Colorblind

by Peter Robertson

  The record producer was Sebastian Winter and he too had gone on to make more recordings, exclusively folk music and mostly by Scottish artists. I scanned his discography. It was large, but clearly lacked the commercial firepower that littered Mr. Dean’s more storied musical resume.

  Winter was still alive and still working. I had already learned that Morris Dean had died fairly young, a victim of throat cancer related to heavy smoking. His death was lamented on the website for two reasons: he was both a marvelous arranger and musician, and was considered one of the few people who might have been able to shed some light on the secrets of Logan Kind’s guitar tunings.

  I learned what model of Guild guitar Logan played, and what year it was probably manufactured, although none of the faithful were exactly certain. He had played electric guitar on two of the tracks on Crofter. He had borrowed an Ibanez Les Paul copy made in the early seventies from Winter at the producer’s urging, and had played it through a thirty-watt Marshall combo. Kind had reputedly hated the electric but had been talked into playing it by the producer for sound commercial reasons. I wasn’t surprised that most of the Internet acolytes took the singer’s side on this issue; yet their opinions came with very little assigned blame. The songs would no doubt have been better on acoustic, but no one seemed willing to assign too much blame to Mr. Winter. It had been a worthwhile endeavor—a brave but doomed attempt to garner Crofter a larger audience.

  I played the aforementioned electric songs and listened hard. The years had been kind to the plugged Kind. In the wake of rootsy alt-country, and grunge, and whatever else Indie, Kind’s raw and gnarly bursts of overdriven staccato noise sounded just fine. If anything, he perhaps tended to overplay, failing to note that less is often more, ignoring the endless sustaining capabilities of the amplified instrument.

  Both the late Morris Dean and the living Sebastian Winter had their own websites, with links to various interviews, and both men had been asked, on occasion, to talk about Logan Kind. On this issue they presented something of a common front. Both men were sad that Kind hadn’t become a bigger star. Winter was unable to shed much light on the commonly asked question: What was the deal with Logan’s guitar tunings? Dean sadly was never asked that question during his abbreviated lifetime. Dean had been grateful to get his start on Crofter. Both men believed that Crofter was one of their best works. Winter proclaimed the electric tracks on the record to be his favorites and that, if Logan were around today, he would surely agree. Dean stated diplomatically that they had both been “interesting and worthwhile experiments.” If Winter sounded a mite defensive on the matter it was hardly surprising, given the number of gently expressed opinions to the contrary.

  As I read through the postings I began to note some curiosities. Crofter was an abject commercial failure, certainly on arrival, but one that had begun a modestly successful career for Sebastian Winter, and launched a stellar one for Morris Dean. Logan Kind had kept on playing live for a while after Crofter, but he hadn’t chosen to record again.

  Logan Kind sold few records as an active musician. But he continued to sell after he had stopped performing, and his popularity had grown still more after his death.

  The music listings on Amazon include something called a best sellers rank and Logan Kind was currently in the 40,000 ballpark. While this number might not be enough to make Taylor Swift lose any sleep, it was more than respectable.

  And then there was Croftertales.com.

  I discovered that Logan Kind had a tribute website of his own, where his fans could avidly construct and tend and post to and wallow in an electronic monument to their boutique hero. Croftertales.com was both slick and professional looking and therefore indistinguishable from the Internet presence of any legitimate, mass-media–anointed star. It was where Logan endured as a cyber-entity; it was as real and as legitimate as any rock star’s website. It functioned as a dumping ground for considerable smugness, as his artistic purity was celebrated, his initial commercial failure basked in and his reputation, undiluted by success.

  The haughtiness was pervasive and weirdly justified since Logan had never gone disco. He’d never rushed out some unleavened sophomore effort, or cashed in on the bloat of a comeback trail. He didn’t sell an FM chestnut to a car manufacturer, and there was thankfully no studio-enhanced duet disc with Willie Nelson.

  His talent was undimmed by any kind of damning mass acceptance. And in their selfish little heart of hearts, the denizens of Croftertales.com wouldn’t have it any other way.

  Poor Mr. Winter took a measured amount of grief for lending Logan the Les Paul copy but I sensed an unstated note of relief in the Internet rumblings; even the voltaged Logan had aged pretty well, and most of his followers were happy to have their own broken and unheralded cult hero, in either the plugged or unplugged versions.

  Reading on.

  The serpentine tributaries of the Internet filled in a few more biographical blanks. The level of privacy afforded a reclusive soul in the present age is laughably slight.

  Logan was known to have lived for a spell in Oxford, Mississippi, for about a year, for no apparent reason. He was twice spotted out and about, once in a second-hand bookshop on the square, and once eating at a meat and three Memphis diner, before he headed south to New Orleans. In Oxford he had rented a house on the rural edge of town, that had been photographed. It sat squatting in a weedy field on a side road that rose up and tumbled over a series of rolling hills heading out of town toward a reservoir.

  In New Orleans he lived much longer. His first five years there were less secretive. After Hurricane Katrina, Logan resided more mysteriously for the remaining nine months of his life.

