Lincoln's Dreams

by Connie Willis

“I just thought I’d finish reading the chapter we were on,” I said. “Don’t worry about me. Go back to sleep.”

  She was asleep almost instantly, but I kept on reading. Ben and Malachi made it out of their cornfield and into the dubious safety of the West Wood. Hooker opened fire on another cornfield with every battery he had, and nobody made it out of there. Ben’s brother and the rest of Mansfield’s Twelfth Corps got the order to hold the East Wood and, in the smoke and confusion, began firing at their own Union troops. When Mansfield tried to stop them he was hit in the chest by Confederate fire. It was a mortal wound, but he managed to dismount and lead his wounded horse to safety before he died.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  D. H. Hill had three horses shot out from under him at Antietam. Lee rode Traveller through the whole battle, though he had trouble controlling him with his bandaged hands. When General Walker brought the last of his men across the ford into Virginia the following night, Lee was sitting on Traveller in midstream. “How many divisions are left?” Lee asked, and when Walker told him he was the last except for some wagonloads of wounded that were right behind him, Lee said, “Thank God!” It was Walker’s impression that he had been sitting there all night.

  Annie didn’t have any more dreams. I dozed in the green chair until it was light outside and then went to bed and slept until after nine. Annie was still dead to the world, but Richard was up. He had already called Broun’s house and left another message for me.

  “It’s obvious that you’re projecting your hostility onto me as an authority figure, but of course Broun is the real object of your anger. You’re superimposing your own revenge fantasy on Annie’s emotional illness, but it’s Broun who’s your real enemy.”

  He stopped long enough for me to say, “You’re the enemy, you bastard.”

  “Your conscious mind can’t acknowledge the rage you feel toward Broun for getting his name on the books you’ve researched, so your subconscious cloaks that rage by distorting Annie’s neurotic dreams into Robert E. Lee’s dreams. By so doing, your subconscious can declare war on Broun, as Lee declared war on Lincoln. It’s a common phenomenon in neurotic patients.”

  “How about drugging patients? Is that a common phenomenon in neurotic psychiatrists?”

  Annie was standing in the doorway in her nightgown. She looked frightened. “Who were you talking to, Jeff? Richard?”

  “I wasn’t talking to anybody,” I said, and held the phone out to her so she could listen. “It’s the answering machine. Richard doesn’t know where we are, so he’s trying to get you back this way, by remote psychoanalysis. You’ll be glad to know I’m the one who’s crazy today.” I put the phone back up to my ear. “This may take a while. Broun’s answering machine can hold three hours of messages. Why don’t you get dressed and we’ll go have breakfast. We’ve got to go see the vet at eleven.”

  She nodded and disappeared into the other room. I listened to the rest of Richard’s harangue, made sure Broun hadn’t called in another message, and erased everything on the machine. Broun usually didn’t call in to pick up his messages when he was out of town. He left messages for me as to where he could be reached and then let me get back to him with a list of the things that couldn’t wait. I didn’t think he’d pick up his messages this trip, especially when he thought I was there to do it, but I thought I’d better call the machine once a day to collect them and erase the tape just in case. I didn’t want Broun hearing Richard’s ravings.

  Annie came and stood in the doorway again. “You were friends, weren’t you?” she said. “Before all this?”

  “We were roommates. I guess we were friends, but we were headed in different directions all along.” I picked up my jacket. “He thought I should study something useful instead of history.”

  “I’m sorry,” Annie said.

  “About what? My studying history?” I grinned at her. “It hasn’t turned out to be all that useless.”

  We went over to the coffee shop. It was crowded with people who looked like they were on their way to church. We had a different waitress from the one who had drenched us in coffee the night before, a pretty redhead not much older than Annie, but she came over immediately with the coffeepot, too. “You two must be tourists,” she said when she saw the map of Virginia I’d brought along. She pulled two menus out from under her arm and handed them to us. “Have you been out to the battlefield?”

  “No,” Annie said. “We haven’t been out there yet.”

