The ferry pulled away from the Belgian coast with that low industrial moan ships make when they’re leaving something behind. I stood out on the deck where the wind knifed across the rails and the gulls circled like scraps of torn paper. Ostend was already shrinking into the haze, the flat land folding into itself the way memories do when they’ve been carried too long.
I was thinking of him again — the old man who wasn’t my father but carried a kind of gravity that fathers sometimes lose. A man at the far end of his road, stories hanging off him like worn medals. Once a priest, he said, once a missionary, once a believer in the bright machinery of salvation. But he’d shed all that. Left the Church, married late, built a film company out of nothing but stubborn will and the way he could talk images into existence.
He was my father’s friend, but he spoke to me like I was some last chance to pass something forward. Not wisdom — no one ever passes that on — but the bits of history that cling to a man’s ribs after the rest has rotted away. He had that quiet voice older Flemish men get, like each word has to be carried across a border.
It was from him I first heard the legend.
We walked the medieval streets of Damme, he leaned in— I was thirteen — and told me about the headless rider who came out of storm clouds, a ghost nobleman from the days when Damme was still a harbour and the sea crept all the way inland. Heer Hallawijn, he called him, though the name rolled out of his mouth like something older, rounder, half-cooked by dialect. I heard it as “Sear Hallawyn,” something sharp and foreign. The sort of name that makes a boy sit still.
Hallawijn rode a black horse with thunder for hooves. No head on his shoulders, no face, no mercy. He came for the young women, the man said, the ones with bright eyes and unspent lives. The storm opened like a gate and the rider broke through, took them up and carried them west, always west, toward the pale land across the water. The white cliffs, he whispered, as if they were a prison wall.
I didn’t understand anything then. Not the history beneath the legend, not the way folklore carries the trauma of a place when the people forget the source. I didn’t know about the raiders who crossed from England and vanished into the night with whoever they caught. I just knew the man was giving me something fragile, a story you don’t tell loud.
Now, on the ferry in ’72, with the coast slipping away and the wind howling like an old engine that wants to quit, I felt the legend rise again. Felt him rising with it — the old man with the tired eyes, the man who had lived too many lives to trust any single one of them.
The ferry turned its steel face toward England. The wake stretched out behind me, long and white and restless. For a moment I imagined Hallawijn riding that same line of water, headless and relentless, still chasing the souls he thought he was owed.
And I realized: some stories never leave you.
Some men don’t either.
They just ride on ahead, waiting for you to catch up.