Lincoln's Dreams

They bred such horses in Virginia then, Horses that were remembered after death And buried not so far from Christian ground That if their sleeping riders should arise They could not witch them from the earth again And ride a printless course along the grass With the old manage and light ease of hand.

Stephen Vincent Benet

T raveller died of lockjaw two years after Robert E. Lee died. I looked that up one day in February, the day I went out to see where Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie had been buried. I had been looking for the grave for over a year, and when I finally found it in a biography of Mary Todd Lincoln, I ran out of the library still carrying the book. It set off an alarm, and one of the librarians came out on the steps and shouted after me, “Jeff, are you all right? Jeff!”

It was snowing hard that day, a wet spring snow. It took me nearly an hour to drive out to the old cemetery in Georgetown. I don’t know what I thought I’d find, some clue maybe to where Annie was and what had happened to her, some message that would tell me what had happened to all of them, Tom Tita and Ben and the rest of the soldiers who had died in the Civil War and were buried together under granite squares no larger than a scrap of paper.

But there wasn’t anything there, not even Willie Lincoln’s body, and I went back to Broun’s house and got out Freeman’s four-volume biography of Lee and tried to find out what had happened to Traveller.

As with everything else that had happened, there were both too many clues and not enough. But eventually I found out what I needed to know, the way I had found out where Willie had been, the way I had found out what was causing Annie’s dreams. After all, that was what I was good at, wasn’t it, looking up obscure facts? Traveller had lived two years. He had picked up a nail and gotten lockjaw. They had had to shoot him.

I met Annie two years ago, the night of Broun’s press reception. The reception was supposed to be an advance publication party for Broun’s twelfth novel, The Duty Bound , with bound galleys passed out to the press, but there weren’t any galleys. There wasn’t even a finished book.

The press reception had been scheduled for the last week in March, but at the end of February Broun was still fiddling with the copyedited manuscript, making changes and then changing the changes, and a week before the reception I was back in West Virginia, trying to find out exactly when Lee had bought Traveller.

It was a detail that didn’t matter one way or the other to the book, since Lee had definitely been riding Traveller at Antietam in September of 1862, but it was the kind of thing Broun had been fussing over the entire book, and it worried me.

He was having all kinds of trouble with The Duty Bound . He usually turned out his Civil War novels like clockwork: proposal to outline to manuscript to corrected galleys, which was why his publisher, McLaws and Herndon, had gone ahead and scheduled this reception before they had the copyedited manuscript back.

I might have done the same thing. In the four years I’d been doing research for Broun, he’d never missed a deadline. But with The Duty Bound , he hadn’t made a deadline yet, and when I called him from West Virginia he was still making major changes.

“I’m thinking of adding a chapter at the beginning of the book, Jeff,” he said. “To explain why Ben Freeman enlists.”

“I thought you’d already sent the copyedited manuscript back,” I said.

“I did, son. Three weeks ago. But then I got to worrying about Ben. He signs up just like that, for no reason. Would you do that?”

“No, but a lot of recruits did. Listen, I’m calling because I’ve run into some trouble with Traveller. In a letter to one of his daughters, Lee says he bought Traveller in the fall of 1861, but the records here show he didn’t buy him until 1862, during the Carolina campaign.”

“They must have had some reason for enlisting,” Broun said. “What if Ben’s courting a girl who’s in love with somebody else?”

McLaws and Herndon would kill Broun if he started adding new characters at this late date. “I think the beginning’s fine,” I said. “Ben doesn’t have to have a good reason to sign up. Nobody else in the Civil War did. Most of the recruits couldn’t have told you what the war was even being fought about, let alone why they were in it. I’d go ahead and leave it as is, and that goes for Traveller, too. I’m going up to Lewisburg tomorrow to check the courthouse records, but I’m almost sure Lee didn’t buy the horse in 1861.”

“Will you be home in time for the reception?” Broun asked.

“I thought they’d postpone it since the book’s late.”