Under the Oak Tree

Under the Oak Tree

By Lena Gemmer

Genealogy

The monochrome photograph of three boys the little girl had never heard of before sat 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 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 motionless in time, never growing up with her. Later, her Mother helped her put faces to the names: Robin, Harlow, and Oliver. 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. He was the only one who had grown up.

Geography

When she grew much taller than the boys, the adolescent 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. Her family had gone to visit Wyoming that summer, taking Interstate 80 to the tree-scattered plains. She remembered how windy and how cold it was, wondering how her Grandfather and Uncles could have survived on so little. Her Mother 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. Her Mother said nothing, so the boys stayed the same. 

History

When she stopped growing and resonating with childish things, the girl decided to let the photograph blend into the background of the dining room with the other forgotten antiques. But one of the boys came up again in her mind on the anniversary of his death. In the purple dining room, her mother raised a glass to the grown-up little boy on the right-hand side of the Bur Oak. Oliver had evolved into a Marine who served in the Second World War, dying after deliberately falling on a grenade to save his friends. The girl stared at the photograph, realizing the brother had only been seventeen years old, the age she was now. The teenage 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 yellow 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 conscience for all these years. Sliding it next to the watercolor 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 paintbrush slow on the canvas, inspiration waning.

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 as “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. No one talked about him jumping trains as a teenager. No one talked about the perfect marriage with a woman he never loved. No one talked about what he did in the pond behind the family home in his early twenties. The young woman, now also in her twenties, watched the colors in the water turn it into a murky muddy brown.