  “Well, you’ve got to go. It’s the only thing Fredericksburg’s famous for.” She set the coffeepot down and fished an order pad out of her pocket. “The National Park Service has it fixed up real nice. They’ve got an electric map and everything. Now, what’ll you have? Eggs? Hotcakes?”

  The waitress took our order, gave our still-full cups what she called a warmup, and went off to the kitchen.

  “Did you say the appointment with the vet was at eleven?” Annie said.

  “Yeah, but it’s out of town so we’d better allow a little time to find it. You didn’t have any other dreams last night, did you?”

  She shook her head.

  “Was the dream different from the other dreams? I mean, I know it was about Fredericksburg, but was it the same kind of dream as the others?”

  She thought about it a minute. “It was clearer than the other dreams. I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but they make more sense.” She shook her head again. “That’s not it, exactly. I still don’t have any idea where I am or what the things in the dream are until you tell me afterward, but it’s as if I’m getting closer to understanding the dreams.”

  “You mean what’s causing them?”

  “I don’t know. It’s … I can’t explain it. They’re getting clearer.” And more frightening, I thought, watching her face. Whatever it is that she thinks she’s starting to understand is terrifying her.

  The waitress brought our breakfast and more coffee. I waited till Annie was done with her eggs and then asked her, “When do you usually have the dreams? You said last night you usually don’t have them after midnight.”

  “Between nine and midnight. That was why Richard was so worried that night at the reception, because it was after nine. I think he thought I might fall asleep on the loveseat or something, but I don’t have narcolepsy. I just have bad dreams.”

  “You said the Thorazine kept you from dreaming that afternoon after I took you home from Arlington. Do you have the dreams during the day, too?”

  “When the dreams first got bad I thought maybe if I could stay awake past midnight, the dreams would leave me alone, and it worked for a while, but then I started dreaming as soon as I went to sleep, so then I tried staying up all night and sleeping during the day, but that didn’t work either.”

  “And that was two weeks ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you were on the Elavil then?”

  “Yes. I’d been on it for a month and a half.”

  “Did Richard think that was odd, that you were dreaming? Antidepressants are supposed to repress the dream cycle. Did Richard say anything about that?”

  “He was a little worried at first, but he said it took the Elavil a while to work and my sleep record was better. I wasn’t waking up so often, and I was getting a lot more rest.”

  “What about when the dreams got worse… clearer?”

  “He said that was a good sign, that whatever was causing the dreams was trying to break through, that my subconscious was determined to make itself heard.”

  I had assumed that he had taken her off the Elavil because it wasn’t working or was even making the dreams worse. If that wasn’t the reason, what was? According to Annie, he hadn’t even been worried about the dreams, but something had happened to frighten him so badly that he had given her Thorazine to try to stop them.

  The waitress made a frontal assault on our coffee cups again, and Annie and I both tried unsuccessfully to hold her off. “Maybe we’d better retreat before she drowns u
s in this stuff.” I looked at my watch. “It’s ten-fifteen. Why don’t we go ahead and see if we can find this Dr. Barton?”

  “All right,” Annie said. She folded her napkin and laid it on the table.

  “Were you on anything before you came to the Institute? You said your doctor sent you to the Institute. Did he have you on any sedatives or anything?”

  We stood up. “Phénobarbital,” she said, reaching for her coat.

  “Did Richard know that?”

  “Yes, he was upset about it. He said that nobody used barbiturates anymore, certainly not in cases of pleisomnia, that my treatment had been all wrong.”

  “You didn’t keep taking the phenobarbital, did you?”

  “No.”

  I handed Annie the map and got the directions the vet’s wife had given me out of my wallet. South of town, she had said, past Hazel Run on the Massaponax road. A house with a porch.

  All the houses had porches, and we meandered along at least three roads marked Massaponax before we found it. Dr. Barton was back from rounds but just barely and he still had a few animals to look at, his wife told us. She was much younger than she had sounded on the phone, not much older than Annie. She told us we were welcome to go around back to the stable and talk to him there.

