The Circle That Was Lyle Lovett

by Laura Bolger

It's pine syrup that got me on the Johnny Carson show, pine syrup as made by my husband. But Trace is too shy, too tongue-tied, to appear on TV.. Shy is not a problem I have, tongue-tied either. So I filled in for him.

My introduction by Johnny focused on the homespun aspect of our enterprise: how one of his crew was vacationing in the south and stopped in at Mel and Alma Priest's place out on old Route 1 and how there at the counter amongst the Slim Jim’s and chewing gum and tobacco he spied a pyramid display of Womble's Pine Syrup made by Trace Womble of Saxapahaw, North Carolina. And how when he asked about it Alma gave him a taste on a piece of cold biscuit, how it tasted good, and that Alma told him our address and he drove out to the house and met Trace and me and Mama and the girls and about ten other townspeople who got wind that a man from the Johnny Carson show was in the area asking questions about pine syrup; how he got shown the big black pot and the pine trees and the wood paddle Trace uses to stir the sap and sugar together to make Womble's pine syrup.

Johnny laughed a lot during the story--like he does, into his shirtfront in a deflating accordion manner--and I could tell he found this all quaintly amusing. So when he said, “Won't you welcome Francine Womble of Saxapahaw, North Carolina?" pronouncing every syllable of the town's name like outsiders do, I think he was anticipating a Minnie Pearl look-alike. Certainly he wasn't expecting me to walk out with my spiked red hair, tortoise-shell glasses and short leopard-print dress. But, then again, Johnny's no different from the rest of us, is he? Don't we all get at least one little surprise each day we're on this earth?

Trace surprises me. I think I know the man after being married to him for fifteen years and one day he comes home from the cigarette factory and says he ain't going back, says it’s a business of death, states he's going to make something from the pine trees that grow natural in our red clay. So I'm expecting furniture or planting boxes or reindeer magazine racks for Christmas and instead he gives me pine syrup, pine syrup he mixed up out back under the falling down auto shed in Mama's old sorghum pot from the farm.

When he brought me in the first jar I said to him, "Trace, I'll tell you about death business. It's taking pine sap that’s supposed to be creosote and inviting people to eat it just because you put sugar in it.”

He didn't say a word--something Trace is good at because he's so low-strung, which I guess is good since I veer a bit the other way--just walked on into the kitchen. I paced the living room letting him know just what I thought about the intentional poisoning of family and neighbors and the world at large that had never done a thing to him to provoke this murderous revenge and that if this had anything to do with what I'd said about his mother last week why didn't he just come out and say so instead of proceeding with this elaborate charade and what if Mama or the girls, for God's sake, got a hold of the jar of that stuff after we were dead and they.

Trace walked out of the kitchen holding two plates of his yeasted flapjacks and set them down on the table. He took his seat, reached over for the jar, opened it and poured the syrup real deliberate-like onto the stack: around the edges, into the center, over the sides again. Then he ran his tongue around the spillover on the jar and, as he did, looked up at me and smiled. It was a smile that said, "I ain't crazy. Come on over here and try it." So I did. And I'll be damned if that syrup tasted a lick like creosote, if it didn't taste instead like marigolds a little bit and the warm sun and maybe wild honey all mixed together into the prettiest liquid amber you’d ever want to see. And I said, "well, tomorrow I'm quitting my job too."

Mama is a nurse…well, was a nurse…practiced midwifery in a three-county area for over fifty years, until her fingers grew too gnarled to feel the babies up inside their mamas. She was a feisty one, too, I tell you. Nothing got Mama more riled up than a husband or boyfriend sitting there watching TV while his woman rolled around on the bed screaming and carrying on with labor, men who would pay more attention to the goring of a pig than the birth of their own blood.

"You!" she'd say to whatever hapless man happened to be offending her idea of right and wrong at the moment. "You was there for the fun part and God help me if you ain't gonna be there for the tough part too! Now go get a bowl of cool water and some cloths and you wipe this gal's face after every contraction. And you hold her hand during the pain and look into her eyes and you tell her, 'It's alright, honey, I'm here.' Now, git to it!"

