fightin’ for you. General!” and “I love you just as well as ever!” and “Goodbye!,” but most of them couldn’t speak at all and they reached out to touch Traveller’s mane and side and flanks. Lee looked straight ahead, his face set, tears in his eyes, but Traveller tossed his head all down the line, as if the cheers were for him.
“It’s all right,” I said. “You won’t dream anymore. The war’s over.”
She held out her arms to me, and I took her and held her and never let her go.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lee seemed to understand the need for surrender before any of his generals did. By the time they made it to the apple orchard, half of his army had been destroyed. Nothing was left of the infantry but a few brigades and Longstreet’s and Gordon’s corps, and none of them had had anything to eat in days. Yet, when he showed Grant’s first letter of surrender terms to General Longstreet, Longstreet snapped, “Not yet,” and when he asked Venable what kind of answer he should send, Venable said stiffly, “I would not answer such a letter.” “Ah, but it must be answered,” Lee said.
The last night before the surrender he slept, all alone, under an apple tree, holding on to Traveller’s bridle.
We went on reading galleys in the coffee shop the next day as if nothing had happened and we would do this every morning for the rest of our lives. During the night the snow had turned to a cold rain.
“We should be able to finish them off this afternoon,” I said, “and then tomorrow we can run them up to New York and hand them to the publishers. What’s the weather like?” I asked our waitress.
“It’s raining hard north of here. Some truckers in here were talking about flooding.”
Annie yawned. She looked beautiful, rested, her cheeks as pink as that first night when she had come to me for help. I took hold of her hand.
“Why don’t you go back to bed?” I said. “You’ve got a lot of catching up on sleep to do. I’ll call McLaws and Herndon.” The waitress frowned. “And the highway patrol.”
We went back up to the room. I called the answering machine to make sure Broun hadn’t decided to come home. Broun had left a message. “Pay dirt,” he said, sounding excited. “I knew I was on the right track. The sleep clinic has some TB patients they’ve been studying because the fever makes them have more REM sleep. All of them dream about being buried alive. They say they can feel the cold wet dirt being shoveled in on them. The doctors say it’s the night sweats, but I talked to them and some of them started having these dreams before they had any other symptoms.
“Not only that, but as the disease progresses the dreams get clearer and less symbolic and they dream their own symptoms, fevers and coughing and blood, and sometimes they dream about dying, being at their own funeral, being in the coffin. That’s why Lincoln dreamed the coffin dream that last week. His acromegaly was getting worse.
“But here’s the best part. One of the patients is this kid who was reading Treasure Island. I asked him about it and he said Robert Louis Stevenson was his hero because he had TB as a kid, too. He said Stevenson had dreamed about being buried alive, too. Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed the same dream over a hundred years ago!”
He didn’t say where he was. He had an autograph party in L.A. on Saturday and an appointment with a neurologist on Monday. He would be home sometime Tuesday if he finished with the prodromic-dreams thing.
Broun’s agent had left another message. “I told McLaws and Herndon the galleys would in Monday at the latest. If you can’t reach Broun, they’ll have to go in as is.”
Before she had even stopped talking, Richard said, “You have to call me immediately.”
“The hell I do,” I said, and hung up. I took the galleys and went back into Annie’s room. Annie was asleep, on top of the covers, her legs pulled up against her body. She was cradling her left arm in her right, as if it hurt. I took the folded-up blanket at the foot of the bed and put it over her.
There were only a few pages of The Duty Bound left to go. Mrs. Macklin had broken Nelly’s wrist trying to get her away from her dead private. The alcoholic surgeon had had to take time off from sawing at arms to set hers and put it in a sling. Mrs. Macklin wanted her to go home. “You can’t do any good here,” she said.
“You told me that once before,” Nelly said. “You have your duty. I have mine,” and kept working as long as they had a hospital, which wasn’t long. The armies swarmed around and past Winchester, and the hospital had to be moved and men dismantled and the soldiers too hurt to walk taken off in wagons. When Ben’s unit marched past on its way to Fredericksburg, Ben went with them.
“No,” Nelly said when he told her he was going.
Annie sat up in the bed and screamed. I jerked as if I’d been shot. I dropped the galleys and stood up. My foot was asleep and I half-fell onto the bed. She screamed again and put up her hands to ward me off. I grabbed her wrists. “Wake up, Annie. You’re having a bad dream. Wake up!”
I could feel her heartbeat through her wrists, fast and light. “No!” she said, and her voice was full of desperation. She tried to pull away from my grip.
“Annie, wake up! It’s just a dream.”
“I’m so cold,” she said, and I thought for a minute she was awake. “It got so cold. In the church.” She was shivering and her breath was coming in gasps, as if she had been running. “The meeting took so long.”
What meeting? Not the meeting with Longstreet at Gettysburg. That was in a school, not a church. Dunker Church? Surely she wasn’t going to dream Antietam, not now, when the dreams were supposed to be over.
“They couldn’t decide … I finally said … so cold!” Her teeth were chattering. I let go of her wrists and wrapped the blanket around her shoulders. I pulled the sides of the coverlet up and over her legs.
> “What were they meeting about?”
She tried to say something through her chattering teeth, closed her eyes, and turned on her side. She gasped and shifted, as if her arm hurt. She put her hand up to cradle her elbow and murmured something I could not make out. Then she turned again, still holding her arm, and said clearly, “Tell Hill to come up.”
And now I knew what church she’d dreamed about. I shut my eyes.
She slept for another hour. I sat with her awhile and then went into the other room, hobbling on my still half-asleep foot, stripped the bed, and piled the blankets over her.
The phone rang. It was the vet’s wife with a message. Dr. Barton had called home from the horse-disease conference. He had two things he wanted to tell me. One was that he had gotten to talking about me with some of the other veterinarians at the convention, and one of them mentioned that he had just read an article about acromegaly in one of the science magazines. He thought I might be interested. She didn’t know which magazine, she was just relaying the message.
The second thing was that he had finally gotten in touch with his sister. She didn’t remember Dr. Barton—she meant Dr. Barton’s father—ever saying anything about dreaming about coffins or boats, and she thought he would have mentioned it. He was very interested in dreams because of his study of the Egyptians. He had had a recurring dream for months before he died that he was convinced was warning him of his death. He had dreamed he was lying dead out under the apple tree in his backyard.
“What did he die of?” I asked. “The acromegaly?”
“No,” the vet’s wife said. “He died of a heart attack.”
“What symptoms did he have? Before the heart attack?”
“Gosh, I don’t know. He was living with Hank’s sister, and we didn’t see much of him. He complained of his arm hurting a lot, I know, because Hank’s sister thought it was arthritis, but afterwards the doctor told her it was probably angina, and I remember he rubbed his wrist all the time.”