The Kruufkes of Borgloon

On a grey morning in early spring, Jantje Drosarts, a farmer of Borgloon, found something strange on his farmyard: small sticks laid one atop another to form a cross, roughly woven as if hastily placed. He stared at it, felt a chill, and immediately believed what his grandmother had once taught him: this was a kruufke, a cursed cross.

He picked it apart and threw the sticks away, but that evening he found two more by the gate, and two more by the ox pasture. His wife Maartje became very distressed. “Someone wishes us ill,” she whispered, and Jantje could not tell her she was wrong.

In the weeks that followed, misfortune descended. A cow fell sick with a malady no herbalist could cure. The young maid developed a fever and lay in bed three days without uttering a word. The harvest failed, as if the very seeds refused to grow. And always, every day renewed, the kruufkes lay scattered around the farmstead — by the window, at the door, in the garden where vegetables should have grown.

In desperation, Jantje went to the village and spoke with Senne, the old herbalist who understood the darker things better than men dared to ask him directly. Senne nodded gravely when he heard about the kruufkes and said: “This is the work of someone with evil knowledge. You have an enemy, neighbour.”

“What do we do?” asked Jantje, his voice like a child’s sobbing.

“There lives a learned man two villages beyond, in Heers. They say he speaks the language of the unseen and that he can break a curse.” Senne wrote down a name — Joos Meinders — and a direction.

Jantje found Joos in a cottage half-hidden in the woods. Joos was old, perhaps older than the trees themselves, and his eyes held the colour of water that runs deep and dark. He listened to Jantje’s story without interruption. Then he said: “You were right to be afraid. But you will also be right to hope. I will come with you.”

As the sun set, Joos and Jantje arrived at the farmstead. Maartje hid indoors, fearful that the learned man might unleash something worse than the kruufkes themselves. But Joos called her outside. “Fear not. We will set this right.”

With his fingers, Joos gathered every kruufke he could find — more than twenty there were — and lay them in a row in the middle of the yard. Then he took a copper coin, spoke words in a language Jantje did not know, and burned the coin above the crosses. The metal hissed and smoked yellow.

“That scent,” said Joos, “goes straight to him who did this. Let him understand his curse is broken.” He drew three circles around the farmhouse with water from the well, spoke more words — this time Latin incantations that sounded like whispers against darkness itself. And finally, he placed a cross of white shells at the entrance, saying: “This house is blessed. Whoever wishes harm shall receive harm returned, threefold and cut.”

Then Joos took his payment, bid no farewell, and walked away into the darkness — just as he had come.