The Medium

by Noëlle Sickels

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER 1 - AUGUST 1937

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5 - SEPTEMBER 1937

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7 - OCTOBER 1937

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11 - NOVEMBER 1937

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13 - JULY 1938

  CHAPTER 14 - OCTOBER 1938

  CHAPTER 15 - JULY 1939

  CHAPTER 16 - AUGUST 1940

  September 1940

  February 1941

  June 1941

  CHAPTER 17 - DECEMBER 1941

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  January 1942

  February 1942

  CHAPTER 20 - MARCH 1942

  CHAPTER 21 - APRIL 1942

  CHAPTER 22 - MAY 1942

  CHAPTER 23 - JUNE 1942

  CHAPTER 24 - AUGUST 1942

  CHAPTER 25 - NOVEMBER 1942

  CHAPTER 26 - JANUARY 1943

  CHAPTER 27 - FEBRUARY 1943

  CHAPTER 28 - JUNE 1943

  CHAPTER 29 - JULY 1943

  CHAPTER 30 - DECEMBER 1943

  CHAPTER 31 - JANUARY 1944

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33 - FEBRUARY 1944

  CHAPTER 34 - MARCH 1944

  CHAPTER 35 - APRIL 1944

  CHAPTER 36 - MAY 1944

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38 - JUNE 1944

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  July 1944

  CHAPTER 42 - AUGUST 1944

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44 - SEPTEMBER 1944

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46 - OCTOBER 1944

  CHAPTER 47 - DECEMBER 1944

  CHAPTER 48 - APRIL 1945

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  To Jude, my wind of happiness

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am very grateful for the efforts, advice, and encouragement of my enthusiastic agent, Jeffery McGraw, of The August Agency.

  The author is grateful for the access granted to the archives of the National Spiritualist Association of Churches in Lily Dale, New York.

  CHAPTER 1

  AUGUST 1937

  Rich man, poor man

  Beggar man, thief,

  Doctor, lawyer

  Indian chief

  Rich man, poor man

  Beggar man—

  “Thief!” a voice shouted.

  Helen lost her rhythm and stepped on her jump rope. Billy Mackey’s grinning face appeared at the top of the fence between their yards.

  “You’re gonna marry a thief!” he cackled.

  “Am not!”

  Helen wished she could be more clever in her retort, but there was something about Billy Mackey recently that could leave her feeling flustered and unsure of herself. Sure, he was two and a half years older and two grades ahead and had taken to acting like that suddenly made him smarter and wiser than she, but she’d turned thirteen last week, and his annoying teases shouldn’t be able to get to her so. There’d been a time—most of their friendship, actually—when he hadn’t been such a tease, when they’d run across lawns and roller skated down sidewalks and tumbled in leaves and snowbanks together like twins. His brother Lloyd, who was her age and in her class at school, always had taunts and practical jokes at the ready, but Billy had been different.

  Billy had lots of pals, but he had never minded spending time with Helen. When they were littler, he had unashamedly hunkered down and made mud pies with her, and even nowadays when he spied her sitting in the shade reading, he’d still sometimes come plop down beside her and spread out model airplane plans to study.

  He had once confided to Helen that he liked it that she wasn’t too “girly,” by which she supposed he meant she wasn’t above putting worms in her pocket or getting dirty. So, why, lately, had he been treating her as if she were too girly? She hadn’t been behaving differently, at least not around him. She had a new habit of evaluating herself in mirrors, but he didn’t know about that.

  The golden curls of Helen’s younger years had mutated into waves the color of clover honey, a regrettable change, she’d decided. She had her father’s serious brown eyes and thick eyebrows, her mother’s straight nose and wide mouth. Her grandmother said she had a strong face and that she would grow into it and be a beautiful woman, but Helen couldn’t see it. What did Billy see? Was wondering that too girly?

  “It doesn’t count if someone makes you miss,” she protested.

  “Okay, do it again. I’ll keep quiet.”

