In the wake of being abandoned, pregnant, by her lover Tick Burden, Alma Tate begins the hard road of her life. Struggling with being dominated by an overbearing and judgmental mother, Henrietta Tate, who could not help but make Alam feel like a failure in her choice of a father for her child, Alma’s life becomes one of working menial jobs in her mother’s bar/restaurant and drinking.
Tucker Tate is born without a father and the only information he gets is what he is told mostly by his grandmother, which does not paint a positive image of the man who contributed to his existence. Nevertheless, Tucker begins to grow up reasonably happy until he is confronted with his mother’s accidental suicide when he is ten years old.
As soon as Tucker is old enough his grandmother puts him to work in the bar, serving drinks to a regular cohort of local characters and drunks until one day his father returns andimmediately begins to order him around.
Tick Burden is unrepentant, and belligerent, which brings Tucker to the moment he chooses to escape this growing hellish life. This throws the two protaganists, Henrietta and Tick, (ironically the two poles of oppression and disappointment in both Alma’s and Tuckers lives) into business together at the Candlelite Inn.
Tick takes over the day-to-day management of the business while Henrietta retreats into the past and dementia until finally passing away at 86.
LOCATION: Dallas, Texas
PERIOD: 1968-2008
DRAMATIS PERSONAE: Alma Tate (1940-1978); Tucker Tate (1968); Tick Burden (1937-2019); Henrietta Tate (1922-2008).
HENRIETTA, ALMA, AND TUCKER
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)
It was 4pm on a Wednesday afternoon,
When Alma realized that Tick was gone.
She walked in a daze from room to room;
Then sat down with the fact she was alone.
She hated that her mama had been right,
And waited for the told-you-so.
The seed Tick had planted that fateful night,
Was the one good thing he did before he’d go.
The violent night Tucker was born,
Outside strong wind and thunder.
Between pangs of labor and the storm,
Alma looked around with childlike wonder.
Then, a hunger.
The rain had stopped, the sky was gray,
The moon was a ghost.
Alma felt herself slowly fading away;
Poured a drink and tossed it down her throat.
Tucker Tate grew up to be a man;
Never knew his father just what he was told.
Not much by his mother mostly from his gran;
He was the issue of a broken mold.
Tucker tended bar in his grandma’s place,
He was setting up to an almost empty room.
A man with a worn but familiar face,
Swaggered into the dark saloon.
Tucker met his father that afternoon.
Late September rain on the roof,
The Candlelite Inn on Highway 80.
Tick Burden hollered from a corner booth;
“Boy, bring a drink to your daddy.”
Tucker Tate disappeared that night,
Grabbed a eastbound freight and was gone.
His grandma stared out the backdoor of the Candlelite,
At her daughter Alma’s gravestone.
Alma had succumbed to drink and depression,
Ten years ago that June.
She’d finally run out of any reason;
And laid down her mop and broom,
A last breath alone, in her room.
Henrietta held on and persevered,
With Tick’s help, the bar stayed open
He ran the Candlelite for the next 20 years;
While Henrietta grew old and broken.
She obsessed over habit and routine,
Against her will, her mind rebelled.
Spent her time with mem’ries and things unseen,
Nothing else really mattered at all.
Old age had freed her from conceit,
And desires of the flesh.
With some reluctance, almost deceit,
She watched her scrapbook flare into ash;
It all ended with a flash.
© 2024 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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