Genealogy

The black and white photograph of a group of three boys the little girl had never heard of sits in the dining room on top of the white lace table runner. Looking closely, she could see them with hands in patched pockets underneath the Bur Oak tree, sporting two blonde heads and a one a shiny brown. Maybe they were friends who played together. They looked her age, almost, but not quite, two looking up and the one in the middle looking down, smiling.

As she grew, she noticed the boys stayed the same, motionless in time, never growing up with her. Later, Mom helped her put faces to the names; Robin, Harlow, and Oliver. She found out the one on the left with the windblown white hair was her Grandfather, and those two other boys were his brothers back during the Great Depression. The girl looked closely at the little boy on the left, trying to match his face to her Grandfather’s who had died earlier that year. He was the only one who had grown up.

She searched and searched for another copy of the photograph, tearing through the rest of the house with her small hands digging for anything she could find. Other pictures sat in other rooms, sporting old faces from older times. Looking at each one she wanted to know if she would recognize the boys. But in every other photo, they remained hidden or nonexistent. Only in the dining room, did they remain alive and resonate. Nothing in her child mind could understand why there was one copy, or why it sat there frozen.

Geography

Years later, when she grew much taller than the boys, she visited them again. This time, the girl took the picture leaning up against the old oil lamp, and flipped it over. On the back, in someone else’s handwriting was the place the picture was taken: Glen Rock Wyoming, 1934. They had gone to visit Wyoming that summer, taking interstate 80 to the tree scattered plains. She remembered how windy it was and how cold, wondering how her Grandfather and uncles could have survived on so little. Mom said they owned a farm and raised sheep, one of whom her Grandfather saved from the coyotes. On the road trip, the girl asked what the other boys did, the Mom said nothing, so the boys stayed the same.

History

When she stopped growing and resonating with childish things, she decided to let the photograph blend into the background of the dining room with the other forgotten antiques. But one of the boy’s came up again in her mind, on the anniversary of his death. Mom raised a glass in the purple dining room to the little boy on the right hand side of the Bur Oak tree who had in fact grown up. Oliver had evolved into a Marine who served in the Second World War who died after deliberately falling on a grenade to save his friends. The girl stared at the photograph, realizing that brother had been only seventeen years old just like the age she was now. The teenaged girl pointed to the last brother, the one in the middle, with the dark hair and asked who he turned out to be. The Mother looked at the photograph once more, before draining her wine glass in silence. The last boy remained unknowable.

Psychology

The day before the young woman moved out of her house, she decided it was time to ask hard questions, the kind that only an adult would be able to ask. Taking the yellowed photograph of the boys that had stayed with her all this time off of the lace table runner, she walked it downstairs to her Mother. Entering her painting room, she glanced around at the photographs her Mother decided to keep in plain view, never featuring this young face of a boy who had haunted her conscious for all these years. Sliding it next to the water color paints, she looked at her Mother curiously, and asked who the brunette boy in the middle was. The young woman watched the colors on the paint brush slow on the canvas, inspiration dissolving.

Finally, her Mother spoke, but not in so many words about how Harlow was always considered different, the black sheep of the family. Somehow he was not “mentally stable” as the other two. As a kid he was considered an outcast, too feminine and introverted to match the strict societal expectations of masculinity. How no one talked about him jumping trains as a teenager, or giving up on his life entirely early in his twenties in the muddy pond behind the family home. They say this happened after being trapped in a seemingly perfect marriage with a woman he never really loved. The young woman, now also in her twenties, watched, as the paint colors in the water wax and wane together, turning into a murky brown.