We went on sipping silently for a minute.
“Daddy, can we get some Subway?”
His daughter shook out her wet hair and plunked herself down in an empty chair beside us, wrinkling her nose in mock disapproval at the two late-afternoon drinkers. Out of the water I could see that this girl was older than I had first thought; my guess was twelve or so.
Her father gave a wry smile at her request.
“Y’all want something to eat?” he asked me as he got slowly to his feet.
If they had ordered blackened possum on a skewer I was going to share it with them. This was my second poolside dinner invitation in twenty-four hours, and I had blundered pretty ineptly through the first one. But this time I was determined to eat and shut the fuck up, and therefore rack up some much needed points for diplomacy. It wouldn’t be that hard to do better this time.
Thankfully a black forest ham sandwich was offered in lieu of possum.
The father left soon after declining to let me contribute financially. His daughter pulled her calculator and her papers in front of her and got seriously busy ignoring me for the entire time it took her father to purchase and return with three footlong sandwiches and one large diet soda.
I did try once to be social.
“What are you working on?”
She didn’t look up.
“Balancing equations.”
“Is it hard?”
I was given a brief and pained look. “It’s eighth-grade science.”
“What grade are you in?”
There followed a massive eye roll. “Fifth.” And then there followed a brief and taciturn stare.
I gave up and swam alone in the pool to work on my appetite.
When the father was safely back poolside, I headed to my room to retrieve my other bottle. Before we drank he coughed up a word that always sounds passably Gaelic, and is clearly meant as a toast that, to my knowledge, no true Celt has ever willfully uttered, but Mister Diplomat mumbled a polite response into his glass and we sipped together in pleasant solidarity.
“What are you reading?” I pointed at the paperback face down on the table.
“It’s for her English class. To Kill a Mockingbird. Way too fucking smart for me.”
“Are you enjoying it?”
“You know what? I am.” He had sounded both surprised and pleased.
* * *
It was now much later and the poolside lights were turned off. The traffic had all but ceased as I sat outside my room, facing the empty courtyard, with the room door closed but unlocked, a naked bulb lit above it, my guitar in my lap, and the noisy clicking of insects all around, the fingers on my fretting hand cramping. The guitar tuner had needed new batteries. The urge to blame Gary for this was a singularly petty one. My phone offered several tuner apps, and I chose the one with the most lavish reviews and ponied up the penny short of three-dollar charge. The guitar turned out to be pretty much still in tune—the warm afternoon drive and the chill of the air-conditioned room had done remarkably little damage.
On the Internet I found alternate versions of every song Logan Kind ever recorded. Some employed chords I knew and could passably play. So I gave it a try. I’d listened to Crofter more than a few more times by now. Again, much like the alleged cover by the Deltatones, the sound was superficially proximate, but also not really so at all. Digging deeper, other posted versions utilized all kinds of alternate tunings. I was pretty much clueless, but my tuner app offered some of these tunings so I got to work hitting the open strings, staring at the digital readout, twisting the tuners until a red and green line blurred agreeably together on the center of the phone screen.
This was deep in uncharted waters as I gingerly fingered the suggested chords. While this was definitely closer to the original Kind sound, it was still elusively absent the all-defining rightness. Once again so close, but still so far away.
It was time to take a break. This was more guitar-playing in a couple of hours than I had done in three decades. My baby-smooth, uncallused fingers throbbed.
* * *
Musical theory had been a mystery at fourteen. My high school offered weekly music lessons to the first two dozen volunteers willing to skip a coma-inducing period of scripture studies every Thursday afternoon. The choices were piano, guitar, or bagpipes, although the third choice may well have been a joke.
My mother was persuaded to cough up for my first instrument. She found a cheap three-quarter-size steel-strung acoustic in a pawnshop, which I actually thought was cool at the time. My teacher was a small man with bad skin and a blonde Bowie cut. He traveled freelance between a handful of schools and shook his head in some disbelief when he tried to force the strings a fair distance down towards the undulant fretboard on my twenty pounds’ worth of breath-thin varnish and slipshod wood veneer.
He didn’t spare my feelings.
“It’s a shite instrument, son.” This came with a sad shake of the head. Part-time instructors, as opposed to the regular school staff, were apparently free to swear.
His honest appraisal wasn’t too detrimental. We did other things. He showed me the chords for the Animals and the Moody Blues and two-fingered shortcuts to playing twelve-bar blues like Status Quo. Each lesson lasted a half hour. For the first twenty minutes he watched as I struggled. For the last ten, his natural empathy kicked in, as wordlessly he handed his huge blonde Epiphone hollow body over and his sore-fingered acolyte could actually get to play something.
My reasoning at the time was that guitar playing was a ridiculously cool endeavor, and I certainly wanted to be that cool. I knew boys my age who played well, but I suspected that they surreptitiously worked very hard at it, and I was loathe to visibly labor at something that clearly wasn’t about to come easily, when there were other things that did.
