May the Wind be Always at Your Back

Quincey flicked a rubbery fried onion from the crust of his green bean casserole. Mrs. Yeats brought it over with a gallon-sized Ziploc bag of sliced ham so that his parents wouldn’t have to cook. They wouldn’t be home for dinner and Quincey wasn’t hungry anyway. But he knew his mother would worry if she came home to her twenty-year-old son with an untouched green bean casserole, so he’d scooped a serving onto a paper plate with a slice of ham and sat idly at the table as if waiting for a curtain to rise.

 

He sat there long after sunset. Even when the phone rang, he sat and waited for the machine to pick up. At last, taking up the full plate, Quincey opened the trash cupboard and pressed the plate face down into the trash can. Unable to compress it enough to justify not taking it out, he tied up the bag and hauled it to the can on the curb. He held his breath as he opened the lid and lobbed in the bag, only to be met with a hiss and a scratching from within. Quincey gasped and jumped back, nearly tripping over his own feet. Two little hands grabbed the rim of the can followed by a pair of luminous orbs.

 

The raccoon scrambled over the rim and tumbled to the pavement. He hissed once more at Quincey for good measure before bounding into the street.

 

A tremble. Quincey watched the raccoon freeze in the middle of the street at approaching headlights. He half-hoped, half-dreaded his parents had returned with news. But if it was his parents, how slowly they crept.

 

The headlights swung side to side with the inky form of the vehicle. A gust of wind sent the fallen leaves swirling and skittering up the road, beckoning the vehicle onward. The raccoon stayed where he was. Over the whispering leaves, Quincey heard the rhythmic rap of horse hooves. They pounded against his ribcage. A whip cracked against the horses’ spines and Quincey felt the sting under his skin. The “headlights,” he now saw, illuminated the driver with a sickly green flame that shone through the orbits of two human skulls hung on either side of the coach. Only once the coach was pulling up in front of his house did the driver fully appear. He held in his right hand a whip of vertebrae strung together. Under his left arm, he held his decaying head.

 

The raccoon hissed. One of the horse’s heads dipped down, the nose almost touching that of the raccoon and huffed a verdigris mist. When it dissipated, the raccoon’s skeleton remained standing bravely. The other horse stomped, finally sending the little raccoon skeleton running to the other side of the street and behind a neighbor’s house.

 

Paying no mind to the raccoon, the driver lifted his head high above his neck and it cried, “Quinn McCarthy!”

 

Quincey’s heart dropped. “I am,” he replied, “Quinn McCarthy.”

 

The driver turned his head in Quincey’s direction. With what facial muscles he had left, he squinted, peering past Quincey’s flesh and veins and nerves, yet unable, or perhaps not caring, to examine beyond Quincey’s skull or ribs. “Are thou?”

 

“I am the only person at this house.”

 

The driver considered the broken handle on one of the coach doors. A young man’s metacarpal and a phalange would do nicely, he figured. “Very well. Get in.” The door swung open.

 

The wind blew in Quincey’s face. Leaves skirted around his feet and tumbled up the driveway behind him. Yet Quincey would not follow them. He climbed into the coach and the door clacked shut. He heard the muffled voice of the driver up on the box pronounce, “Right, crack on” and crack of the whip and the huff of the horses and the ancient groan of the wheels as they began to turn.

 

As the coach picked up speed, Quincey noticed a bug quivering on the outside of the window. He leaned his head against the murky emerald velvet lining and watched the bug brace against the wind and the rumbling and rattling of the coach. “Let go, little guy,” he pleaded softly. “Let the wind take you away.” For on this coach no living thing remains so for long.

 

The door flew open, taking the bug with it. Quincey reached out, only to jump back in his seat as a body swung inside. The intruder wore dusty blue jeans, a coat that looked like it had been dragged behind a horse, and a blue bandana about his neck. He reached his sun-bleached, fleshless hand up and tipped his hat. “I’m afraid we’ve no time for pleasantries, my corporeal friend.” He sat opposite Quincey, propped one boot-clad foot on his seat, and got down to business. “Now if I may, how’d a youngin like you get mixed up with the Duly-han?”

 

“There’s no mix-up,” Quincey responded firmly, “The Dullahan called my name and I answered.”

 

“You and I both know that dog won’t hunt.” The skeleton cowboy took a toothpick from his pocket and stuck it between his teeth. “I mean why are you dying?”

 

A cold hand grasped Quincey’s right shoulder. “Were thou slain, knape?”

 

“Jesus Christ!” Quincey whirled around to find a man leaning through the rear window. From the torso up, he was a skeleton, engraved by long-buried swords. The chainmail he wore jingled as he fell headlong into the coach.

 

He quickly righted himself and promptly smacked the back of Quincey’s head. “Boy, don’t take the Lord’s name in vain. Thou may have no time for confession,” he warned.

 

Rubbing the back of his head, Quincey reiterated, “All I can tell you is that the Dullahan called my name.”

 

The skeleton knight cupped Quincey’s chin in his hand, forcing Quincey’s gaze to fix on the pits where his eyes should be. “Then ‘tis thy fate to die tonight. Prepare thyself.”

