Ten Thousand Saints

Twelve





What was there to do, back in Lintonburg, but start a band? “We’ll bring straight edge to the people,” Jude told Johnny. “It’ll be a sight to behold.” Kram and Delph were on board. They’d both been dumped by their girlfriends. They had no college plans. The grassy summer stretched before them.

And so one Saturday morning in May, the former members of the Bastards gathered in Jude’s basement for their first practice in two and a half years. They dusted off their equipment; they plugged in; they tuned. Johnny, the only one of them who’d been in a serious band, ran them through the hardcore standards, Delph thrashing over his bass, Kram trying to keep up on the drums, and Johnny and Jude each on a guitar, like the metal gods they’d once dreamed of being. Jude’s guitar was in bad shape, but by the end of the day, they’d even pieced together one and a half songs of their own.

“Shit’s fast,” Kram said, sweat dripping from his chin.

But the Bastards was no longer a sufficiently menacing moniker. After practice, Jude armed himself with chalk, leading the band name brainstorm on the basement chalkboard:

The Ass-Kickers

The Righteous Ninjas

Salvation Army

Just Say Hell No

The Underground

The Law

X-Ray

X-Men

X-ecute

X-emplify

Against All Odds

Origin of Trust

What Peril Falls

When Truth Hurts

Friend or Foe (???)

It was very likely the greatest number of words Jude had voluntarily composed, and he felt a frenzied sense of accomplishment.

“They all sound like the title of a 60 Minutes story,” said Delph, who had cut off his mullet and was now sporting a crew cut. Kram chuckled, and Delph said, “Shut up, moron, you’ve never seen 60 Minutes.”

“Why don’t you just call yourselves the Get-Along Gang?”

Everyone had forgotten Eliza, who was sitting at the top of the stairs. She had been drifting in and out of their practice all day. She didn’t look up from the toenails she was painting.

“Ha-ha,” Jude said. “Hilarious.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t make fun of things you don’t know anything about,” Johnny told her.

“How could I know about it?” she asked. “You wouldn’t take me to any shows.”

“That was for your own safety,” Johnny reminded her.

“Whatever,” she said, blowing on her nails. “I don’t really care what you call yourselves.”

“I don’t like any of the names either,” Kram admitted.

“There are a lot of Xs up there,” said Delph.

Kram and Delph had adapted quickly to the presence of Johnny’s new wife, treating her with a distant awe. Jude had told them that the baby was Teddy’s. It had been a relief to tell someone, and he hadn’t thought twice about it. Wouldn’t Teddy want them to know? But Johnny had gone ape. What if it got out? Jude didn’t see why it mattered. It wasn’t like he’d told his parents. And Johnny and Eliza were married now.

Jude doubted it was a coincidence that Delph and Kram had jumped back into the band with such little resistance. Kram, he was a pushover—he would have joined an a cappella group if Johnny had asked him to—but two months ago Delph was selling pot, and now he had joined a band that was, at present count, 50 percent straight edge. It was the baby they were in awe of, Jude thought, the little punk Eliza carried in utero, the embryonic offspring of drug-ruined Teddy. As they’d inventoried their ancient equipment this morning, lifting the sheet off the rusty drum kit, the heady, homesick feeling of being together again sparkled with the slow-falling dust, and Jude recognized what was holding them together. It was the unspoken absence of the missing band member.

But it appeared Jude still had some convincing to do. He did care about this band. He hadn’t cared about much before. He didn’t care about school, or girls, or his family; he’d cared only about getting f*cked up, about getting Teddy f*cked up, about getting Teddy to laugh that f*cked-up laugh, and now that laugh tormented him. He wanted to wipe that laugh off the face of the earth. He wanted to wipe the smile off the face of every hippie he met.

“This isn’t boarding school,” Jude said. “This is not the talent show, this is not your mom’s church bake sale, Kram.” Now he had his place at the front of the classroom, stabbing the air with his chalk, and Johnny took a seat in one of the schoolhouse chairs, as though to say, Let’s see what you’ve got, grasshopper. Now Jude was the one who had something to sell Delph and Kram, even if they’d already been sold. Pictures of the insides of clubs they’d never even heard of. A record label, distribution, tour dates. In Delph’s expression, Jude could see the familiar battling forces of excitement and suspicion. But no. It’s true. Go to New York. Go to D.C., L.A., Boston, even Connecticut. You’ll see. This was not MTV. This was not Ticketmaster. This was not get-discovered-in-a-shopping-mall. Start-a-record-label-in-your-dorm-room-and-turn-into-millionaires. Make-your-dad-your-manager-so-he-can-sell-your-rights-and-f*ck-you-over. F*ck millionaires, f*ck managers. This was 100 percent grassroots—of the people, by the people, for the people. This was jump off a stage and know ten guys will catch you. This was f*ck your dreams and make your destiny.

