I would submit for your listening the following song, which I heard many, many times at the Horshoe Tavern as an eleven year old.
It can be played on YouTube and it's a great song. All the drunken and half-drunk patrons at the Horseshoe Tavern played it incessantly. It is a short song, but it embodies a vignette about the relationship between a man and a woman when little problems turn into bigger ones and they split. It's a good drinking song and drink they did and laugh they did at the Horseshoe Tavern which was just a dingy little joint on the left side of the road just as you crossed the Root River and before the road climbed up into Hokah and turned right a bit past the Catholic Church and School.
There was at least one more bar on the stretch through town but my mother and Al liked the Horseshoe Tavern best. There was, of course, a U-shaped bar, hence the name of the place. They had become increasingly regular customers there when I was in 5th and 6th grades.
The problem for me was with my attention span. After a couple of strawberry sodas and bags of potato chips or candy bars, I became very bored hearing Don Gibson sing his hit song over and over and over and would have liked to go home where I could play with my toys, read, and such.
My mother and Al would slowly be getting more and more intoxicated and just when I thought they had had their fill the door would swing open and someone would stride in to reignite the fun. More drinks would be ordered and another forty-five minutes would be added to the game clock.
There was a narrow hallway which led to the bathrooms and the bartender stacked all the old newspapers at the end of that hall. I took to sitting on the floor and going through them, reading the short comic strips and looking at the weather maps with all their arcane markings. I would sometimes do this for more than an hour until they determined that it was time to go home, sometimes because they were the only two left.
Al had a Pontiac and it had an air-flow duct right in the middle of the dash in front of where I sat between them. It was three concentric chrome circles fanned out so that the air could pass in. It resembled a small steering wheel and I would put my little hands on it and pretend to steer.
Al would weave down the highway for about two miles in the direction of La Crescent before turning left up into Pfeffer Valley. Sometimes they would be laughing about what had transpired in the bar but sometimes they would be sharp with one another over some transgression or other. In either case they were pretty potched and I became more nervous with each weaving across the center line.
Fortunately there was little or no traffic in those days, especially on that lonesome stretch of road, so it didn't matter all that much.
The part of the ride I dreaded was just past Langens' farm where we would bend left and up a steep grade to the top where we would pass the farm driveway to Al Thompson's place. The road followed a very exposed stretch of maybe a quarter of a mile with no guard rail, just a barb-wire fence separating the road from a steep clay drop off to the pastures perhaps forty-five feet below.
I was certain that Al would fall asleep at the wheel and that we would go over that cliff, and I would grip the little air-vent steering wheel and try and bend it to the left as though I had some impact upon the steering of the car.
We always made it and followed the road down again past the Dahlkes' driveway and then on to our own, where I breathed a sigh of relief.
The marriage was not going so well as I entered the 6th grade in 1958 when Don Gibson had his famous hit, and although I like the song, I sadly associate it with this fact.
As beautiful and loving as my mother was, she did have a problem with alcohol, and could be very sharp, bringing out the worst in Al. Al, for his own part, became a belligerent drunk and would sometimes be aggressive.
Once, when driving back during the day, the driver of another car honked at him. Al turned the car around, pulled him over and got out to have words with him, calling him some bad names and offering to beat him up. When the other driver got out of his car to oblige, Al backed down, got back in and we drove home. It was very disconcerting to me.
Al had never been abusive or threatening to me but I was beginning to fear him.
On a couple of occasions, once home, he and my mother would argue and throw threats at one another and he would strike her. I stood immobilized by fear and guilt that I had no means to defend her. He would get under control and they would tone it down, but eventually it would happen again.
As the year went on, my mother and Al became increasingly cool toward one another. It was very confusing and dreadful to me and I can remember it reflecting upon how I behaved in school. My mind was not on my work and it was as if I had checked out mentally. I fooled around at my desk instead of listening to the teacher. I can remember the teacher moving my desk up to the front of the room by the chalk board. It didn't seem to matter. I sat there and fooled around with my stapler, my pencils, and such.