 

The cowboy cut in, “Well, I myself don’t make a habit of linin’ fate’s pockets. If it were your time, you’d be lookin’ like an ox in the desert, same as us.” He leaned forward. “I see livin’ in you yet, boy.” He reached out a hand to Quincey. “What’d you say we make a break for it?”

 

“No…um, well…no, thank you. I’m fine to stay right here.”

 

Humming in contemplation, the knight observed, “Strange for a youth of thine age to lose corage so soon.”

 

“But you just said—”

 

“Preparation should take time.”

 

“Sir Jingle Bob’s got a point.” The cowboy took the toothpick from his mouth and pointed it at the knight and then at Quincey. “You’ll have no time for preparation if you stay on this wagon since I figure we aren’t far from the bone orchard.” He cracked the door open and flicked his toothpick out. Yet, rather than shut the door afterward, he took hold of Quincey and wrestled him from his seat and into the doorway.

 

The knight joined in, keeping Quincey from backing away from the door. “We’ll follow thee,” he said with perplexing tenderness.

 

“Tuck and roll,” the cowboy advised coolly before shoving Quincey from the moving coach.

 

Quincey had fallen from his bike often enough as a child to know the burn of flesh against pavement, but upon this impact all he felt was a short sting followed by a dull ache. The Dullahan had driven him past the border of injury. He scrambled to his feet and began to run after the coach. Each strike of his feet against the asphalt reverberated up through his knees. Nevertheless, the rap of the horses’ hooves faded away.

 

“What I wouldn’t give for one of those horses,” the knight’s voice drifted up to Quincey’s ears, accompanied by murmurs of agreement from the cowboy.

 

Quincey recognized the street as part of the route he would take to his elementary school, the street where he used to play with a little girl who lived beside a cemetery. He cut across three yards leading to a shallow wood. Just before he disappeared into the trees, the cowboy shot his pistol, which would have scared Quincey half to death if he weren’t already there.

 

The leaves chattered over Quincey’s head, mingling with the growing jangle of the knight’s chainmail. Quincey reached a crumbling stone wall, climbed over, and ran into the cemetery. A crushed bug fell to the dirt on the wrong side of the wall.

 

Quincey darted frantically between headstones. The paved lane for visitors deteriorated into a set of dirt tracks. Quincey reeled round and round. “I am Quinn McCarthy! I’m here!” he yelled to the Dullahan, to the horses, to the trees, to the wind. Only the latter mocked him with a response that sent the leaves into peals of laughter.

 

Curling in on himself, Quincey lowered to his knees. He bowed down until his forehead pressed against the cold earth. He squeezed his eyes shut, yet the tears fell anyway. His face in the mud he’d created, Quincey at last gave way to sobs. Shoulders heaving, he gasped for breath amidst cries that refused to ease their grasp.

 

A hand pressed Quincey’s back. “Whenever I got into a scrape,” the cowboy began, settling himself beside Quincey, “my sister would find me every time and she’d sit me right down on the ground, didn’t matter where we were. I knew there’d be hell to pay when I got home…” He laughed to himself. “But she wouldn’t take me there ’til I was ready.”

 

Quincey lifted his eyes to the cowboy, who was looking off into the distance. “I’m not near ready,” Quincey said, his voice ragged with tears.

 

The cowboy turned, his eyes almost as startling to Quincey as their initial absence. He cocked his head with a sigh and smiled under his copper mustache. “Well, I ain’t near ready to leave you, Quinn McCarthy. I’ve got all the time in the world.” He leaned against a tombstone and plucked a blade of grass to chew on.

 

“Quincey McCarthy,” Quincey admitted. He sat up, but turned aside in a ridiculous attempt to hide his tears. “My grandma is Quinn McCarthy.”

 

The knight stepped from behind an obelisk. He knelt before Quincey. “You are a hero.”

Quincey shook his head. “No. Don’t call me that.” He stared at the ground, shaking. “I just wanted somewhere it would be quiet, where everything would just be quiet.” The tears welled anew. “And now it’s quiet and it just hurts so much.” The last words of his sentence fell out haltingly through sobs. His head drooped against the cowboy’s chest.

 

Without hesitation, the cowboy gathered Quincey to him as his sister had held his bloodied corpse outside the saloon they wouldn’t let him die inside of. The wind blows every which way but where you need. The cowboy had sat around enough campfires to figure that out, yet he’d let the wind guide him for more than a century. The wind howled in his face. He wouldn’t have budged for a tornado.

 

The knight stood guard over this living tomb until, at last, Quincey stirred. Quincey wiped his eyes, stood, and tremulously announced that he must return home.

 

After the two ghosts bid him farewell, Quincey started for the cemetery gates, though just a few steps in, he turned around. “Can I ask a favor? When she gets here, will you look after her?”

 

“We’ll be here.”

 

Quincey walked for more than an hour, retracing the Dullahan’s route, his once-upon-a-time school route, back home. Just in front of his house, he froze in the middle of the street before a pair of approaching headlights. The curtain was torn in two. Quincey stared through the rupture. He’d never let his grandma teach him how to sew.