Part 4: 6 - Harvest Moon
Maeve and Todd dance again
Things That Can’t Be Broken is a novel presented as a live draft, one chapter every week.
Nine-year-old Dani makes a fervent promise that there will always be horses in her life, so when she finds out her next-door neighbor won a scholarship to an exclusive horsemanship program, she vows to win one too. She never gets the chance—but her short life has a lasting effect on a community.
Last week: Part 4: 5 - Sedona • Caleb returns to Sedona, the last stop of his tour
Part 4 | This Storm is Called Progress
6 - Harvest Moon
Maeve Allen
September 9, 2022
San Diego, California
Maeve leaned hard against the wall in the hospital hallway; her phone still clutched at the end of her leaden arm. Her insides felt like a stale pretzel. Swarming conversations and squeaking shoes existed all around her in another universe while she reheard her own voice over and over in her mind telling Caleb, “We don’t know how serious this is.”
And then Caleb’s response over the phone, “I’m packing up now, Mam. I’ll be there in a few hours.”
Was their fate already carved into time when Tim Cartwright and his irrepressible pup found them in the park? Why was I so eager to come here? Why was Todd?
She and Todd could have let the chance meeting be the end of it, but even after all this time, all this distance, Todd still held a need to take responsibility. He still felt connected to the Cartwrights and their loss. And it was as if the Cartwrights knew their power over him, over both of them, with their crazy idea.
When Tim and Lisa came by the following week, the four of them sat around the table in the shade of the elm in the garden while Molly and Ammy growled and wrestled in play. She never imagined meeting this couple would feel like a homecoming celebration after a long war, but somehow, it did. Maeve brought a pot of tea and fresh scones. They laughed and chatted for over an hour.
The Cartwrights’ proposal was as ridiculous as it was enticing. “It’s a win-win,” Tim had said, while scratching the laughing retriever puppy leaned against his leg. That was accurate. It was impossible to tell who was doing the giving and who the taking.
They wanted her and Todd to restart the horsemanship program. Tim would provide all the resources to renovate the ranch and employ help if she and Todd would manage the program. He said, “If you don’t want to be part of this, I completely understand, but I am going to find a way to make this happen somewhere somehow, and soon. We are coming to you first, because Dani would want it to be everything it was before.”
After they left, she and Todd turned to each other and burst out laughing. They were in their early seventies, Tim and Lisa themselves in their sixties. It was pure folly. Maeve with her cane, Todd with his cancer. Tim had told them he would wait thirty days to hear from them before moving on to find another way to make the horsemanship program happen, but no longer than that.
The idea sunk its roots deeper as the days went by. Maeve began to picture the two of them back at Allen Haven Ranch. It could be one last great endeavor, maybe even a legacy to last beyond them. The possibilities brought her energy she didn’t know she could tap into. It was revitalizing, imagining a new future ahead. She noticed Todd laughing more. Even their physical desire for each other increased.
Not a week later, Todd came to her and said, “Mo ghràdh, let’s go back to California,” tipping his head slightly as if that was just around the corner by the post office.
She had replied, “You can’t be serious. Are you thinking about taking the Cartwrights up on their crazy idea?”
“I donnae ken for certain. But let’s go see the property, get an idea what it would take to bring it back before we decide. . . Besides that, do we nae have a son traipsing around over there somewhere? We’ve nae yet seen the lad play for a crowd. I hear he’s pure dead brilliant, and I want to go.”
She sighed and shook her head at that. He knew as well as she it was dangerous for him to travel. But his lower lids tensed at her reaction, and he leaned toward her. “Och. Donnae fash. . . Ye ken I may catch something any time I go out for the messages—and have nothing but milk and bread to show for it.”
And so, not long after, they had boarded a plane bound for California, leaving Molly behind with a friend from church. They planned for a two week trip.
