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Authors: Noëlle Sickels

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BOOK: The Medium
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Seagoville was not the only place where motorists were sounding their horns and flashing their lights. Across the country, church bells were pealing, air raid sirens blaring, factories and trains blowing their whistles. But despite the excitement, the reporters said, the overall mood was solemn. Churches were filled with praying, weeping people. There were prayer services in offices. Stores were closed, sidewalks deserted. On Army bases, men stood in silent crowds around loudspeakers piping in the news. Tonight, the Statue of Liberty, dark since
Pearl Harbor, would be lit for fifteen minutes, and at ten o'clock, the President would come on the radio and lead the nation in a prayer for their fighting men.
“The liberation of Europe has begun,” an announcer quoted a White House statement, adding his own enthused comment, “Brother, we're on the road to Berlin!”
While more home-front stories were being broadcast, the guard leaned closer to Helen and filled her in on what she'd missed.
“They hit five beaches in Normandy,” he said. “The Brits and the Canadians are at Gold, Juno, and Sword, and our boys are at Utah and Omaha. Sounds like they got it the worst on Omaha, by a country mile.”
Helen's heart jumped.
“Fooled the Jerrys,” the man continued. “They thought we were coming in at Calais, so they were better dug in there. They said Rommel was off at a birthday party in Berlin! Bad as it was on Omaha, it coulda been worse if they knew we were coming in there.”
“Omaha?” Helen said. “That's a beach?”
“Well, it's not what the Frenchies call it, I'll wager, but, yeah, it's a beach. More like a combination grave pit and junkyard now, from what they say.” Again, he indicated the radio. Omaha had just been mentioned.
Helen listened, frozen. It was late afternoon in Normandy. The troops on Omaha Beach had reached the cliff tops, and tanks were beginning to move inland, so the terrible shore fighting was over, but the reporter was recapping the morning landings. He was describing her vision—the falling and fallen bodies, the floundering landing vessels, the men pinned down on the sand by machine gun fire, the choppy, bloody sea, the whole cacophonous storm. Now, the reporter said, the beach was quieter—an occasional mine explosion, some sniper fire. Ships
as far as the eye could see waited off-shore to unload supplies and more men. The next phase of Operation Overlord would be the taking of Normandy's Cotentin peninsula, followed by a break-out from there toward Paris.
Yes, the beach was quieter, the reporter repeated soberly, and weary soldiers were moving doggedly on to the tasks of cleanup and build-up, but the wreckage of battle, both human and machine, lay about on every side. Burning trucks and jeeps, overturned boats, twisted wrecks that used to be mine detectors and portable radios, dead tanks, smashed bulldozers, rolls of telephone wire, bloodied shoes, writing paper, first aid kits, thousands of cartons of cigarettes, oranges, toothbrushes, family snapshots, life belts. And bodies—bodies arranged in rows and covered with blankets, other bodies as yet not collected. During the battle, the reporter noted, there'd been so many bodies everywhere, you could barely take a step. He named the divisions that had landed on Omaha. One of them was Lloyd's. If he hadn't been sent home from Sicily, he would have been there today on that horrific beach.
Helen turned and left the office. She wanted to sit out in the hot Texas sun a while and try to calm her mind, then find a chapel. There must be one somewhere on the grounds.
What had made her think she could prevent anything as vast and convulsive as Omaha? She'd strode into Captain Fitzpatrick's office with such self-confidence. She'd felt so important. How like a silly, vain schoolgirl.
Why had she been given the vision? Or any of the messages she received? It was an old refrain, but one she'd lost sight of. Maybe here, locked away and alone, the answer would come at last.
Marta had warned Helen about “barbed wire sickness,” the excruciating boredom and sinking worry that afflicted those who didn't stay busy, so Helen quickly devised a routine. Each morning, before the day's heat had gathered force, she walked the grounds. After breakfast, she helped out in the children's classrooms, teaching conversational English. She spent the rest of her day in the weaving room, where she was working on a small rug. Some days, she had to put in time in her building's kitchen. Marta asked her to join a group of women who were planning to put on a play, but Helen declined. She was trying to make the best of a bad situation, but she wasn't ready to conceive of it as being a long-lived one.
The evenings were emptier. There'd been an open-air songfest once, where the standard
Leiderkranz,
or wreath of songs, was punctuated by
Deep in the Heart of Texas
and
Home on the Range,
both belted out with gusto. Another night, Helen went to a Hopalong Cassidy movie in the auditorium.
