Benjamin Edmonds turned the film advance knob on the self-developing camera in slow rhythmic motions of hand and wrist. When the mechanism locked, he placed the camera on its side next to the bronze casting on the wall table. He flipped off the ceiling light and turned on the faint red darkroom lamp over the developing trays. He sat for a moment, studying the casting and waiting for his eyes to adjust to the near darkness.
The replica was a plain, almost homely thing: a hand clasping a piece of broomstick. Even after a century and a quarter it still radiated the immense strength and suprahuman compassion of its greater model, and it would surely help to waken the distant sleeping shadows. Edmonds laid his own big hand over it softly; the metal seemed oddly warm.
It was time to begin.
He turned off the red light and let the blackness flow over him.
The images began almost immediately. At first they flickered vaguely, seemingly trapped within the plane of his eyelids. Then they gathered clarity and stereoscopic dimension, and moved out, and away. They were real, and he was there, in the crowded theater, looking up at the flag-draped presidential box, occupied by the three smaller figures and the tall bearded man in the rocking chair. And now, from behind, a fifth. The arm surely rising. The deadly glint of metal. The shot. The man leaping out of the box to the stage below. And pandemonium. Fluttering scenes. They were carrying the tall man across the street in the wavering paschal moonlight. And finally, in that far time, Edmonds permitted the strange hours to pass, until the right moment came, and the right image came.
It was the critical instant. This last scene, this static vision in time, must now be captured on the emulsion waiting inside the camera. As always, the mental process of transfer was sharp, burning. And then it was done.
He stood up and turned on the ceiling light again. He was breathing heavily. He felt cold, but his face was dripping with sweat. He pushed the bronze casting aside, rubbed at his eyes with a couple of paper towels, then pulled the film out of the camera. He studied the positive print briefly, but with approval. He rubbed the negative carefully with a hypo-stick and placed it between the carrier plates of the enlarger.
Why, of all the transcendent possibilities, did he think Helen would want this simple thing of hands? Why not the gangling young man, brooding at the grave of Ann Rutledge? Or the poignant farewell from the rear of the train just before it pulled out of Springfield? No, none of these. For Helen Nord, it had to be the hands.
For a bachelor in his fifties, thought Edmonds, I am a fool. And if Helen only knew what I have been doing here, she would certainly agree. I'm worse than Tom Sawyer, walking the picket fence to show off in front of his young lady friend.
He smiled wryly as he turned off the ceiling light once more and reached for the 8x11 bromide paper.
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