  The vet was young, too, with a thin, boyish mustache, and he obviously had never had acromegaly. He was only about five foot eight. He was wearing a pocketed blue shirt, jeans, and a pair of high boots that made him look like a Union army officer.

  “What can I do for you?” he said, looking at a sorrel mare with a bad foot.

  “I doubt if you can do anything for me,” I said. “I’ve made a mistake. I was looking for a Dr. Barton who has acromegaly.”

  “That was my father,” he said, picking up the mare’s left hind foot. “I told Mary I bet that was who you wanted to see when she told me you’d mentioned Dr. Stone’s name.” He put the foot down. “Dad died of a heart attack this fall. What did you want to talk to him about?”

  “I work for Thomas Broun.” The vet nodded as if he’d heard of him. “He’s doing a book on Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had acromegaly.”

  “I know,” he said. “Dad was always interested in other people who’d had acromegaly, especially famous people. Edward the First, the pharaoh Akhenaten, but especially Lincoln. I think because late years he got to look like Lincoln. That happens, you know, with the acromegaly. They all get the big ears and nose and the splayed hands.”

  He picked up each of the mare’s feet one by one, laid his hand flat against the sole of it, and then set the foot back down so the mare would put her weight on it. When he got to the right forefoot, the mare held the foot above the ground for a minute and then set it down carefully. Annie sat down on a bale of hay and watched him.

  “What Broun’s really interested in is Lincoln’s dreams,” I said.

  “The boat dream, huh?” He picked up the forefoot, looked at it, and set it down again. This time the mare put it firmly on the ground. “Dad was always fascinated by that.”

  “Boat dream?”

  “Yeah. Lincoln had this recurring dream.” He started on the mare’s feet again, picking them up, setting them down. When he let go of the right forefoot, the mare put it down and then picked it up again and held it just above the ground. “In the dream he was in a boat drifting toward a dark, hazy shore. He dreamed it before battles: Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg. He dreamed it the night before he was assassinated, too.”

  I looked at Annie, worried about what effect all this talk about dreams might be having on her, but she looked more interested in the mare than in our conversation.

  “Did your father ever mention having any dreams?”

  He pulled a small curved knife out of his shirt pocket. “About boats? I don’t think so. Why?”

  “Broun thinks Lincoln’s dreams may have had something to do with his acromegaly. Did he ever mention the acromegaly causing him to dream a lot?”

  “That’s an interesting theory.” He thought a minute. “I don’t remember Dad ever mentioning any dreams. If you know anything about acromegaly, you know it produces headaches and depression. My father was a very unhappy man. He didn’t talk much, especially about his acromegaly. He told me as much about his symptoms as this mare does. The only time I ever heard him talk about it was in connection with famous people like Lincoln or Akhenaten. Toward the end it became almost an obsession with him.”

  He picked up the right front foot and began scraping away at the bottom of the hoof with the knife. “Speaking of Akhenaten, the Egyptians were big on dreams,” he said. “They wrote them down, hired soothsayers to interpret them, believed their dreams could predict the future. There might be something …” He brushed away the shavings and peered at the bottom of the foot. “No, I doubt if there’d be anything on Akhenaten’s dreams. The next pharaoh who came along, Ramses, wiped out just about every trace of him. Knocked down all his statues, scratched out his name wherever he could find it, burned everything.”

  “Then how do they know he had acromegaly?”

  “They don’t,” he said. He poked at something on the hoof with the top of the knife and frowned. He let go of the foot and watched as the mare put her foot down. She put her weight on it with no hesitation. “It was just a pet theory of Dad’s. There are a couple of wall paintings and statues that Ramses missed. They show him as having elongated ears and a wide, flat nose, and what records there are comment on his height. One of the hieroglyphics also called him melancholy, which, like I said, is one of the symptoms of acromegaly.”