The movie show was the only time she saw Japanese internees up close. She studied them surreptitiously, curious about their appearance and their uniformly mild-mannered demeanor. These people had not been interned as part of the wholesale removal of Japanese and Japanese-Americans from the West Coast. If they had been, they'd be in a relocation camp instead of at Seagoville. Everyone here had been interned as individuals, for specific reasons. Helen caught herself wondering what
their “crimes” had been, but as soon as she'd thought it, she felt ashamed. What had
her
crime been? Surely, she was not the only person interned on flimsy, circumstantial, or secret evidence. Marta informed her that the Japanese at Seagoville who were not from South America were language teachers from California, or were, like Marta herself, voluntary internees wishing to stay with their spouses.
Except for the songfest and the movie, Helen stayed in her room evenings reading newspapers. For days after June 6th, almost every story was about the invasion of France. Advertisements had been dropped to make room for reports from Caen, St. Lo, and Cherbourg. Radio stations, too, had cancelled commercials. The radio in the rec room was on continuously, even though at times Helen was the only one there. She knew this was in stark contrast to homes across the country where people were sticking close to their radios and hanging on every detail of the dramatic, first-hand accounts of the fighting. She'd read that factory workers were so news-hungry, bulletins were being broadcast over loudspeakers on the factory floors.
Helen would have sought out the news in any case, but she had the added spur of a directive from Iris. Or her interpretation of a directive from Iris.
In her room on the night of June 6, still shaken up from having had her premonition about Omaha beach so exhaustively confirmed, Helen had called on Iris. Because she was nervous about entering trance in such an alien environment, she placed her chair against the door. If someone tried to come in, she'd be jarred, and simultaneously, her weight would impede the opening of the door, allowing her a moment to collect herself.
Despite her nervousness, Helen slipped easily into a light trance. The characteristic sense of well-being was restorative. Iris soon shimmered into view, surrounded by a pink mist.
“Iris,” Helen addressed her mentally, not daring to speak
aloud. “I don't know why I'm here—here in this place, and here in your company. I need guidance.”
“Here is the same as anywhere,” Iris answered.
“For the moment, yes,” Helen countered. “But I have to function in two worlds, not just in yours.”
“Mine is also yours.”
“Yes, yes.”
Helen fought down irritation. It would only disrupt her trance and cause Iris to be even more vague. She concentrated on cultivating the paradoxical state of being alert enough to interact meaningfully with Iris, and detached enough to let in whatever she might offer, especially the unexpected or mysterious. Attempts at interpretation should come later. This frame of mind was much easier to achieve when Helen was doing a reading for someone else, or when Iris had an agenda, like when she brought the newly dead soldiers. It was different now that Helen herself was seeking a message.
Iris waited patiently, as always, while Helen reinforced her trance state. Though, Helen had thought in the past, could Iris ever be said to be truly waiting? There was no air of expectancy in her, no sense that her time was being ill-spent, no sense of time passing at all. Iris didn't wait, really, Helen had finally decided. Nor did she have patience. Or not have it. She simply existed. She didn't struggle to understand things, nor to elucidate them. Maybe she already understood everything, or maybe she didn't deem full understanding to be necessary or even particularly interesting. It was an enviable state.
“You desire to understand,” Iris communicated, as Helen was trying to think of how to say just that. “It is natural. No act bears fruit without this desire.”
“There must be a reason you come to me,” Helen said, “and a reason my boys come, and all the spirits who appear when I call on behalf of other people.”
“We come out of love.”
“But
why
?”
“For that question.”
Helen felt a fluttering of despair. Talking with Iris was like trying to grasp flowing water. Except that Iris wanted to help her. She was sure of that. Though wanting was perhaps too muscular a notion.
Helen envisioned a stream of cold, clear water, eddying around rocks, sliding through a quiet forest. She elaborated the image until she could smell dampness, hear the stream gurgle, pick out individual pebbles in the streambed and water striders near its green banks. She stared at the stream, as mesmerized and content as she might have been beside a real stream in the woods by Hunter's River on a summer afternoon at home.
Her fledgling despair lifted. It wasn't her responsibility to steer the stream. She had no control over what the stream might carry to her or past her. Iris had control. Or something or someone beyond Iris. It was a liberating realization.
“We can guide anyone,” Iris said, “but some are easier to reach. Some stand by the door. You are one.”
“What is your guidance?”
“Prepare to live evermore. You make your own rewards, your own regrets, in your earthly world and in ours. Live in joy here and now, and prepare to live in joy.”
Helen recalled the mundane questions people put to their departed loved ones during seances. Requests for advice on practical problems, pleas for release from sorrow or guilt, applications for glimpses into the future. They all seemed so small compared to what Iris was offering. Yet most of the time, the spirits had obliged.
Helen had started discouraging these kinds of inquiries last October because she'd begun to feel such use of her powers, and of the spirits' tolerance, was actually a misuse, or, at best, a
mistaken use. But she'd never broached her theory to Iris, and Iris had never made any overt notice that Helen was approaching her mediumship differently. In the series of seances last month, Helen had lifted all restrictions in an attempt to pave the way for Billy to appear. Iris hadn't shown notice of that shift, either.