And those men danced to whatever tune Mama named. Got so's they'd beg their
 women not to bring Mama in for the birthing. "No! Not Miss Mattie! Get Dr. Craig to come in. You don't want an old midwife when you can have a doctor for the same price." But those women were not dumb. They knew they'd be listening to Mannix and The Price is Right on the TV in the next room if Dr. Craig tended them, knew they could holler till they bust a gut and nobody would give no never mind, the men sitting in their easy chairs drinking liquor and smoking cigars as if they were the ones to be congratulated for the appearance of babies. No, i t was Mama the women wanted for birthing and it was Mama they got, any time of the day or night.

Mama delivered Emerald and Crystal, my girls, right here in this house, in the same old sleigh bed she'd borne her own children. She had a way of delivering a baby that was downright beautiful. After the baby's head was out and she'd sucked the goobers out of its nose and mouth, Mama'd have the woman reach down with her own hands and pull that crying baby right on up atop her stomach where it would turn from blue to pink and maybe even root around for a nipple. I did i t myself and have to say that the experience of pulling a living being out from your own body is…well, it's feeling like God and Eve and the whole creating universe a l l at once, like you're a radiant star in the night sky that just split into two or a moon catching its own glistening reflection in the sea. Except for that third baby, the boy, I'd do it over again in a minute.

I've lived each of my pregnancies to the music of a different singer. Emerald spent her nine months awash in the songs of Van Morrison, mysteriously Celtic with a blues backbeat that spoke of wonder and natural magic. I danced a lot during that pregnancy and wore long skirts and cooked garden foods. Trace and I were good together; I was, truth be told, deliriously happy. Emerald is the flesh of that mood and music: she is a bright shining star, a dancer, a child of the fields and sun and open places. She is always in vivid colors and preens unashamedly in front of the mirror. Her laugh is the warble of an indigo bunting, the fluting of a wood thrush.

Crystal was conceived four years later. I was a changed woman. Looking back, I believe it was the pressures of being a child who was raising a child and watching my husband lose interest in me that sent me plummeting. Trace had taken up for a brief spell with a waitress out at the truck stop on Highway 54--he was living a Conway Twitty song. I'd begun smoking cigarettes and staying up till three in the morning, thinking. "Too much!" Trace accused. "You think too goddamn much!" And I started listening to Leonard Cohen--him of the black-and-blue music, smoky bars, lunar introspection. I avoided the sun, wore turtlenecks, became subterranean.

Trace's sperm met my egg the night we reconciled his affair in a moaning, groaning, breast-kneading fit of lovemaking. But I continued to listen to Leonard Cohen through the progress of my second child from tadpole to amphibian to human baby. And she prisms the sense of loss that I was experiencing, the excrutiatingly slow pain of growth and change, the nocturnal seedings of a woman. Crystal is a child of intelligence so sharp it cuts shards of my heart: her stern eyes and no-nonsense pronouncements leave me weak at times. She had my number from the moment she was born.

It was a seven year-old Crystal who asked, when I was pregnant the third time, "What do you want another kid for? Daddy refuses to work…" (in fact, Trace was busy developing the syrup formula; though, at the time, we didn't recognize sitting out back in the loblolly pine grove staring at the trees day in and day out as meaningful barely make it as it is.” enterprise) "…and we can barely make it as it is.”

My answer didn't put her off.

"What happens if it's a girl instead? What then? Do you keep making babies until you get your precious boy?" Her eyes narrowed, and she struck. "What's the matter, Mama, you feeling unnecessary?"

I couldn't look at her, couldn't answer either. But she’d hit her mark, I could tell because of the way my heart stopped for a brief second. I think that if all those moments between Crystal and me were added together it would equal at least four massive cardiac arrests I've suffered. I wish I'd listened to Broadway musicals or Glenn Miller during her gestation.

For the third pregnancy I lived my life to Lyle Lovett’s music. It is full of sassy women, jazzy clubs and syncopated comebacks. I began t o dance again; not the floating dreaminess of Emerald but sophisticated two-steps and riffs. I dyed my hair eggplant and wore short skirts and tights. Life was fun again; I cooked pasta frequently. But then the labor came, two months early.

I was in the bathroom touching up my roots, Lyle Lovett singing to me from the living room, when the first pain came, like a chainsaw in my gut. This was no normal contraction; it threw me to my knees. I vomited on the floor. "Get your father!" I screamed to the girls. "Get Mama!"

They carried me into the bedroom, Mama yelling orders, Trace looking worried and scared. "Okay Francine," Mama said after examining me, "this baby's intent on coming now. ' I don't know what we're gonna get…" Her voice drifted off before she turned away.

