“We’ve come to say good-bye to the president,” one girl had told Helen when they’d trooped by a little while ago.
A few yards away, Helen’s father was standing between her mother and her grandmother. On Helen’s right, close beside her, stood Lloyd. He put his arm around her waist and pulled her even closer.
“He’s coming,” he said. “I hear the engine.”
A few minutes later, everyone else heard it, too. People pressed up against the bridge railing and leaned towards the sound like sunflowers turning to the sun. The headlight of the locomotive came into view, then the locomotive itself, with its plume of white steam. The children stopped fidgeting. The soft conversations ceased. A few people knelt and bent their heads in prayer. Walter reached one arm around Emilie’s shoulders and the other arm around Ursula’s. Helen took Lloyd’s free hand and entwined her fingers with his. A man near them lifted a small boy up so he could see.
It was a long train. It had carried the president in life, too, with all his retinue, so there were club cars and a diner, a line of sleepers for the press and staff and the Marine guards, a baggage car, a vehicle-carrying car, a communications car, and the president’s private car. After the noisy locomotive had passed beneath the bridge, the children with the roses began singing God Bless America. Train wheels clacked, couplings squealed, but the children’s high-pitched voices prevailed. Some adults joined in, the song spreading along the bridge like a creeping grass fire. Helen tried to sing, but after only one line, she couldn’t continue.
Finally came the last car, the president’s private car. Its seats had been removed to make room for a pine bier. The circular windows were open. FDR’s long, flag-draped coffin was clearly visible, resting on the bier and flanked by uniformed servicemen at attention, one from each branch of service.
“The casket’s passing now,” Helen told Lloyd. “It’s got a flag over it, and an honor guard.”
“Is Fala there?”
“I don’t see him.”
“He loved that dog.”
Helen recalled all of the times she’d seen photos of FDR with his Scottish terrier. The president always seemed to be smiling in those pictures. But now that she thought of it, he had smiled quite a lot for a man with his heavy responsibilities. He was large. That was all there was to it. He was a large man in every way, including joy and mirth. She smiled to herself, thinking that he’d probably make a large spirit, too.
People had begun leaving the bridge, though a few continued to watch the train as it moved away from them, heading north. Helen remembered the trains from early in the war, lively with jovial young men jostling one another at the windows to reach into the baskets of fruits and doughnuts being offered by pretty girls alongside the tracks. She remembered, too, the trains that had passed through River Bend in later years, shades drawn down over closed windows, trains full of wounded men and coffins.
“You two ready to go?” Walter asked, approaching Helen and Lloyd. His voice was husky.
“I’d like to stay until I can’t hear the train anymore,” Lloyd replied.
“We’ll meet you at the car,” Helen said to her father.
Walter waited for Emilie and Ursula, who’d been walking arm in arm a bit behind him. Then the three of them continued on.
“The president used to say ‘my friends’ all the time in his radio talks and speeches,” Lloyd reminisced as he and Helen began walking off the bridge several minutes later. “And he really felt like one. I feel like I’ve lost a friend.”
“And a protector,” Helen added.
“Right. That, too.”
“It’s hard to believe he’s gone. He’d been looking so tired since Yalta, but somehow I never thought of him dying. It’s shocking.”
“’Cause it was so sudden, I guess. And ’cause we need him so much.”
Helen was glad, for FDR’s sake, that the death had been sudden. It would have been hard for a man like that to linger. And she was glad he’d been in a place he loved, a warm place, where spring was already well established. April in Georgia. There’d be peach trees in bloom, and dogwoods.
“It doesn’t seem right that he won’t get to see the end of the war,” Lloyd said.
“He will if he still wants to.”
“Well, he knew it was coming soon, anyway.”
Patton and Montgomery were ready to cross the Rhine, meeting only sporadic opposition from German troops, many of whom were green boys hastily armed. The Russians were in Vienna and nearing Berlin. German cities had been devastated by intense American bombing. On the day Truman was sworn in, two more large concentration camps, Buchenwald and Belsen, had been liberated. Negotiations were underway for the surrender of the Germans in Italy. In the Pacific, the invasion of Okinawa was continuing. Clearly, Allied victory was inevitable, though the ferocious resistance of entrenched Japanese soldiers and kamikaze pilots would make it costly.
So many dead, Helen thought. Over 13,000 from New Jersey alone. People she had known. Her first love. She held more tightly to Lloyd’s elbow. This was life now, this man’s solid arm, this daybreak bridge, her own body and darting mind. This is what life had always been, a seamless ball of exaltation and sorrow and many pedestrian moments. She wanted to savor it all, to remember to stand still at some point inside each living hour, pleasant or heartbreaking, bland or crucial. She believed it was the only way. Because, really, there was no standing still. Every moment was a departure. She wanted to notice the fall of scarlet leaves and the apple-green budding of new ones, the scent of swelling yeast, the fullness of laughter, the taste of icicles, the hundreds of tiny ways people cared every day, whether it was a man washing his car on a sleepy Sunday afternoon or a girl pushing her brother on a swing, the smile of a stranger or the wordless, confident touch of a friend.
The dead were at her back and in her heart, but they were leaving her to her own devices, successful or mistaken, as they did everyone. They’d come to her, Helen believed, simply to say that life was important and life was not all. She’d passed on the message as best she could. She’d continue to pass it on by how she lived, how she treated other people. She was keeping her inner ear open to whatever subtle variations on the message might emerge, but she wasn’t expecting again anything as dramatic as Iris or other spirit visitors, nor vivid premonitions. That door was closed. It was enough, now, to know it existed.
“Do you want to go home right away?” Lloyd asked.
“What do you have in mind?”
“I’d like to walk a while. Maybe find a place for breakfast later. I don’t feature sitting just yet.”
“Me, either. But we have to stop by the car and tell my folks.”
“Sure.”
Helen, only inches in front of Lloyd, stepped off the curb. He followed without hesitation, almost simultaneously. They crossed the street into the brightening morning.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Noelle Sickels grew up in northern New Jersey, the setting of The Medium. She is the author of two other historical novels: Walking West, the story of an 1852 wagon train journey from Indiana to California, and The Shopkeeper’s Wife, a tale of murder in 1856 Philadelphia. She’s also had contemporary short stories and poems published in numerous anthologies and magazines. Ms. Sickels is a retired teacher living in Los Angeles and Ojai, California. She isn’t psychic, but she did see a ghost once.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE MEDIUM. Copyright © 2007 by Noëlle Sickels.
All Rights Reserved
For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Excerpts and paraphrases of the War of the Worlds radio play by Howard Koch (copyright 1940, renewed), adapted from the novel by H. G. Wells and broadcast on October 30, 1938 by The Mercury Theater on the Air, used by permission.
eISBN 9781466819498
The Medium Page 38