“If there's this higher purpose,” Helen pressed now, “why do spirits bother to answer earthly problems and petitions?”
“They answer so people will believe,” Iris said, “so people will pay attention. Those answers are not the real answer.”
“Why do they send me visions I didn't ask for?”
“There is a sea of nows,” Iris continued. “The boundaries do not always hold.”
“But what am I to
do
?”
“Choose. Give what will help. Everything has its time.”
To Helen's dismay, Iris began to fade.
“I still don't understand,” she called to her.
But Iris was already part of the mist, distinguishable merely as a thicker area of cloudiness. Only her flower was still identifiable, hovering unsupported in the air.
“You will know,” Iris said from out of the mist. Her voice was unusually melodious and sweet.
Despite Iris's confident words, when Helen came out of trance, she felt frustrated. Then, Iris's tone, lingering in her mind, began to soothe her, in the same way she'd been soothed as a fretful child by her father singing her a lullaby or her mother stroking her head.
It occurred to Helen that though she wasn't in control of the elusive stream of the spirit world, nor of the boundary-cracking visions, she
was
in charge of what information from these sources she shared with others. And just as she'd learned to enter and leave trance at will, she would learn how to “schedule” opportunities for receiving visions. After all, hadn't she succeeded
years ago in “turning off” seeing auras all the time? She stood up and stretched her arms above her head. She felt better.
The next evening, Helen began her intensive newspaper reading. She tried to pry out the common, human experiences behind the facts of battle statistics and geography. She read about families and schools and churches, and how the war was touching them. She read editorials and analyses, and letters from local boys overseas. If, as Iris had instructed, she was to choose what was helpful, she had to know what was needed. Not what people thought they needed, not what they would say at first blush if you asked them, but what they might say in an unguarded moment after a tiring day, when they were sitting with a friend who fell quiet at the right time, or when they took a gamble on a compassionate stranger's shoulder.
 
Major Levy arrived in Seagoville ten days after Helen. A clerk from Dr. Stannard's office found Helen weeding in the flower garden and escorted her to a meeting room in the administration building. The major was seated at a long table when Helen entered. He stood up and said good morning. She nodded to acknowledge his greeting, but she didn't say anything in return. He seemed not to mind.
“I trust you've been comfortable, Miss Schneider?” he said when they'd sat down on opposite sides of the table. “This camp has an excellent record.”
“Being kept in the dark is not comfortable, Major,” Helen replied.
She wasn't afraid of him, as she'd been on Ellis Island. What could he threaten her with now? She wanted to get out of Seagoville and go home, but if she had to stay, she would manage. The war against Germany couldn't last much longer. The experts were saying it'd be over by Christmas. In any case,
Major Levy was not likely to be swayed by displays of humility or timidity, nor by appeals. She didn't know what, in fact, would sway him, but she believed that the stronger she was, the better chance she had. And she did feel strong. So why not show it?
“Kept in the dark?” Levy said roguishly. “I assume you don't mean literally.”
“No, not literally.”
“Well, Miss Schneider, perhaps by the end of this meeting, you won't have that complaint any longer. It's all up to you.”
Helen doubted this was true. The major bent to open a briefcase on the floor at his side. He took out an olive green folder and set it on the table between them. It was stamped “Top Secret.” Helen looked from the folder to the major. He seemed to be waiting for her to speak. But why bother to ask about the folder? He was obviously going to tell her about it whether she asked or not.
“What did you think of the news of D-Day, Miss Schneider?” Levy finally said.
“I thought what everyone thought—that it was horrible and yet good news.”
“Nothing more?”
Helen hesitated. This must be what people mean, she thought, when they speak of playing cat and mouse.
“I thought that I'd been right.”
The major nodded.
“I thought that, too,” he said quietly.
He laid his hands flat on top of the green folder. His fingers were hairy, and he was wearing a wedding ring.
“I'd like to ask you some questions about how you …
see
such things.”
“All right.”
“They aren't dreams, correct?”
“No, I'm awake. I'm usually in the middle of some ordinary
activity, and a vision just arrives. Though when I saw that beach, I was in trance.”
“In trance?”
“It was during a séance.”
“A séance.” The major sat back in his chair and shook his head. “Where dead people in white sheets float around the room and levitate furniture.”
“It's not like that.”
“Whatever you say,” Levy conceded, sounding fatigued. “Séances are not my concern. What I want to know is whether you can bring on visions like the D-Day battle at will.”
“I've never tried.”
“Do you think you could?”
BOOK: The Medium
3.8Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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