The guitar joined a long list of activities to be performed with sporadic interest and a studied mediocrity, but never fully mastered. I did swap a denim jacket in my first year of university for a much better instrument, an Aria six-string. I could play it better than my twenty-quid special, which I left at home and would never see again.
* * *
So now to both learn and relearn. An A minor chord I could still remember. If I barred two frets up it was a B minor. Another fret up was C minor and the chord I was looking for, a C sharp minor, was right there on the fourth fret. I gave it a shot.
A limited success. Once again I was slightly surprised. I was far older, and my fingers were doubtless much stronger. The action on the Guild was low and forgiving. Yet barre chords were the bane of my teenage Axe-hero days, and now I could, with some effort, create them.
And as raggedy and hesitantly as I played outside my room in the compound, I already cherished the sound of the Guild. I looked at the dark aged wood and the cracks in the varnish as I kept on playing. I had read somewhere that wood instruments need to be played, that rich collectors often loan their priceless Stradivarius violins to lowly gigging musicians so that the instrument stays supple and fluid. Had this old Guild been played much of late? It was pleasant to think that it had.
In Memphis they told me it had been well cared for, the original paperwork and replaced parts had been retained, the frets worked on at some point, and Gary had professed the setup to have been of professional quality. In addition, a sturdy high-quality case had been found to house the instrument at some juncture.
How long had the guitar sat in the Memphis store?
I hoped not long.
Who had owned it before me?
Why had they sold it?
I should have asked these questions when I had the chance.
Because I needed more mysteries in my life.
I thought about Logan Kind, and the guitar he held on the cover of Crofter.
Gary had said it was a better instrument.
I was more t
han okay with that.
He was a better player.
That was only fair.
I played through the pain until it got seriously dark. Then I went to bed, a happy man, with four fingers in a state of near agony.
* * *
The slow-gurgling mass was masquerading as sausage gravy, the lumps of pale fleshy dough posturing as biscuits. The fact that all the guests, even the social pariahs from the annex, were invited to partake should have alerted me to the grim nature of the proffered vittles.
Anyway, I took a pass, paid my bill for the one night, and drove into Oxford, Mississippi, in the white of the morning sunshine.
The main street that took me into the town was as blandly anonymous as any, with fast gas-fast food-fast drug stores alternating in a drab recurring pattern.
But closer to the town center, the roads narrowed and climbed, then descended. The gardens grew green and lush and were well tended. The porches were bright bursts of paint, yet partly obscured by vibrant explosions of spring flowers.
The town square was scrupulously in order and preposterously cute. Landscaped trees in a sea of dark burgundy tulips adorned the square. In the center, a white-columned building housed the county courthouse, and the four sides were given over to shops: a large bookstore with a separate entrance to a used books section, a starched old relic of a department store, at least one bar, and several restaurants.
I found a parking place under the shade of an oak tree and cracked all four windows open.
Directly across a narrow road from a clearly thriving Baptist church stood a storefront breakfast café and bakery filled with church comers and goers and legions of sorority girls in what looked weirdly like serious date dresses, full makeup and jewelry, and long big blonde highlighted hair that was pretty, if pretty dated. The ladies were turned out well enough to have attended the morning service, but I strongly suspected that they hadn’t.
I ate a homemade bagel and drank good coffee at the counter. The servers were all toothy and smiling and patented Southern, which I found to be polite and languorous.
* * *
On my phone, the online version of a major Chicago newspaper contained the details of the suburban coffee shop suicide, now two days past. Stephen Park had been just twenty-four years old and had lived with his father, Edgar, in a town twenty miles south from where he died. Park was attending the local community college and was near completing his associate’s degree. He had dropped out of the larger state university in DeKalb after his first year. His mother said he was finally getting his life together. She lived on the north side of Chicago and worked at a theater box office. His father drove a remote parking bus at Midway airport. His parents were divorced and Stephen had been their sole offspring.
Stephen Park had listened to music all his life. He had taken part in theater productions in junior high school and worked on the sound crew in high school. He had been a Fine Arts major at DeKalb. He had apparently spent most of his time working at the college radio station producing and recording studio sessions, and researching on his own time. He had written a paper on modern Scottish poetry. His tastes were zealously narrowed to folk music from Scotland and Ireland. The Park family had roots in both. His father’s family were Scots who had moved north from Kentucky a generation ago. His mother, whose maiden name was Donahue, had family originally from Cookstown in Northern Ireland. His mother said Stephen had wanted to go there, and was saving up for a trip.
She said she was shocked.
She said she had loved her son dearly.
She said he was always a happy boy.
There was no funeral information provided.
That Stephen Park seemed wholly unremarkable in every way made his death no less distressing.
I Googled his name and got exactly the same newspaper account I had just read. I typed his name again and added Logan’s.
Pay dirt.
