The Freedom in American Songs by Kathleen Winter Read Free Book Online Page B

Handler or their friends beating him to a pulp. Maybe you had to be a raging queen for them to leave you alone. Maybe being unsure of what you were was a worse sin in the eyes of the Rolands and Kenneths.
    Kerry was sure of some things though. He was sure that he loved, more than anything else in the world, singing harmony. In the Tongues of Flame Pentecostal Assembly everyone knew how to weave in and out of a major chord, and that place felt to him like the home of angels, and he was excited to attend even if his comfort there was tarnished by Pastor Best warning that to be homosexual meant a person was certain to be left behind on the day of the Rapture, and not only that, the person would know a punishment that had no end. But this punishment would wait until Kerry was dead if the Rapture did not come first, and before then, if he were lucky, he would have figured out some way to make peace with god, and with his raging sexual excitement in the proximity of Xavier Boland.
    But the Assembly met only three times a week, and only one of those times, Sunday mornings, had an hour given over to choruses, and, he had to admit to himself in all honesty, there were songs he’d far rather sing than Alive, Alive or Let the Anointing Fall on Me. For his own enjoyment, he had changed some of the words to I Keep Falling in Love with Him Over and Over Again so that instead of “Oh what joy between the Lord and I” the chorus spoke of joy with a certain other person, and likewise he altered the words to I’ve got a Longing in my Heart for Jesus. This he did as he walked home from school, making sure no one was close behind, especially not his brother Steve, who specialized in spying on people. But the songs he was really interested in were not these adaptations, nor were they the top ten from CFTO Radio, Your Voice of Reason in the Valley. The songs he loved were songs he had learned from his American cousin Poppy, the summer she had come up from North Carolina to get her illegitimate baby out of her system. The baby had been born by the time Poppy came to stay, born and given away in an adoption process somewhere north of North Carolina but not as north as Creek Bend. He’d been eight and Poppy had to him looked like any normal girl, and he had found it hard to envision her as Clothed in Stain’s Disgrace. By the time she arrived at his house, Poppy had forgotten her disgrace enough to begin singing, if she had ever stopped, and she took it for granted that he, Kerry, would be her singing partner on the back steps under his mother’s clothesline.
    American songs were different. American songs had sunshine in them. They had sunny sides of the street, and riversides, and mockingbirds. They had not only two-part harmony but two-part verses and words, which, overlaid one on another, created a complex lattice that had harmony added to it by-the-way, as if a bird had come to visit and begun singing a third element. There was land in American songs; there were wildwood flowers and bright mornings and sweet little Alice-blue gowns. It was as if everyone in America was getting dressed for a never-ending riverside dance, and sometimes the Americans would sail downriver or fall in love or even murder their lovers and bury them in the reeds, but there was always fresher air than here, and a shining sun, and there were ringlets. Kerry knew in his heart that this was ridiculous and that America was not like that at all, but the songs were joyful and had all these things in them; the songs were a kind of America of their own, and he and Poppy brought it into being with the words and the music and their voices.
    â€œYou have a good voice,” Poppy said, and he suspected it was true—maybe the songs made his voice even nicer than it was in church, and this was one of the things that sustained him once Poppy had long gone and he was without a singing partner in the world outside church. It sustained him and he saved a