Jude let his chalk rest at last. He was sweating. Johnny, legs crossed, gave him a nod of approval. When Jude looked up at the top of the stairs, Eliza was gone, and he couldn’t say when she’d left.

Delph and Kram, though, they were still there.

“Well, hell, man,” Kram said, picking up Johnny’s tattoo machine and pointing it, like a gun, at some undetermined target, “let’s play a show.”

Unless you counted the bruises and Indian burns he’d exchanged with Teddy and his sister, or the routine wedgies and noogies he’d endured from Delph and Johnny and Kram, Jude had never been in a fight, had bullied his way haltingly toward fights with kids several years younger than he was, had talked on various playgrounds about kicking so-and-so’s ass, but his efforts had proved unheeded. The incident on New Year’s hardly qualified as a fight, fights requiring mutual advancements of opposing sides. But New York and the pit and rehab had pumped Jude full of a giddy courage. In his bedroom in Vermont, he listened to Project X’s “Straight Edge Revenge” again and again, dragging the needle back to the beginning when it was over. He wanted to go after Hippie and Tory. He wanted revenge—for New Year’s Eve, for Teddy, for the final insult of involving his mother. The beer bottle they had left behind, as carelessly as Tory had left his belt, was all the authorization he needed. They were asking for it.

Jude had learned in New York that bands weren’t just bands. They were troops. They were tribes. And now he was no longer an army of one. The Bastards were back.

But Johnny wasn’t about to be drafted into a stone-throwing youth crew—he’d survived that scene in New York, and he wanted to leave it behind. “Let’s play music,” Johnny said. “No rough stuff, Jude. Okay?”

Jude said, “You don’t know what an a*shole Tory is.” He told Johnny what he’d done to him on New Year’s Eve. “It could have been Teddy,” he said. “And now he did this shit to my mom?”

“We don’t know it was Tory,” Johnny reminded him. Ever since they’d found out about the baby, Johnny had gone all civil disobedience. It was like he’d found religion, and his religion was Teddy’s kid. He went on about nonviolence, the Upanishads, the five moral virtues. Sure, in Alphabet City, they were hard to follow, Johnny said, but he didn’t pick fights; he only finished them. “I’ve got a kid on the way,” Johnny said. “I’m not landing in jail just to settle the score with some dickhead jock and his dealer.”

“Fine,” Jude said. “Stay out of it, then.”

After the band’s second practice, during which Jude became increasingly less devoted to his third-hand Ibanez, he went with Kram and Delph to the pawnshop on University, where Jude and Teddy used to play Metallica songs until they got kicked out. This time, though, Jude’s wallet was full of his father’s cash. Over his shoulder, he hung a Les Paul Classic in Bullion Gold. Gently used, but it gleamed.

“Aren’t you supposed to use that money to pay for the pot you took?” Delph asked.

Every morning since Jude’s return, his mother told him that, before things got worse—before God forbid those boys came back and broke into the house—he’d better pay back Hippie. A peace offering. Jude promised her that he would.

“Never liked that guy,” Kram said. “Got a stick up his ass. Oh, my weed is so divine.”

“Stuff’s weak,” Delph agreed.

“F*ck him,” Jude said. “He waged war on my mom’s greenhouse. He’s not getting a penny from me.”

“I’m telling you,” Delph said, “it had to be Tory. No way Hippie has the balls to carry that out by himself.”

“Hate that guy, too,” said Kram, though this was news to no one. Over four seasons of football, they’d heard plenty about Kram’s poignant attempts to coexist with the guys who tea-bagged him and headbanged him and once cut off a lock of his hair. Kram was a big guy, but on the team, he was alone. He even claimed they’d tried to bully him into their locker room circle jerks—“Don’t be a p-ssy, O’Connor.” Jude did not believe that Tory Ventura fagged around, but Kram’s hatred for Tory was pure. Jude would have quit after the first practice, but Kram just really loved playing football.

“It’s not like he knows I have the money.” Jude plucked a liquid gold C from the guitar.

“I don’t know,” Delph said. “Five hundred bucks is a lot of dough. Even if it wasn’t Hippie who did it, he’ll still be coming after you for that money.”

“Then we’ll find him before he can find us,” said Jude.

Neither Delph nor Kram stopped him from handing over the five crisp hundred-dollar bills, along with his old guitar, and leaving with the Les Paul. They walked through the dazzling sunshine to the Kramaro, Jude’s guitar case heavy as a cannon. He was out of hiding.

The next morning, when Harriet again made her plea, Jude fed his toast into the toaster and said, “Taken care of.”