  “Or of knowing the next pharaoh’s going to do his best to make everybody forget you,” I said.

  He grinned. “Right. It’s all just a game, guessing what diseases people back in history had. Or guessing what diseases people have now, for that matter.” He took hold of the mare’s bridle and began walking her up and down past us, watching carefully to see which foot she favored.

  “With animals it’s really a guessing game. They can’t tell you where it hurts or what they think they have. Like this mare here,” he said, still parading her in a slow circle. “She’s got a sore foot, probably a bruised sole or a prick from a horseshoe nail, but it could be laminitis or corns or something else altogether. I can’t find the infection, so I can’t tell. The only sure way of finding out is to let her alone till it’s gotten really serious. Then the infection will be easy to find—the hoof will be hot to the touch, she won’t be able to put any weight on it, and she’ll have developed a lot of other symptoms. Only problem is, by then it could be too late to do her any good, especially if she’s picked up a nail. I need to find it now.”

  “What if you can’t find it?” Annie said.

  “Then I’ll give her a tetanus shot and wait till I can, but I’ll find it. The clues to what’s going on are there. You just have to look a little harder to find them at this stage.” He stopped the mare and tied her bridle securely to a rail and picked up the right front foot again. “With animals you either have too many symptoms or not enough, and one’s as bad as the other. I had a bay in here last week had every symptom in the book and then some. Had to sort through a dozen diseases before I got the right one. But I love a good mystery, don’t you?”

  He scraped away at the caked dirt on the hoof, turning the knife blade on edge to get in close to the shoe. We weren’t getting anywhere with all this, but the barn was warm and smelled of dry hay, and Annie looked as if she was thinking about the mare’s sore foot and not about that other horse with its legs shot off. Dr. Barton dug in with the knife, and the mare began to shake her head as if telling him to stop. Annie stood up and went over to her, taking hold of the bridle just under the mare’s chin, and stroking her neck.

  “Your father never talked about his dreams, not even in connection with Lincoln’s boat dream?”

  “Not to me. He moved to Georgia last year when he started having heart problems. Did you know high blood pressure and heart disease were connecte
d to acromegaly?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  He stopped scraping and put the horse’s foot down. “Dad might have told my sister his dreams. She was always his favorite, and he used to talk to her more than to the rest of us. Would you like me to call her?”

  “I’d appreciate it if you would,” I said, and wrote out our phone number at the inn. “Ask her if he had any dreams. They don’t have to be about boats.”

  “Boats,” he said thoughtfully, folding up the piece of paper and sticking it in his pocket. The mare had tangled her mane in the bridle when she tossed her head. Annie pulled the forelock out from under it, smoothed it, and patted the mare’s forehead. “The Egyptians dreamed a lot about boats. Symbol of the passage to the world of the dead.”

  We left the vet to the mystery of the sore foot and drove back to the inn. We had lunch at a McDonald’s on the way back into town, and when we got back to the inn, Annie took a nap.

  I called the answering machine. There was a jumble of messages from people who hadn’t figured out Broun was gone yet, and Richard had left another message on the machine.

  “I’ve been looking at the results of Annie’s blood tests, and I think I’ve found the key to what’s happening here,” he said in his Good Shrink voice. “Her L-tryptophan levels are indicative of cryptomnesia.” He waited long enough for me to ask what cryptomnesia was. “It occurs when the patient presents early memories as reality, something the patient saw or read in a book and the conscious mind has forgotten. The subconscious mind then reintegrates the material as reality. Bridey Murphy. Her memories of an earlier life in Ireland were stories her nurse had told her in a preverbal stage, and under hypnosis she presented them as a previous life.”

  “Annie wasn’t hypnotized,” I said. “She was drugged.”

  “She obviously had preverbal contact with someone who told her stories about the Civil War, or there’s a possibility of more recent reading of Civil War novels. Maybe she read one of Broun’s books. That would account for her immediate neurotic attachment to you. She’s experiencing schizophrenic dissociation, and you represent Broun.”