  Billy had put on a sober expression, but his hazel green eyes twinkled with warning. Helen wound up her rope.

  “I don’t feel like it,” she said.

  “Don’t you want to know what kind of man you’re gonna marry?”

  “It’s just a game.”

  Jumping rope was beginning to feel like a mortifying thing to have been caught at.

  “Say, maybe one of your grandma’s spooks will jerk the rope and make you miss when you get to the right answer,” he said, laughing.

  Righteous anger welled up in Helen. Now he had truly trespassed. No one was allowed to make fun of Nanny and her seances. She gave him a scorching stare. Pride made him hold his smile, but his eyes, by which she always knew his true feelings, spoke remorse. She held his gaze until she saw his brave grin waver, then she spun on her heel and marched away.

  “Hey, Helen,” he called, “I didn’t mean it. C’mon back. I’ve got some nougats.”

  She looked over her shoulder. He was holding up a small white paper sack.

  “Whad‘ya do, steal ’em?” she said fiercely. “Or did your bum father send them to you?”

  She ran to the house. He wouldn’t call after her again. Because now she had trespassed, too. As soon as she’d hurled the barb, she was sorry. She knew how worried the whole Mackey family was about Mr. Mackey, who had been riding the rails for nearly four years, having left the family when the youngest, Linda, was still a baby, so that it would be easier for them to collect relief. She knew Billy feared his father would never come back. Now she’d taken that fear and twisted it into a weapon. She didn’t understand how such meanness could have sprung up in her, even considering his provocation.

  Hearing the voices of her mother and grandmother in the kitchen, Helen wheeled upstairs to her room. She was too dangerously close to tears to meet anyone. She honestly could not have told them why she was upset, anyway. The bare facts might seem sufficient, but she had a gnawing sense that they really weren’t and that trying to explain would only prove another kind of trespass.

  Her room was stuffy, but she didn’t open the window. She lay on her bed and stared out into the thick foliage of the large sugar maple in the backyard. She wondered if Billy were still standing by the fence, as surprised by her outburst as she was. Most likely he was furious. He’d be blind to her presence next time they met. If she apologized, he’d act as if what she’d said hadn’t touched him. He didn’t often get mad at her, but when he did that was how he handled it. Coolness, then a turning aside of her efforts to talk, then after a pause of a few days, an unblinking resumption of easy commerce. Those first reconciled exchanges always left her feeling a little sick to her stomach, as if she were telling a lie.

  A squirrel ran down one branch of the maple and leapt to another, shaking the leaves along his path. Helen was sure she heard the leaves rustle, though with the windows shut, it had to be her imagination. Her mother said she had a good imagination.

  Perhaps, Helen thought, she’d imagine herself apologizing to Mr. Mackey.
She’d insulted him as much as she’d injured Billy. Helen knew full well that Mr. Mackey was not a bum, but a hobo. Her father had carefully explained the difference once when they saw a man on the street wearing a sign saying “I will work for food.” While both bums and hobos hitchhiked or hopped trains, hobos were looking for work, while bums lived by begging.

  If Mr. Mackey were here, it would be an awful trial to apologize to him, not because he was intimidating but because she’d have to admit her cruelty. But once it was done, she could face Billy more freely. Yes, apologizing to Mr. Mackey would definitely make her feel better. And if she couldn’t do it in person, she’d do it in her mind. Nanny had said the mind was like a box of magic tricks, and that if you believed hard enough in something, it was like it was real.

  Helen shut her eyes and pictured Mr. Mackey, his red hair and freckled forearms, his pants that were always a little too short and showed a flash of white socks. In her mind’s eye, Mr. Mackey appeared in a plaid woolen shirt, but the last time she’d seen him, he was wearing a brown jacket and a brown hat and carrying a small cardboard suitcase. It was that image she was trying to bring up, Mr. Mackey standing in front of his house looking it up and down, right before he turned and walked away. Yet there he was in her imagination wearing a plaid shirt. Actually, it was draped over his shoulders, wrapped around him as if he were cold. She could see he had another plain shirt underneath, with dirt smudges on it. Helen decided to go ahead no matter how he was dressed.