Late afternoon on the day they arrived, they drove up Blue Haven Lane for the first time in ten years. It felt like walking into a ghost town as one of its original inhabitants. When they unlocked the front gate and pushed the weeds aside to drive through, the overgrown brush invading the gravel drive scraped and squeaked against the sides of their rented pickup.
It had been eight years since Genny and Seth had moved to Washington state for better teaching jobs. The abandoned ranch was much as it had been before Maeve and Todd first arrived in 1981. Well, maybe not that bad, but it was disheartening.
As it turned out, the house was dusty and cobwebbed, but it appeared to be intact. Some families of small animals would have to be evicted from the crawlspace, but it was the barn inhabitant that concerned her. Someone was apparently living in one of the shaded paddocks. A camp cot was folded neatly in the corner of a stall along with a set of rolled blankets and a full plastic gallon of fresh water. “It can’t be the same old man we used to see out here,” Maeve said, shaking her head at Todd.
“Kiko? Och. No. . . He cannae be wandering these hills at his age.”
But when they stopped next door, Bobby Vasquez told him that Kiko was, in fact, still around. He said Kiko helped with small tasks around their farm sometimes. Bobby’s wife provided him with meals, and he used their water to wash and drink. Bobby felt his kids were safer with Kiko out there. He served as a watchdog, a sort of “lone ranger” in the hills, as he put it. But Bobby didn’t know where Kiko went at night other than “into the hills”. He said, “Kiko is like a neighborhood cat. He doesn’t show up every day. But I’ll ask him about your barn next time I see him.”
Todd and Maeve both agreed, whoever it was, the Sheriff would have to be notified if the trespasser returned. At that moment, it seemed like their biggest problem.
Hours later, the flu symptoms hit. It was too soon for Todd to have picked it up on the flight. He must have been infected before they left Scotland. He lost so much fluid. Nothing would stay down.
The next morning, Maeve took Todd to the emergency room with no resistance from him, he was so weak. Todd begged her not to call Caleb. He promised he would be better in time to see his son’s last performance in Sedona at the end of the week.
It seemed reasonable at the time, but now it was five days later, the end of the week had come, and Todd was not going anywhere soon. He was barely conscious, his lungs full of fluid, his body not responding to any antibiotics so far. She had no choice but to call their son.
Maeve returned from the hallway, pulling a chair closer to the bed to sit. Todd stirred and spoke in a gravelly whisper, “Where’s Caleb?
“He’s on his way.”
After a few moments, he said, “I want to see him play.”
“We will,” she said, though she didn’t think it would be anytime soon.
Time doesn’t work the same in the hospital as it does in the outside world. It held her like a fly in honey. Sometime between the nurses coming and going, Maeve’s phone beeped. There was a text from Caleb. “I’m about an hour out. What room?”
She texted back, “410. Drive safe.”
Maeve reached up to her husband’s chest and unfolded his right arm to hold his hand. Pressing it between her own small hands, she remembered that hand, young, warm, and strong, the day they met. That was over forty years ago. How could it be that long ago?
Todd had stood at the far end of the Oatridge arena and waved this hand at her. Her hands were too full to wave back at the time. She was lunging a tall gangly three-year-old gelding, which suddenly stopped, ducked his head, and lay down in front of her to roll in the freshly-fluffed dirt as if he had nothing better to do. She had looked up and Todd caught her eye. The two had shrugged at each other and smiled. That smile crawled straight into her subconscious and made itself at home; hers as much as it was his, much like the hand she held now.
This landscape of wrinkles, callouses, and scars had done so many things. They had built and rebuilt their lives over and over. They turned her grandfather’s forgotten acreage into an efficient little horse ranch. They fixed everything broken, built arenas, jumps, and stands. They landscaped and irrigated. They helped to gently raise their son.
She leaned onto her folded arms, cradling the hand and tilting her head to see the face she knew better than her own, closed from her now in sleep. The weight of emotional exhaustion dragged at her entire body. She let her head rest over her folded arms and instantly drifted into a dream.