"Trace, call the hospital. Tell them we got a baby being born eight weeks too soon. Tell them to send an ambulance now."

"Ma'am, the roads are all iced up," Trace answered. " It'll take 'em an hour to get here."

"Just do it! " Mama snapped.

Crystal stood in the doorway with her sister. I heard her ask in a tiny voice, "Is she dying, Grandma?”

"Oh God!" I moaned. Blood gushed from between my legs.

"Hush, both of you," Mama hissed. "No, she ain't dying. You girls get me two pans of water, one warm and one cool. And some cloths…and my bag! Good Lord in heaven, someone get me my bag. Hand me your watch, Trace. These contractions is coming regular already. Now, honey, you breathe like I taught you: in your nose, out your mouth… Slow it down, girl! This ain't a race. In slow, out slow. That's it.. .that’s it…"

Mama took control of me. I stared into her eyes as she willed the pain out of my body with each breath I took, each breath I exhaled. Maybe she breathed it in; maybe Mama took the pain onto her still sturdy shoulders when it left my wracked body, I don't know. What I do know is that I relaxed into the contractions, let them work to push that baby out, gave myself over to Mama's hands. She slid her knotty fingers into me one more time before the baby was born. "Hmmmm," was her only comment on what she found.

"Mama, I've got to push!"

"Okay, Francine, it's time. You know how to do it: grab those knees and bear down. When you feel the next contraction, try to push my fingers out of you. You getting one? Okay, girl…push! Come on…push, push, push, push, push. Take a breath. Come at it again! One, two, three, four…"

Suddenly, with a plop, the baby fell onto the bed. I remember my surprise that it hadn't eased out like the other two, the head sticking out between my legs while Mama cleaned out its airway. This baby shot out of me like a log down a chute. Dead silence filled the room. Mama, Trace and the stared at the pool of birth below my buttocks.

"What is it? What is it?" I couldn't move, my nerves temporarily numbed by the trauma. Mama clamped the cord.

"It's a boy, Francine," she answered.

"Give him here, Mama." I turned to my husband. "Trace, we got our boy!" I didn’t register his expression. “Mama, put him on my belly! Come on!" No one moved.

Quite unexpectedly, it hit. "What's wrong? What's wrong with the baby?" I screamed.

Trace was crying. "Honey, the baby's deformed…it's not alive…"

"It's still alive," Mama said, her hand on the baby's chest. She turned to me. Her voice was that of a teacher talking to a very slow child. "Francine, it’s a dwarf…its head is big…twice the size of its little body…ain't enough lungs in there to keep it alive…"

"It?" I yelled. "Why are you calling my son an ‘it'?" I scrabbled to grab his arms, to pull him up on me. The weight of his head jackknifed it back onto his spine, he wasn't crying. Tiny gurgles escaped from his lips. "Mama, please…please help me…"

"Yes, child. Here he is, here's your son." She lifted him gently and placed him in my arms.

There are moments in life that return in the twilight between wake and sleep, when we tense and twitch, attempting to rework the truth of our memories. This is such a moment for me. In my half-dreams I struggle to shrink my son's head, breathe life into his lungs, suckle him on my breast. But always he lies there, as he did that day, eyes at half-mast with the pressure of fluid behind, caricature of the perfect fetus, dying.

I stroked his head and murmured a name: Seth. His tiny dwarfed fingers I kissed and wrapped around my own. At first the others stood by silently, hiding their eyes and trying to find something to do with their hands. Trace was the one to break the spell. With a sigh he approached the bed and gazed at our son; he reached down and covered our hands with his own. Then Mama followed, Emerald was next. Crystal stood alone in the doorway, indecisive, crying. But then she too came and knelt, laid her head on my shoulder and caressed the baby’s crown. We each held our positions, stroking, whispering: arthritic fingers against calloused palms against the promising pink hands of youth atop the greying natal body. It was a scene, it was an adoration, it was a wonder.

Twenty minutes later, when the ambulance arrived, Seth was dead.

Entering the green room after my interview with Johnny Carson--I was not an important enough guest to stay on stage through the entire show--I was full of myself. The audience had laughed when I wanted them to, listened respectfully on cue and rewarded my act with affectionate applause. And it had been an act: I'd played sassy and ingenuous and wiseacre all rolled into one. Johnny ate it up. The music I'd listened to preparing for the show, the role, was Cindy Lauper. It had been fun. Maybe I could even take on David Letterman, that's how cocksure I was.

