Lincoln's Dreams

“When I first started having it, I couldn’t remember very much of the dream. The dead soldier was in it and the snow and the apple tree, but it wasn’t very clear. I don’t mean fuzzy exactly, but distant, sort of. And then, after I’d been at the Institute for two weeks, it suddenly got clearer, and when I woke up from it I was so scared I didn’t know what to do.” Her gloved hands were clenched tightly in her lap.

“Did you go back to the Institute?”

“No.” She looked down at her hands. “I called Richard up and told him I was afraid to stay alone, and he said to get a cab and come right over, that I could stay with him.”

I’ll bet he did, I thought. “You said the dream was clearer? You mean, like focusing a camera?”

“No, not exactly. The dream itself didn’t change. It was just more frightening. And clearer somehow. I started noticing things like the message on the soldier’s arm. It had been there all along, but I just hadn’t seen it before. And I noticed the apple tree was in bloom. I don’t think it was in the first dream.”

The windshield wipers were starting to ice up. I opened my window and reached around to smack the wiper against the windshield. A narrow band of ice broke off and slid down the window. “What about the cat? Was it in the dream from the beginning?”

“Yes. Do you think I’m crazy like Richard says?”

“No.” I pulled very carefully away from the curb and onto the wide road.

I couldn’t see the curving stone gates until we were almost up to them, and I couldn’t see Arlington House at all. You can usually see it all the way from the Mall across the Potomac, looking like a golden Greek temple instead of a plantation, with its broad porch and buff-colored pillars.

“Robert E. Lee had a cat, didn’t he?” she said.

“Yes,” I said, and turned in at the iron gate that led to the visitors’ center, flashed the pass Broun had that let him drive into the cemetery instead of parking in the visitors’ lot, at a guard in a raincoat and a plastic-covered hat, and drove on up the hill to the back of Arlington House. We still couldn’t see more than a bare outline of the house through the sleet, even after I’d parked the car at the back of the house next to the outbuilding that had been turned into the gift shop, but Annie wasn’t looking at the house. As soon as I’d parked the car, she got out and walked around to the garden as if she knew exactly where she was going.

I followed her, squinting through the snow at the house to see if it was open to visitors. I couldn’t tell. There weren’t any other cars in the parking lot, and there weren’t any footprints leading up to the house, but the snow was coming down fast enough that it could have hidden them. The only way to tell would be to go up to the front door, but Annie was already standing in front of the first of the tombstones at the edge of the garden, her head bent to look at the name on the wet tombstone as if she wasn’t even aware of the snow.

I went over and stood next to her. The snow still wasn’t sticking to the grass except in little isolated clumps that melted and refroze, making webs of ice between the blades of grass, but the wind had blown enough snow against the tombstones to make them almost unreadable. I could barely make out the name on the first one.

“John Goulding, Lieutenant, Sixteenth New York Cavalry,’” Annie read.

“These aren’t the soldiers who were originally buried here,” I said. “Those were all enlisted men. Officers were buried on the hill in front of the mansion.”

The second gravestone was covered with snow. I bent and wiped it off with my hand, wishing I’d worn gloves. “See? ‘Gustave Von Branson, Lieutenant, Company K, Third U.S. Vermont Volunteers.’ Lieutenant Von Branson wasn’t buried here till 1865, after Arlington had become a national cemetery.” I straightened up, rubbing my wet hand on my jeans, and turned around. “Then Commander Meigs had the enlisted men moved to—”

Annie was gone. “Annie?” I said stupidly and looked down the row of tombstones, thinking maybe she had gone past me, but she wasn’t there. She must have gone into the house, I thought. It must be open today after all.

I walked rapidly back along the gravel path and up the slick steps onto the porch. The wind was blowing snow up onto the brick-tiled porch and against the buff-colored pillars so they looked almost white.

I tried the door and then pounded on it. “Are you open?” I shouted, trying to see in through the windows. There weren’t any footprints on the porch except mine, but I kept on pounding for another full minute, as if I thought Annie might have gotten locked in, before my rational self told me she’d probably gotten cold and gone back to the car, and I went back around the house to see.

She wasn’t in the car, and the gift shop was locked up tight, and I gave up all pretense that I wasn’t worried and went tearing back to the front of the house to look down the hill at the lawn where the bodies had been buried.