In Old Photographs   

from The Logic of Wings  by Vanessa Haley   Cherry Grove Collections 2004

In old photographs of my mother, she is thin and beautiful,

her mouth dark with lipstick, her 40s business clothes

tailored to fit her small frame.  Right out of high school

she went to work at Du Pont, taking shorthand, typing memos,

walking downtown for lunch with the girls from the office.

In four years she worked her way up to executive secretary

and never missed a day, rising early each morning to take the bus

to the city, an hour ride past cornfields and dairy

farms surrounding the small town where she lived with her parents

and paid them room and board now that she had a job. 

She banked half her paycheck every week, saving for the car

her Uncle Clarence wanted to sell after her cousin, who drove an army

tank the color of mud during the war, was killed in France.

There are pictures of the two of them as children riding a horse

down the dirt lane that led to her uncle’s farm:  a lean-to house

and three barns; a silo and a hundred acres plowed and planted

with rotation crops:  wheat, corn and soybeans.

My mother is holding her cousin, Charlie, tight, the two of them

shirtless and sexless in the summer heat, dwarfed by the immense

workhorse, retired from labor and left to pasture, by then old

in animal years and gray in the face.  The split rail fence in the

background stands like a study in perspective leading far away. 

My mother felt guilty driving Charlie’s car and saved the pack of Camels

in the glove compartment, needing something small and

intimate she could keep inside her purse and carry everywhere. 

He bought the cigarettes the day he enlisted and left high school

behind, tomorrow’s assignment still written in chalk on the blackboard

in Mrs. Halloway’s classroom: 

Summarize Odysseus’ journey until his confinement           

by Calypso.  Please write in complete sentences.

He had lied about his age and asked my mother not to say a word.

And so she didn’t, not even when her uncle cursed and cried

and crushed his good felt-hat in his hands, awkward

in the suit he had to go out and buy for the funeral.

Before my mother died she told me this story.  I framed

the picture of her and Charlie on the horse.  They smile

and wave in innocence.  I never knew the horse’s name.