  “Mr. Mackey,” she said aloud, her eyes still closed, “I said something terrible about you today, and I’m sorry.”

  She wondered if she ought to be specific. Should she say she’d accused him of being a thief? That wasn’t precisely accurate. Should she explain she only called him a bum because his Billy had made fun of her grandmother? Or would that detract from the purity of her repentance?

  As she was pondering this impasse, Helen heard again the distinct rustle of leaves. She opened her eyes and looked out the window. No squirrel in sight, but the leaves were moving. Wind, she guessed.

  Then she smelled smoke. It wasn’t a cooking smell. And it wasn’t smoke from someone’s trash fire, either. It was stronger than that, blacker and denser, she somehow knew, though she didn’t see even one wisp in the air outside.

  Suddenly, Helen sat up, her heart pounding. It was Mr. Mackey. Mr. Mackey was in a fire. She was as sure as if the flames were roaring up right before her. She was gripped by terror, both because of Mr. Mackey’s peril and because her knowledge was so absolute. She rushed to the door of her room. She had to find Mama or Nanny. Her hand on the knob, she stopped and tried to calm herself. If she went to them hysterical, they’d just think it had been a bad dream. As she stood there, a new certainty came over her. Mr. Mackey was not in the fire anymore. He was safe. Someone was taking care of him. He was going to be all right.

  She went to the window and pushed up the sash. A soft breeze entered, bringing no smell of smoke. Despite the warm air, Helen shivered. Seeing Mr. Mackey was not a completely new experience. There’d been other times when a phrase or a picture had appeared unexpectedly in her mind like a stray puppy nosing insistently at a screen door. These words or sights were invariably meaningless to her and fleeting. They’d slip out of her awareness as cleanly as they’d entered. She’d never given them much notice. But this time was different.

  “It never came so strong before,” she murmured. “Never so strong before.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “They got the wire from the Red Cross this afternoon,” Helen’s mother was telling her father at dinner the next evening. “It seems Will and some other men were sleeping in the warehouse. It’s a miracle they were saved. The firemen weren’t looking for anyone to be in there.”

  “Will Mackey has no business being away from his family,” Helen’s father said.

  “I guess he thinks it’s best.”

  “He is coming home now, Emilie?” Helen’s grandmother, Ursula, asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  That her vision had proved true excited Helen, but her stomach churned with worried guilt, as if she had broken some rule and was bound to be found out. Even so, she was curious about the details of Mr. Mackey’s ordeal.

  “Was Mr. Mackey burnt?” she asked.

  Her mother was slicing another piece of meat loaf. She placed it on her husband’s plate.

  “Gravy, Walter?” she asked. He nodded and she passed him the gravy boat.

  “I don’t think so, Helen. They only kept him overnight in the hospital because he had breathed in a lot of smoke.”

  “Was it black smoke?”

  “I don’t know. Any kind of smoke from a big fire like that is bad for you.”

  “Was he wearing a plaid shirt?”

  “What kind of question is that?” Helen’s father interrupted. He preferred quiet dinners or ones in which he led the conversation.

  “Why do you wonder such a thing, Helen?” Ursula said with genuine interest.

  “No reason.”

  Helen shoveled a large piece of meat loaf into her mouth. She wouldn’t be expected to say more with her mouth full.

  “Helen, don’t take such big bites,” her mother scolded. “Really, you’re too old for me to have to tell you that.”

  Helen tried to keep her cheeks from sticking out as she chewed the soft wad. She stared at the row of steins on the sideboard in order to avoid her grandmother’s quizzical gaze.

