Jeffrey's Favorite 13 Ghost Stories. Kathryn Tucker Windham
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clothes, iron, milk the cow, kill and dress a chicken, sew, mend and darn, and take care of the younger children.
They were living in the community of Stemley, near the Coosa River, in Talladega County then. All the children from Cassie to Harvey were born there, but the town has now dwindled into nothingness, and only a few older people remember where it was.
Cassie Hammer was likely too busy helping her mother care for the younger children, especially the baby, to have much time to play, but she really didn’t mind. There was something different about taking care of Harvey, something that soothed her resentment over having the responsibilities of a grown-up forced so early upon her.
Harvey was a good baby. And he was beautiful.
“Look, Mama,” Cassie would say after she had bathed and dressed him. “Look how beautiful Harvey is! I wish I had curly hair like he has. Look how it shines in the sunlight. And look how big his eyes are. Sometimes I think he sees things we can’t see. What do you suppose he sees, Mama?”
Mrs. Hammer, being a sensible woman, replied, “Don’t be silly, Cassie. He sees just what we see. Nothing else.” She paused. “But he is a beautiful baby. I wish I could have his picture made, looking just the way he looks now: all clean and shining and happy.”
She took the baby in her arms and kissed him. It was not easy for Mrs. Hammer to show affection, it wasn’t her nature, but Harvey had a quality, an elusive quality that even his mother couldn’t define, that called her to hug him and to cuddle him and to call him “my precious baby.”
Everybody loved Harvey. They loved him not merely because he was the youngest in the family, but because Harvey himself was so loving. His arms went out to everyone who came near, his smile had a radiance of pure joy, and his laughter was as musical and refreshing as snatches of dancing tunes.
Even Jacob Hammer, usually too busy earning a living for his growing family to squander time in play, would bounce his baby on his knee and sing to him some half-forgotten songs from his Indiana boyhood, and talk to him about matters only the two of them understood.
“You know what?” Jacob asked his wife. “This son of ours will grow up to see flying machines carrying passengers and mail from city to city. And he’ll ride on wide thoroughfares connecting the cities. Big changes are coming in this world—and Harvey will be part of them.”
“Oh, Jacob!” Mrs. Hammer replied. “What a wild imagination you have! How do you ever think of such foolish things?”
“They’re not foolish,” Jacob stated firmly. “They’ll come true. You’ll see—if you live long enough. Harvey believes what I’m telling you. Don’t you, Harvey?”
The baby smiled, and his eyes shone as though he did indeed understand, as though he shared with his father an exciting look into the future.
Harvey was walking and beginning to talk a little when the family moved to Renfroe, a community some six miles west of Talladega. At that time, Mr. Hammer was devoting most of his energies to farming.
Cassie continued to be Harvey’s loving protector, and the toddler adored her. Mrs. Hammer may have been a little jealous, but she tried not to show it.
“I hope your own babies will love you as much as Harvey does,” she said to Cassie one day.
“He loves you, too, Mama,” Cassie replied. “He loves everybody—but you most of all. Sometimes,” she added, “I think it’s not me but my gold locket that Harvey loves. He plays with it every time I wear it, and I believe he wants to wear it himself!”
Cassie’s locket, her only piece of jewelry had been a gift from her father. It was heart shaped and hung on a slender gold chain.
“It looks like you,” Jacob Hammer had said as he fastened it around her neck. “It looks like my Cassandra.”
Even then Harvey reached out to get the shining locket.
“No, Harvey,” Cassie said gently. “Boys don’t wear lockets. This is mine. Maybe some time I’ll let you try it on. But not now!”
One stormy night in late September 1898 Cassie woke up and heard Harvey crying in her parents’ bedroom. She ran across the hall and found her mother holding Harvey in her lap while Mr. Hammer rubbed the little boy’s chest with melted tallow and wrapped a flannel cloth around him.
“It’s the croup,” Mrs. Hammer told Cassie. “He’s real sick.” She held the baby close and rocked him.
Harvey was limp and listless, and his breathing was raspy.
“What can I do?” Cassie asked.
“Nothing,” Mrs. Hammer replied. “We’ve done all we can. Now we will just have to wait.”
Just 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,