This is what Harriet knew about the girl who had given birth to her son: she was Caucasian, and in 1971, she was unmarried and she was sixteen. With these stark facts Harriet had sculpted a number of identities over the years, characters who would visit but not quite haunt her dreams. Most often she appeared as a flower child, a freckled Village nymph with miles of long red hair. She was a girl who liked boys and Dusty Springfield and getting stoned, and one night had had too much fun in the back of a car; she was the girl Harriet would have been if she were ten years younger and hadn’t spent her adolescence in a sweater set and a Maidenform bra it would take years for her to burn. For the young city girl who Did the Right Thing, Harriet felt a dangerous sense of gratitude, as though Harriet owed her, as though one day the girl would come to collect, would materialize to reclaim Jude and see what a mess Harriet had made of the boy.

It was not until last January, when the young doctor had offered her brisk diagnosis, that Harriet’s image of Jude’s birth mother had changed. Now she was a drunk. A sixteen-year-old drunk, a ghetto dweller, a street urchin, with questionable hygiene and poorly fitting clothes and the same alcohol-melted facial features, as though they were a family trait. Or she was a prostitute. Or she was a junkie. It pained Harriet, the distaste she now felt for the mother of her own child. The only silver lining in this dim picture was that the girl (she was a woman now, of course, but she would always be a girl to Harriet) would be too drunk, too uncaring, or too dumb to look for Jude, and even if she did—this was perhaps an even greater relief—too incompetent to recognize Harriet’s own incompetence.

Still, she’d had an irrational fear that he would run into his birth mother in New York—the place of his birth—that one day he would see his own face looking back at him on the subway.

Or worse: that he’d seek her out.

But he had come home to her instead. And he’d brought with him a pregnant sixteen-year-old girl. One morning while the boys were out and Prudence was at school, Harriet fed Eliza a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar to soothe the heartburn she’d woken up with. “It sounds backward, but it works,” she assured her. They stood at the butcher-block kitchen counter, both of them still in their pajamas. Eliza cringed as it went down, but after a few seconds, her face softened. “It does,” she said in wonder.

“When I was pregnant, I drank this stuff like water.” Automatically, Harriet was careful not to say When I was pregnant with Prudence, to exclude Jude unnecessarily. “They don’t tell you about the heartburn, do they? Or the hemorrhoids? The varicose veins?”

“Hemorrhoids?”

“You still have those to look forward to. They should include those in the sex ed video, right? That would solve the teen pregnancy crisis.”

Eliza’s eyes closed, and her hand went to her chest. She was either absorbing the molecules of her relief or fighting off tears. Harriet had meant her comment as a joke, but of course it hadn’t been received as one. She put her hand to her own chest. Maybe she hadn’t meant to joke. Maybe she was trying, in her sarcastic way, to parent someone in this house. Jude had admitted, before she could bring it up, that he’d lied about going to school in New York. This she had suspected, and it was an affirmation to know that of all the dark and mercurial sentiments that commanded her parental life, the one she could still count on was distrust. She had known it was too good to be true! Strangely, Jude’s disclosure of this fact made the rest of his conversion more plausible. Of course, he didn’t plan on returning to school in Vermont, either. He was working on his music. He was no good at school, he whined; music he was good at. They had started a band again, he and his friends. He was up early, he was eating breakfast, he was practicing with a diligence she had never known him capable of. This very moment he and Johnny were downtown at a meeting with the chair of the rec center board, trying to get her to let them use the space for their “shows.” Could she be blamed for enjoying the peace for a while, for letting his truancy go? The spring term was almost over, anyway. He could go back, start fresh, in the fall.

But poor Eliza: Jude did what he pleased, and Eliza got heartburn. “Christ,” Harriet began, “I’m sorry.” She waited for several seconds for Eliza to begin to cry, and when she didn’t, Harriet finally thought to put her arms around the girl anyway. Eliza accepted the hug more mightily than Harriet was prepared for. They stood on the tattered rug in the middle of the kitchen, Eliza’s clammy forehead on Harriet’s collarbone. She was small, smaller than Prudence, and even with the firm mound of her belly between them, she had the brittle bones of a child. “I miss my mom,” she said, almost inaudibly. This remark, combined with the inability to remember the last time she’d held her own daughter this way (who was she to think Prudence wouldn’t come home knocked up?), nearly brought Harriet to tears herself.

“Of course you do.” Harriet cupped the back of the girl’s head, giving it a little massage.

“She’s supposed to be telling me this stuff.”

“I know, honey.”

“She’s not even looking for me.”