  Helen’s parents had already forgotten her odd question and poor manners. They were on to the familiar topic of “hard times.” Though the Schneiders had lost their savings when the bank failed a few years ago, and Walter’s job as a bookkeeper had been cut back to three days a week, at least he still had a job. Household economies like buying day-old bread, coupled with Emilie selling vegetables from her garden and Ursula contributing the fees she got for seances had enabled the family to weather the worst years of the Depression without being subjected to hardships suffered by so many others.

  Shocked at first, Helen had gotten used to seeing people living in their cars, businessmen in suits digging sewer pipe ditches, schoolgirls wearing dresses made from feed sacks, and idle men loitering in parks and libraries to postpone the shame of going home empty-handed. Now, thanks to federal assistance, people could get rent money and shoes and food from their local townships. Just last winter, Helen had helped Billy and Lloyd pull home sleds loaded with free turnips, potatoes, and cornmeal for the Mackey family. The Schneiders hadn’t needed food hand-outs, but Helen was aware that the adults often ate less so that she was sure to get enough.

  Helen expected her grandmother to press her about the plaid shirt when they were alone together in the kitchen getting dessert ready, but Ursula was all business, scooping noodle pudding into glass dishes, skimming cream from the top of the milk bottle to pour on Walter’s serving, steeping the tea. Helen scraped the dinner plates and stacked them in the sink. They exchanged only a few utilitarian comments. Helen was so relieved that she didn’t even mind not knowing if she’d been right about the shirt.

  But her relief was short-lived. After dessert, Walter and Emilie went to the living room to listen to the radio, while Helen and Ursula, as usual, cleaned up in the kitchen. Helen was drying the last platter when Ursula finished sweeping the floor and came to stand beside her. Helen felt an eruption of nervousness.

  “Mr. Mackey,” Ursula said. “He was lucky, no?”

  Helen nodded yes to the rhetorical question.

  “Did you see him, Helen?”

  “See him?”

  “Did you see him in that fire?”

  “No. No, I didn’t. How could I?”

  “Ach, there’s no answer for that.”

  Ursula shook her head slowly.

  “When I was a girl, near your age,” she said, “I had a dream about an avalanche. A man from our village was in it. Our baker. I saw his skis go over and over down the mountain. My Papa said I only dreamed so because I
knew the baker was away visiting in Austria. But a few days later, we learned there was an avalanche, and he was killed in it.”

  Helen waited for her grandmother to go on, but she didn’t. A lump burned in her throat.

  “I was thinking about Mr. Mackey,” she finally whispered. “And I kind of saw him.”

  “It was my first time,” Ursula said, as if Helen had not spoken. “Dreams is how the spirits start you sometimes. To get you used to it.”

  She patted Helen’s shoulder.

  “But, Nanny, I didn’t see him in a dream. It was daytime. I was awake. And I just knew.”

  Ursula raised her eyebrows.

  “Then, Liebling, I can not help you so much. You are already past me.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Helen came home from the park one Wednesday afternoon two weeks later to find her grandmother in the kitchen ironing one of her Sunday dresses. Usually, this was done on Saturday. Not curious enough to ask about it, Helen merely said hello and headed for the cookie jar.

  “Go take a bath, Helen,” Ursula said, sprinkling water on the dress’s pique collar. “And wash your hair.”

  Helen took two fruit shortbread cookies out of the jar and went to the Kelvinator for milk.

  “Is someone coming for dinner?”

  “No one for dinner. We go out afterwards, you and me.”

  “Out?”

  “I have some people at Mrs. Durkin’s.”

  A seance, then. When Helen was younger, she often had to accompany her mother and grandmother to seances. At Mrs. Durkin’s, she got to wait outside under a huge weeping willow. At other homes, she was required to sit quietly in a boring kitchen while the grown-ups met in another room. But Helen had not been to a seance in almost a year. Her mother felt she was old enough to stay at home alone during the day, and in the evenings her father was always there, except when the Sängerbund met. As one of only three baritones in the singing society, Walter didn’t like to miss meetings. But Wednesday was not their night.