A Song of Love and Freedom

by William Lowell Males

The parts I come from must be among the friendliest in the world. You get to the turnoff from Elk and especially the intersection where you turn north to Cheyenne and people--well, male people--will start fingering at you. They just lift their finger off the steering wheel enough for you to see.

It can't make too much difference who you are. Nobody much can know who I am after over 40 years away and only home now and then. Nobody can recognize my rental car.

The drivers don't actually wave their fingers, or maybe they do. I think it's optional or maybe depends on how friendly you want to be. The procedure is like hoisting a flag for a friendly vessel.

The gas-field trucks--well, trucks in general--don't acknowledge you at all. A lot of their captains are from off and besides, they're grander ships. I'm just a dingy on this ocean, even with my four-wheel drive.

I've driven through small towns, Henrietta, Texas, for example, and nobody raised a finger. Henrietta's got an urban shadow. The roads around are too frequented.

It's the index finger always, on that little road home.

My Swedish wife didn't understand the importance of which finger for a long time. When she wanted to give someone "the finger," which is opposite of friendly, she'd shoot them her index finger.

She's not with me now 'cause she doesn't like trips where you're all over the place. In my Swedish family--my second wife and my kids with the first--you stay at least a week each place.

There's some trace of that this trip. I've stayed four nights at the Holiday Inn in Elk City, Oklahoma. My other nights will be scattered over the plains back to Dallas.

The only good excuse I have for being here is a family reunion on my mother's side. Her folks are called the Savages. That's their real name.

My brother came--one of the men in my life. He and I see ourselves in each other. We're mild and thoughtful, as if we might never meet again.

When I get folks around me like this it's easy to get drunk, but I didn't much. I put myself on the list for singing. We're a big family for music.

I said, "This is a family song. It's about homosexual love," and something happened in the room.

Before the entertainment began, my brother and I had slipped out to the sinful part of the hotel to drink a couple of gin and tonics. I was relaxed and let my guard down real low.

The sinful part smells of sin and cigarettes and I called the woman a barmaid. That wasn't the right word, but she didn't get offended.

She was a slender woman, gave me the thought she might have tried to fly and failed, perhaps broken some vital feather.

She didn't have the smoking voice you would expect. She tried to strike up a talk. My brother likes that sort of thing, and so do I. "You guys aren't from around here," she said.

She could tell we weren't. She had long hair and was actually a pretty girl if a pair of eyes would really see.

And I guess we aren't from here, though my brother said we come from about a half-hour north. I imagined the male drivers and their friendly index fingers on that stretch. The woman drivers are friendly, too, but you don't want to be too friendly if you're a woman. The one at the bar would appreciate this.

Her friendliness was a bit guarded but she had the bar between us and we looked more civilized than the regulars, I guess. I can't say my civilization runs deep. A lot of these finger-wavers are more constant than I. They might be better at helping you.

My folks are finger-wavers gone city. My cousin Gene still doesn't lock his car as a regular thing and he lives way down in the Texas with all kinds of Mexicans. He's determined to be friendly and easy, carries his reality around and is very hard to get mad.

He's shorter than I am and my brother is too. We're short on my mom's side, tall on Dad's. Gene hugs me; my brother hugs me--sincere hugs, not the kind where you keep your body slightly out of range. Some of my girl cousins kiss me on the mouth, some wet. I like that a lot. If I would give the bar woman a kiss that might help her calm down. She seems in a dither, always on her way somewhere. She pours our gin without measuring, talking to warm us up and of course for the tip, to a certain degree. Who doesn't whore for tips?

She can see by the cut of our clothes she'll never see us again, and that gives a kind of intimacy. We could have asked her more about her life and she could have asked us more. But we had to get back.

It's kind of a friendly static, the background talk in small towns on the plains. I was leaving a Mexican joint and held open the door for a couple who obviously try to make their living off the earth and he said, "How you doin'?" instead of "Thanks." I was not expected to answer.

If you ask a Swede, "How you doin'?" and walk off without listening, the Swede will feel like he jumped into your arms and you didn't catch him. It's a relatively big thing for a Swede to say "How you doin'?" Here it's just a fingerwave.

I've been living with Swedes most of my life and understood now that I could have been living on Mars. Here on the plains we don't present a song saying anything about homosexual love.

It's a good song. It's called "If I Had the Wings of an Angel" and has been sung in our family since time immemorial. "All the Pretty Little Horses" is another of our songs. It's a lullaby from the time we had slaves back in Kentucky . The singer is a slave girl.

It makes me sad to hear we had slaves and I want to know we were abolitionists. It's important to me. Kentucky was a border state. They were with the Union but allowed slavery. Our folks might have given our slaves free before they had to.

I can't believe we kept other folks slave, can't believe the bad stories I hear, for example how we took the plains and shot down Indians and their buffalo like rabbits. We've been pretty cruel in our time despite all the fingerwaving.

But I didn't know we had stayed this cruel. I say, "Love is love," and my militaristic cousin who is what I could have been if I hadn’t broken free ...

I wouldn't recommend breaking free. I'm very ashamed of myself. I can't help it. I'm from here and broke free and one price I have to pay is shame. I'm not ashamed of myself before the mirror, but I'm ashamed of myself in my hometown. I didn't become what they figured on me becoming, and it's all my doing.

"Love is love," I say and he says, "No, it isn't." He doesn't say, "No, it ain't". He’s an educated man.

And we leave it at that. We have a business to run. We both want to leave here on a fingerwaving basis.

Afterwards someone says that the husband of one of my girl cousins went all pale when I presented my song.

It might be my favorite.