Gently, Harriet shifted the girl out of her arms. At first she had worried distantly about the mother locating Eliza. Wasn’t harboring a runaway a crime? In truth, she’d felt that Eliza’s return to New York would be the inevitable and appropriate conclusion. She had not wanted this girl’s water breaking in her home.

But then Les had called late one night shortly after the children’s arrival, Harriet tripping downstairs to the phone. “Sorry,” he’d said. “I’m on mountain time.”

“Which mountain?” Harriet had asked, half-asleep.

“Eliza’s mom is looking for her. I just thought you should know.”

The private investigator Di had hired had tracked down Les in Santa Fe, but Les had managed to pay the guy off, double what Di was paying him. “Poor guy looked so pitiful taking the money, but he says his mother has medical bills.” The P.I. agreed to throw Di off Eliza’s trail, to tell her that Vermont came up empty. But Di wasn’t stupid. “I don’t know what we’ve gotten ourselves into,” Les had said. “Jesus. I’d just do anything for that kid.”

It had taken Harriet a moment to realize that he meant Eliza. She didn’t know where to begin. Les was the one who’d gotten them into this. And the protection he was now falling all over himself to offer someone else’s daughter disgusted her. What protection had he offered Prudence in the last seven years?

And yet when she’d hung up the phone, she’d done nothing. She hadn’t called Diane to confess. She’d told herself she was staying neutral, allowing the stars to align themselves on their own.

“Your mom is looking for you,” Harriet told Eliza now.

Eliza closed her eyes. “She is?”

“Do you want to maybe give her a call?” Harriet asked.

Eliza curled into Harriet’s arms again, and Harriet felt her shake her head. “No,” Eliza whispered, and Harriet was surprised to feel a river of relief in her chest. Now, with Eliza’s feverish head on her breast, she, too, felt the need to defend this cub from her own mama. It was the same proprietary impulse she exercised against the girl who’d given birth to Jude, to prove her maternal prowess, to make up for its derelict history. Diane Urbanski, the Jewish British widow ballerina, was no longer merely a romantic rival. She was another woman who was coming to collect.

Through May, as the first fists of bloodroot opened and the gauzy swans of fiddlehead raised their necks, Harriet and Eliza turned the garden, shook the rugs, walked together to the farmers’ market to buy eggs and honey and cheese. Out in the greenhouse, Eliza watched Harriet blow two salad bowls, a set of wine goblets, and a bud vase. Out in the greenhouse, Eliza posed for a drawing, a full-length portrait of her naked pregnant profile, which Harriet let her keep.

Prudence spent more and more nights at her new friend Dena’s house, leaving her room to Eliza. Had Prudence, the girl with whom Harriet had until recently shared a bed, shown jealousy or exasperation or the territoriality which Harriet herself had refined, Harriet would have known how to suffer this guilt. Instead Harriet was the one who felt jealous, of the mysterious people with whom Pru was now content to spend her time. There were new kids in Jude’s life, too—boys showing up at the door with guitars, leaning their bikes against her house. Harriet let Eliza do her makeup. At the second-run theater, Harriet and Eliza saw Moonstruck.

Meanwhile, the music stabbed through the ceiling of the basement.

Harriet asked Eliza to translate the lyrics for her, but even she could make out only a handful of words. If Jude were to name his own children after the songs of his youth, they might be named Truth, Strength, or Justice. Purity, Brotherhood, Loyalty, Trust. The words filled Harriet with a measure of gratification—her son was singing the merits of purity!—but they also amused her, embarrassed her, and concerned her. What kind of teenage boys sang songs about purity? What had happened to songs about getting stoned? Getting laid? And if one had to sing songs about purity (she didn’t mind songs about purity!), why did they have to be so hard on the ears? They were awfully angry, these songs. The classics of her own youth, about getting stoned and getting laid, were strummed on the guitar, they were hummed in the shower, there were harmonicas.

Les had attempted to take up the harmonica one summer, but it was a phase. He had other passions to cater to. When Harriet had first met him, when he was not much older than Jude was now, he had embraced drugs with the same unqualified exuberance with which their son now refused them. That, it turned out, had not been a phase. She hoped Jude’s newfound sainthood was not a phase, either.

But how could it be anything else? Her son’s life story was a series of phases: scooters, BMX, skateboards; metal, punk, hardcore. He had ADD, he grew out of a pair of shoes in six weeks, and the songs he now sang were an average of forty-five seconds long. He would be over it by the end of the summer.

Harriet watched the boys come and go. From the basement to the van, from Jude’s room to the fridge. She listened for them on the stairs, on the fire escape, to the ring of the phone and the drone of their showers and the puerile wail of their guitars. She observed Jude’s romance with straight edge as she might have observed his first love—warily, with a mother’s pride, hoping that, in the end, his heart wouldn’t break too hard.