He was still shorter than me, a fact that never failed to irritate him. “All right, I’ll be Brom Bones chasing the pig and you be Markus Baas and climb that tree when the pig gets close,” I said, pointing to a maple with low branches that Sander could easily reach. It would have been better if there were a large group but no one ever wanted to play with us. On the day that Cristoffel van den Berg was found in the woods without his head, Sander and I were playing Sleepy Hollow Boys by the creek. Later I discovered that, like so many things, this was both true and not true. I always had the feeling that Brom knew more about the Horseman than he was letting on. Whenever someone mentioned the Horseman, Brom would get a funny glint in his eye and sometimes chuckle to himself, and this made Katrina even more annoyed about the subject. I never called them by their names, of course-Brom wouldn’t have minded, but Katrina would have been very annoyed had I referred to her as anything except “Oma.” I always thought of my grandparents as Katrina and Brom though they were my grandmother and grandfather, because the legend of the Horseman and the crane and Katrina and Brom were part of the fabric of the Hollow, something woven into our hearts and minds. Then Sander told me all about the schoolmaster who looked like a crane and how he tried to court Katrina and how one night the Horseman took the schoolmaster away, never to be seen again.
I already knew the part about the Horseman looking for a head because he didn’t have one. It was practically nothing to ask Sander to tell me about it.
Besides, the story of the Headless Horseman was a favorite in Sleepy Hollow, one that had been told and retold almost since the village was established.
I found out everything I wanted to know about the Horseman anyway, because children always hear and see more than adults think they do. If ever anyone brought up the subject within my hearing, Katrina would shush that person immediately, her eyes slanting in my direction as if to say, “Don’t speak of it in front of the child.” Of course I knew about the Horseman, no matter how much Katrina tried to keep it from me. I hope you join me in Sleepy Hollow on September 28th! I’ve got a sneak peek at the first chapter for you below, followed by the U.S. September has arrived, and that means that my latest book HORSEMAN: A TALE OF SLEEPY HOLLOW is nearly here! It will be out on September 28th, 2021, just in time for your spooky season reading.
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