I had failed to dig deeply enough into the Croftertales website the first time. Stephen Park was in there several times, commenting, discussing, adding his views to a labyrinthine series of discussion group threads. It wasn’t too surprising to learn that Park had loved Crofter, and that he had worshipped Logan Kind. In one long cyber-aside he offered his testimony about his first exposure to Kind. I soon learned that a woman named Margaret in DeKalb had introduced Park to Kind’s music. Her last name was Munro. She was an artisan graduate student. There was a link to her earth-toned website, where she offered organic soaps and vegan edibles and wraps (it was unclear whether these last were edible or cleansing) and other earth-friendly, apparently endlessly sustainable skincare products, all with the lofty purpose of promoting a safe and reusable world and the more-intimate intent to foster a general epidermal improvement for all.
If I was secretly hoping that Park had a site of his own, where some deranged manifesto for Kind worshippers would be posted and readily available, and where a cult of folk-addicted suicidal mopes would be revealed, I clearly was going to be roundly disappointed.
On Margaret’s granola-earnest home page there were raggedy soaps made from cardamom and pine and lavender and shea butter. But there was nothing that helped explain why Stephen Park was dead and why he had chosen to die on the anniversary of Logan Kind’s death. There was also nothing to explain a young man’s fascination with Kind, a model musical footnote. There was no mention of Park on Margaret’s site, and no mention of Logan, for that matter. I Googled Margaret and got nothing more than a link back to her website, a handful of customer raves for her soap, and Stephen Park’s lone mentioning of her.
Mentally scrolling back to my earlier searches, I tried “Circumstance” and Munro and Park together and separately and got nothing. I combined Park’s name with the list of Crofter track names and got so many variations on a theme—extended comments in Croftertales where Stephen alluded to most of the songs in various stages of dewy-eyed deification.
Every permutation using “Circumstance” remained a veritable dead end thus far.
* * *
Oxford was the land of the Deltatones. I circled back to them. Deltatones and Park was a possibility. It produced nothing. The flash drive text file had alluded to the similarities between their songs and Kind’s. Had Stephen Park shared his opinion with the band on Deltatonic.com? It would seem not. I recalled that others had also noted the resemblance between the one Delatones song and one of Kind’s. But “Circumstance” wasn’t the name of the song. The band’s website made no mention of this connection. But then again, why would it? It was hardly in the nature of being a compliment.
The band website did list sporadic concert dates. All were either in the past or a long way off. All were either in Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana or Mississippi. It seemed the band had a residency of sorts at one time in a bar called the Green Lady, which was in Memphis.
I thought about the old vet’s ghost story, of wretched Jean and her murdered daughter, and her burned vigil by the dying embers of the fire. Scotland had a million green lady stories.
* * *
There were more pictures of the Deltatones. I looked once more at the compendium of raggedy beards and massed flannel. The young woman with the fiddle stood out as both refreshingly beardless and nowhere near as burly. Her name was Carly Williamson. I Googled her. She had her own website. She didn’t make soap. She had appeared on every Deltatones recording. She lived locally. She was working on her first solo album. She had left the band. She had an old beagle named Wallace. There was a picture of her and Wallace outside what I assumed was her house. He looked very old and mostly brown and seemed friendly enough, but I barely noticed him because the house was far more interesting.
I went back to Croftertales and found the Wiki-like bio that formed the home page. There were precious few photographs accompanying the introductory text. I quickly found the one from Kind’s approximate year spent in Oxford. It featured Lo
gan posing with a younger Wallace the beagle outside a house with a neatly trimmed front yard and a green paint job, unmistakably the very same property where Carly Williamson and her pet were photographed.
Croftertales even went so far as to include the street address.
I opened Google Maps as I sucked down the last cold remains of my coffee.
“Y’all done here, Hon?”
I told the waitress that I surely was.
Seven
When Carly Williamson opened her front door and took one brief look at me, she clearly found me less than mysterious.
“So let me guess,” she began with a smirk. “You’re going to be my seventh pilgrim so far this year.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I get them mostly in the spring and summer. You’re kinda older than they usually are. Hope you don’t mind me saying that, but you are. Shit. You are one aren’t you?”
“Am I disturbing you? I should perhaps have called or something?”
“No. You’re good. I was out shopping. I just got back. You timed it well.”
“You mentioned a pilgrim?”
She laughed and pulled the door closed behind her. We stood on the porch of the house.
“Tell me if I get anything wrong.”
“Okay.”
“So you’re a huge music fan and you want to know if this is Logan Kind’s old house. They usually start with something like that, which is so much bullshit, because you already found the place on the Internet, so you already know that it’s the right place.”
It seemed prudent to say nothing and wait.
She continued. “So what is it that I can do for you? You’d like to take a picture for sure. Maybe I can give you a tour of the place? You’re wondering if he left anything of value behind? Could there be a collection of his writings perchance? Or the secret cheat sheet with all his weird chord tunings? Or the master tapes he secretly recorded with Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. You’re looking for some kind of seriously exclusive shit like that? Am I right?”
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