  For one thing he played his guitar in public on occasion in New Orleans. He was photographed jamming on a summer night in a club on Poland Avenue in the Bywater district and was more than once observed playing his guitar on the streets of the French Quarter, metaphorical cap in hand for tourists to tip and the locals to presumably ignore.

  According to the testimony from one giddy website poster, Kind was playing covers as a street musician in the Quarter. The woman in question asked him to perform one of his originals. He had politely declined. When she tried for a photograph he subsequently turned and fled. She had posted a picture of the location—the intersection of two streets. One of the streets was where Tennessee Williams had reputedly lived out the last years of his life, she proudly informed us. Finally, she had submitted a list of the songs she had heard him play. I had to admit he had chosen his covers well and the majority of online postings concurred.

  Logan had been mostly observed playing before Katrina. His whereabouts known. The address of the apartment building where he lived was even provided.

  What was stranger was that the posted dates of his street performances did include post-Katrina dates; one was only weeks after the storm, and a second, only weeks before his death.

  Both were during the period when no one had a clue where he was living.

  The faithful of Croftertales.com had come up with a plethora of theories.

  I began to feel a little sorry for Mr. Kind, whose attempts at living the reclusive life would have been better served before the invention of the Internet.

  There were some other sightings before the storm.

  He had reportedly performed one of his own compositions at a young woman’s funeral—a typical rollicking New Orleans street affair, with a second line brass band and a meandering cavalcade of friends, slight acquaintances, shameless interlopers, and one delighted tourist who recognized Kind. Logan had in fact played none other than “Pittenweem Girl” to a wet-eyed ensemble. Later, the girl’s roommate and occasional lesbian lover had belted out Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” without benefit of a mike, augmented by a sprightly trombone accompaniment, all a mere matter of months before the levee did indeed break.

  The Bywater club sighting was expl
ored in greater detail in a link provided to the club’s own website. Logan had been talked into getting on the cramped stage upstairs and jamming with a touring rock guitarist. My brief exposure to Kind’s songs made me seriously doubt whether he had any real interest in jamming and perhaps I was right. According to a handful of unreliable witnesses, Logan had been drinking but wasn’t by any means drunk, but he had, by his own standards, played badly. He had left the stage hurriedly with ill grace after only a couple of songs.

  The guitar player, a genuine star and a longtime admirer of Crofter, was almost overcome with glee at getting Kind to play. In his modest view, Logan had pretty much blown him off the stage, but the shy Kind had clearly felt otherwise.

  There was a link posted to a short newspaper piece. Logan Kind had died mysteriously in the Industrial Canal in May 2006. His death was ruled an accidental drowning, and the date of his death was recorded. His body had subsequently been cremated, his ashes scattered on the surface of the water that had swallowed his life a few days before.

  But the exact date of his death couldn’t be right.

  Because that date was today—the same day the young man in the coffee shop had chosen to end his life, the same day I had illegally commandeered a flash drive and walked away from a crime scene in the making with a piece of evidence.

  And on a decidedly lesser note, today was the same day I had first listened to Logan Kind, to his singular creation. Crofter was as remarkable a collection of songs as I had heard in long years of obsessive music-listening in teenage bedrooms and college dorms and coffee shops, in nice bars (including my own at Belvedere Brewing) and shitty bars, in nice cars and shitty cars, in stadium arenas on blissfully few occasions and small clubs on thankfully a whole lot more, and on badly scratched vinyl and shitty digital downloads, and every other format in between.

  There was more to read about in Croftertales but I was too tired to continue.

  Time to turn off my phone and instead consider the notion of serendipity.

  Six

  “Ever been to a place called Colinton?”

  “That’s where the army barracks are?”

  He nodded twice. “Stationed there during the war.”

  “Which war?”

  He looked at me with pity. “My war. Most people got themselves a war. You got a war?”

  “Not really.” I looked hard at him. “You don’t look old enough.”

  He looked sneaky. “Which war is it you puttin’ me down for?”

  “The Second.” My hasty calculations made it unlikely that an American serviceman would be stationed outside Edinburgh for any other reason.

  He nodded three times and looked pleased with both of us. “Yessir. That was mine. I’m eighty-eight years old.”

  “You look much younger.”

  “Black folks’ skin keeps real smooth.” He grinned at me challengingly.

  “Is that actually true?”

  “How the fuck should I know?” His laugh was like a gunshot. “We like to use us more lotion, that’s for damn sure.” Another burst of bullets.

  He finished the bottle and put it down sucked out and empty.

  “I know me a Scottish ghost story. Little Scottish guy once told it when I was there, in a bar in an alley in the center of the town. There’s nothin’ but bars there.”

  “Rose Street?”

  “That one.”

  “Guy wasn’t nothin’ but a wee kind of laddie who told it to me. You’d call him that right? Swore it was nothin’ but true. Kept it with me all these years. Scottish people, they ever known to lie?”

  I smiled. “All the time.”

  He smiled back at me. “Then maybe it’s just so much bullshit. It’s about a green lady.”