The day was unusually warm for September. Maeve opened the window by Todd’s bed. He was never indoors by choice. The breeze had grown cool with the evening, but the sky was still clear and bright, a full moon glowing.
She became aware of the earthy smell of the early fall garden, the tree’s branches of browning leaves swaying. These things would be some comfort to him, she thought. She told herself to go make a cup of tea, but her body remained standing there, hypnotized by the moonlit shadows of leaves waving over the pale green cotton blanket.
A familiar song began to play.
Standing together, he lifted both of her hands up to his face. Kissed them. Released. She swayed away from him and back to his light touch, their steps unthought. She was smiling that open-mouthed smile. She could never stop smiling when they danced.
They danced barefoot out into the grassy garden, the moonlight dappling their steps in the grass. It was their first dance, and their last, and all of the dances in between—fluidly shifting moments transposed against movement. They danced in her apartment before they first made love. They danced on the Saltillo-tiled back patio at Allen Haven. They glided over the terrace at their wedding reception. They twirled in the tenement kitchen, Caleb a small boisterous child busting into their arms to join in. And then Caleb, a spotty-faced teen hunched over his guitar, trying not to smile while he watched.
Todd slowed her at last, raising their locked hands in front of him to look into her eyes. “I need to say something, mo ghràdh.”
“What is it, my love?”
He smiled, that deep heart-smile, and said, “I have to leave soon. And it’s time for ye to go back, be near Caleb, restart the program.”
She felt a quickening running through his hand, wedged between hers, his heart beating like a small bird.
She said, “I can’t do this without you.”
“Ye can,” he said.
Still controlling the dance, he pulled her into his chest and held her there, turning to face a brightening hallway where a small dark-haired girl was standing backlit next to his Grianach. It was Dani, waiting quietly with his horse, one hand resting low on his sleek shoulder. The girl looked at Maeve and smiled, patting Grianach, then she turned him away and they walked side by side into the brilliant light.
Todd’s hand squeezed hers. He said, “Bring the horses back.”
A guitar was playing. Caleb’s guitar. He was quietly strumming a tune she knew well, Harvest Moon. She raised her head to see Caleb sitting across from her in the far corner. Sensing her movement, he interrupted the song to lift the curls that hung over his face.
He said, “I dinnae want the nurse to wake ye. I asked her to come back in five minutes so that I could wake ye with the music. . . I was playing this song before I fell asleep last night. And I was dreaming about you and Da right before ye called. Ye both came to see me play.”
Maeve smiled and went to hug her son. Todd coughed weakly.
“Keep playing, Caleb,” said Maeve. “He hears you.”
Next
Part 4 | This Storm is Called Progress
7 - Gathering
Behind-the-Scenes Extra
This chapter started out as one of the original short stories I’ve mentioned that have been weaved into this novel, but once again, it’s very different from the original. The characters of Maeve, Todd, and Caleb have evolved, but the Harvest Moon short story was their beginning.
I’ve written numerous versions of similar scenes to this one since witnessing my parents’ love story. The writing brings raw feelings bubbling back. We all know we’re temporarily in this state we call life. Our loves are not going to be available physically forever. One will leave the other. Time and touch is precious.
The first time I heard this Neil Young song as a live recording by The Mavericks it surprised me, because it made me cry, and I don’t cry easily. I was driving down the road crying for no obvious reason. I felt a tenderness, a joy, a deep sadness that was too intimate to ignore. It’s a true challenge to describe. But I try. I’ve tried again here. I hope I’m getting closer.
Here are the Spotify links to the songs that inspired this chapter in case you want to have a listen:
This is the Todd version.
This is the Caleb version.
And this song is Maeve’s, which I played for my grandmother one day and she loved it, so now it reminds me of her love story with my grandfather too.
This one got me. Well done, Shannon 🥹❤️