as daylight marked the end of that long night, Harvey Hammer died. He was twenty months old.
When word of the child’s death spread through the community, the neighbors came, as they always came in the rural South. They were silent with grief, some of them, while others tried to speak comfortingly about “understanding some day” and “God’s will.” Jacob Hammer did not believe it was God’s will for Harvey to die. Neither did Cassie.
The younger children walked around the house big-eyed and frightened until an aunt came to take them home with her.
Mrs. Hammer’s grief was too deep for tears. “My baby. My precious baby,” she kept repeating. “He’s dead. And we don’t even have a picture of him. We never had a picture made of our precious Harvey.”
Mr. Hammer, hoping to ease his wife’s sorrow, promised, “We’ll send in to Talladega and get the photographer to come out and take Harvey’s picture in his coffin. Then you—all of us—will have his picture to remember him by.”
Outside, a cold, slashing rain seemed almost an extension of the gloominess of the household.
Men who lived nearby fashioned a small coffin from pine boards, and the women padded it with cotton and lined it with soft white cloth.
Those same neighbor women made a little dress for Harvey to be buried in. It was white, as befitted a burial garment for a pure child, and it had a wide, ruffled, lace-trimmed collar. When they put the garment on him, the neck was too big, making the collar hang low on his pale shoulders.
“That will be all right,” one of the women said. “When we put him in the coffin, we’ll just pull the collar in place and tuck the extra fullness under him.”
And they did. After Havey’s body was placed in the coffin, and after the seamstresses had pulled up the collar and tucked it beneath him, nobody could tell the neck was too large.
“He looks so peaceful,” the people said. “Just like he was asleep. Come look at your little brother, Cassie,” they said.
Cassie looked. She knew the women were expecting her to say something, but she couldn’t make any words come. She stood there silent for a long time, just looking at Harvey and wondering what it was like to be dead. Then, very slowly, she took off her heart-shaped locket and fastend it around Harvey’s neck.
The rain never slacked.
Finally word came that the roads between Talladega and Renfroe were impassable, so the photographer couldn’t come. Harvey Hammer was buried without ever having had his picture made.
His mother continued to grieve, as did other members of the family, and she continued to weep over having no picture of her little boy.
“If only I had his picture to look at, to remember him by,” she moaned.
A few weeks after Harvey’s death, Mr. Hammer set out to clear a parcel of land some distance from his house. The land was too far away for him to go and come from home each day, so he made arrangements to camp in an abandoned one-room schoolhouse near the property. The building had a pot-bellied stove in it that he could use for heat and for cooking, so Mr. Hammer took a cot to sleep on, blankets, some food, and moved into the school.
The first night there, he was tired from the move and from the strenuous labor of clearing the land, and he fell asleep soon after he had eaten supper. He had been asleep for some time when he was awakened by a brilliant light.
His first thought was that the building was on fire, and he jumped up to run outside.
But as soon as he was fully awake, he realized that the building was not on fire. The light came from a corner of the room. In the corner was his little boy, Harvey, holding a burning candle.
Jacob Hammer walked toward the figure and reached out toward him. As he did, the child blew out the candle and vanished.
There was no more sleep for Jacob Hammer that night. Questions crowded in upon him: had he really seen his son or was his grief conjuring up cruel visions? Could Harvey have returned from the dead? And if so, why?
The daylight brought no answers and the questions haunted him all the next day as he worked in his field.
That second night, the same thing happened: he was awakened by a flash of light and saw Harvey, holding a flickering candle, in the corner of the room. Once again Jacob Hammer approached the child, and once again the child blew out the candle and vanished.
As Jacob Hammer lay awake and tried to answer the questions that trampled through his mind, a new thought came to him. Was it possible, he wondered, that Harvey’s spirit was so disturbed by his mother’s yearning for a picture of him that he had come back so that such a picture could be made? The more he thought about it, the more he became convinced of the logic of his theory.
So when daylight came, instead of going to his field, Jacob Hammer went into Talladega to borrow a camera from W.H. McMillan, a photographer there.
He did not tell Mr. McMillan why he wanted to use the camera. He would have felt foolish saying that he intended to try to photograph a ghost, so he implied that he needed a picture of a landmark on his property, and he promised to return the camera early the next morning.
Mr. McMillan let him borrow one of the cumbersome old cameras with a tripod, and he showed him how to use it.
“Be careful with the glass negative,” he warned. “They break right easy.”
Jacob Hammer took the equipment back to the school building and set it up beside his cot, focusing it on the corner where he had seen the apparition on the two previous nights. He did not go to sleep that night: he sat on the side of the cot and waited.
Hours passed. Nothing happened. Mr. Hammer was beginning to wonder if he had imagined the whole thing when suddenly a bright light filled the room, and he saw Harvey in the far corner. He snapped the shutter of the camera, and the figure disappeared.
Mr. Hammer dozed fitfully (he was very tired) until daylight came. Then he went to Talladega to return the camera and to have the glass plate developed. Once again he wondered what he should tell the photographer, and once again he decided to tell him nothing.
After he had thanked the man for the use of the camera, he asked, “Will you please develop the plate? I took only one picture, but I would very much like to see it.”
Jacob Hammer waited, a restless wait, until Mr. McMillan came out of the darkroom. He was holding the glass negative, still wet, up to the light.
“Jacob,” he said, “I thought you did not have a picture of your little boy, the one who died.”
“We don’t have,” Jacob Hammer replied.
“Yes, you do. This is him—Harvey—right here. Look.”
Jacob Hammer looked. On the negative was the exact likeness of Harvey Hammer: blond curls, big eyes, wistful smile framed in a strange aura of light.
Jacob Hammer was unable to speak. He took the negative from the hands of the puzzled photographer and hastened home.
“Martha! Martha!” he shouted as he ran into the house. “Look!” He held the glass negative up to the light.