I walked into the waiting area grinning. Johnny's voice played over a monitor in the room; he was hawking lubricant, doing a set-up for a WD-40 commercial. " I'll bet Francine could think of a few things to do with this,” he snickered. I laughed along with the audience, then stopped dead in my tracks. Lyle Lovett sat in a chair on the opposite side of the room. He smirked at me.

Lyle Lovett: his black hair swooped up and breaking over the left eye like a wave, cascading like a Hawaiian waterfall, lip pulled up on the right, eyes studying me.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey," he answered. "You weren't half bad out there."

"Thanks." My mood was broken. I sat down in a chair across from his . "The large band here with you?" We were alone in the room; the third guest, Morgan Fairchild, was making her entrance and the crew was setting up for Lyle.

"Yeah," he said. "They're making sound checks." He smirked again. I got the feeling I was being handed a dare. Without thinking, I took it.

"I listen to your albums a lot…listened to them all through my third…" I started again. "I've developed this theory about music…"

He raised an eyebrow.

"…that if you listen to a particular kind of music all through a pregnancy, the child will be like that music. So far I have a Van Morrison and a Leonard Cohen…"

"Intense household," he remarked.

"Thank you, yes it is. Well, the third time I was pregnant, last year, I listened to your music all the time…and I had…well…the baby was a dwarf," I blurted out. "He didn’t live more than half an hour.”

The effect of these last words on Lyle Lovett was startling: the upturned right lip returned to the straight line of his mouth, his eyes cooled, he slumped in the chair. "Thanks for telling me," he said.

"No, but you see, I was all wrong. I mean, I hated you fox a long time after that…you know, like it was your fault. But then I saw that my mama thought it was all her fault 'cause she took care of me while I was pregnant and delivered the baby. She turned into an old woman over it. And my husband…well, Trace thought it was all his fault on account of he was developing the pine syrup recipe at the time and believed that maybe all that thinking about chemicals and such had affected his sperm. Trace has a powerful respect for the act of thinking.

"The Leonard Cohen child, Crystal, she thought it was all her fault…because that's how a Leonard Cohen child would think. And the Van Morrison child wasn't sure how it could be but she thought surely it must be her fault somehow because that's what everyone else was thinking--you know, that Irish influence. So there we all were: blaming ourselves or, like me, blaming someone else—blaming you, when all you did was sit in a studio somewhere and make some music." He nodded hopefully at this last statement.

"I got to thinking, see, that what it comes down to is this: stuff happens that doesn't make sense. And we try to make sense out of it one way or another. But we're only supposing, you know? It's like seeing pictures in the stars when what they are really is a bunch of suns in a bunch of galaxies in a universe."

A woman stuck her head in the door. “You’re on in one minute, Mr. Lovett."

Flustered, I said, "Oh, Lord, I've been babbling on here. I'm sorry…"

Lyle Lovett stood. "Don't," he said. He shook out his limbs then raked the hair over his left eye, practiced a snarl once or twice, looked at me briefly. He followed the woman out the door without another word. I sat alone for several minutes remembering the baby, wondering why I could never learn to keep my big mouth shut.

Mama entered the room tentatively, leaning on her cane, winded. "well, there you are Francine! We been waiting for you downstairs. NBC's let Trace set up a stand in the lobby and the syrup's selling like hotcakes!" She paused to catch her breath. "So, come on. Folks are askin' for you.”

I straightened my dress and hiked up my pantyhose as I stood. Mama shuffled out of the room ahead of me, excited I guess about the prospect of a riot for pine syrup when the audience let out from the Tonight show. I looked around the room before leaving, trying to recapture the excitement I’d felt coming off stage. On the monitor above the chair Lyle Lovett had sat in, curtains opened and the man himself stepped forward to the mike. Lyle Lovett.” Johnny's voice announced, "Once again, Lyle Lovett.”

"Got a song here for a woman I just met," Lyle Lovett said. He growled at the musicians behind him, "One, two, three, four…" On the last beat the band bent low into an old spiritual, playing it slow and sad. "Will the circle be unbroken…" Lyle Lovett sang.

And I thought: Trees! That's it. We are trees. Cut us open and we are circle upon circle of years, of life. Then I thought: Lyle Lovett knows that. And then: I like the circle that was Lyle Lovett.

© 1982/2024 by Laura Bolger