  “A lot of them are. So why are you telling me this?”

  “Thought you’d like to hear it. A thing from your home. A piece from the old country. You get yourself to missing it?”

  “Sometimes I do.”

  “Best time I ever had was being there. Being a young man. In a place that was strange but not strange. Not many of us.”

  “Americans?”

  “That. But more being myself a black man.”

  “I suppose not.”

  "Well? You want to hear it?”

  He did have my interest now. “You go right ahead.”

  He looked at the empty bottle in front of him. There was a hesitation. “Cost you four beers.”

  “It must be a very long story.”

  He grinned. “Makes you think that? I drink me a Bud or two when I’m tellin’ stories. Makes the words slide out. What is it you drinking yourself today?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “Bud’s what they call the king of beers.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  He pointed at my glass. “Less money than that dark shit water y’all are drinkin.”

  He did have a point, although he wasn’t going to be the one actually paying.

  “What do you do?” he suddenly asked.

  I held up my glass of Copperhead Red. “I brew dark shit water like this.” There was no response. “And I sell art supplies.” Again a blank. “But mostly nothing.”

  At last he had the answer he was after. There was a knowing nod, and after that a prolonged pause. Defeat came after a while, and the bartender, who already had a Budweiser longneck in his fat hand, came our way with the proverbial shit-eating grin on his face. He set the bottle down on the stained coaster beside the old black man who was the only other customer in the bar, and the dark, shiny wooden Indian, who languished in the shaded corner of the bar on Marshall Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee.

  He began his ghost story and my expectations were truncated. There are at least a dozen green lady tales set in at least a dozen Scottish castles. In the bulk of them she is glimpsed fleetingly in a high window late at night. She is usually gossamer young and pale and ethereal and profoundly mopey, because she has been deeply wronged, almost always by a handsome cad, and she has surrendered something of great value.

  This then is the green lady story I heard in a Memphis bar that afternoon, which cost me four beers, and took close to an hour of my life, an hour I’ll never get back, and which I’m truthfully okay with.

  “The young lady in this story, her name was Jean. She was still just a teenager. They married them young and set them to workin’ even younger in them times. She was real shy and in a little way she was real pretty and had herself this head of long dark hair. She worked as a maid in a high tall castle. This was hundreds of years back when. The castle was on an island in a small kind of sea. This was in the high country place in the north. Her family was mostly poor just like she was poor. They lived close to the castle by the edge of the water. What are these people you had then?”

  “These people?” I was confused

  “They were back in the day. Living the land. Not owning the place outright. Using slices of the dirt for their walls and roofs.”

  “We called them crofters.”

  The word clearly meant nothing. “Crofters?”

  So I had to try again. “Like homesteaders.”

  He nodded an understanding at that.

  So the story would continue.

  “She didn’t earn much of anything. Jean, she worked hard, and gave all the little she earned back to her crofter folks. Even though she was young she was already of a marrying age. So it was fixed that she would marry one of the older servants who was owed a favor. He was the master of the castle’s personal manservant. A bad man by all accounts. He got her pregnant quick and she had his baby. He chose to drink mostly and he didn’t care to love her much after the child. Then he lost his job for stealing the prize silver from his master. He took to his drinking more after that. Jean said nothing to him in blame. She wasn’t ever mean and she didn’t try to change him but in his nasty rage he fou
ght hard with his young wife, and at the end of his last nerve he threw their newborn daughter into a burning fire where she sadly perished in the heat and flames. Poor Jean tried to pull the little body from the fire. She burned herself bad in her efforts, but she went on and lived subsequent to this. Afterwards the husband left her and he fled someplace away out of her mind. The young girl was recalled in her sadness, and she sat alone by the cold embers of the fire for days afterwards, holding tight the body of her dead baby girl. Her own badly burned body was hurting but she cared herself none for that, her bad life already over in the measure of her sad eyes.”

  “What happened to the husband?”

  “They found his no account self and hung him from a tree for his nasty ways. Then they figured he deserved some more, so they burned his hung body till it was ashes and mixed them into the feed of the livestock they was planning to slaughter soon. Some who ate the meat said that it was bad and vile and tainted with his evil, that it tasted no damn good.”

  “What about Jean?”

  “She lived on for a little time. Her face just a mess of ruined flesh, it was far too late to try to tend to. The little piece left of her sat days by that fireplace. She let no one burn the fire there. Said nothing else to anyone till she went and passed. Her pains must have been bad, but she lingered, until the grief took her away and she perished still young. People say they see her now, once a year, on the very same day that her little girl passed. She’s all burned up and truly an ugly sight to behold. She wears a green dress and her hair is still dark and long and pretty but her face is plenty terrible and her hands are charred down to the blackness of the bones and nothin’ much of anything else. The castle is just ruins now but visitors say they see her ghost in the same room where the old fireplace used to be. They say she sits and holds a loose baby shawl in her lap, nothing but empty now, the cloth lying across her burn-damaged fingers. Say that she says nothing, but cries herself some big sad tears that make their way down across the ruination of her face and onto the baby blanket.”