Voodoo

This story has been hibernating in my notebook for several years, waiting  for an ending, a resolution of some kind, all in vain.  But some things don't resolve, or resolve themselves away from our eyes and ears.

I ran into Terry at the city library. He told me he was researching the practices of the occult.  We hadn't seen each other for 27 years, since graduating from college.   He grew up in this town where I was living, and he moved away soon after graduation, while I stayed behind. He returned only sporadically for short visits with his family. Some people escape from  places onto which others eagerly descend.

We went for a coffee and Terry told me this story. Several years earlier,  he was living in New Orleans.  There he ran into his high school sweetheart.  She was divorced, as was he, and they started seeing each other.  One thing led to another and they became engaged, planning a wedding and a move to New York City, where both of her brothers lived.  They made a short trip to Manhattan, to orient themselves and to look for an apartment, and then, immediately after returning to Louisiana, unexpectedly, she broke off the engagement, refusing to give him an explanation.

"Welcome to the club!" I told Terry when he told me this, I having experienced similar unexplained breakups myself. .

He wrote her several letters to which she never replied. He was upset, heartbroken, and decided to deal with his  emotional turmoil by travelling abroad.  He got a job with an international development agency, and traveled to Haiti where he stayed for 18 months. Terry spoke fluent French, which proved marginally useful communicating with native Haitians, he told me.

After Haiti, the agency sent him to Africa, the country of Senegal, if I'm not mistaken (my notes aren't clear), a former French colony, where he spent another year working before returning to the States.

Now, that is shortly before the time when we met each other, his former fiancee sent him a letter.  In it she explains that it was her brother, whom he had met when they were visiting Manhattan, who had advised her to break off the engagement.   Terry suspected it from the beginning, but she of course denied it at the time.

Her brother, a stockbroker on Wall Street, met with some financial misfortunes, and ended up a drug addict and alcoholic on skid row.  She had been trying to help him without success.   She then went seeking help to some kind of psychic or fortune teller or gypsy, or all three of them in one person, and the woman (these magicians are always women, aren't they?) persuaded her  that there is a curse, evil spell,  jinx or voodoo on her brother, and she identified its source as Haiti, where, as Terry's ex-fiancee somehow knew,  Terry had spent some time.  And so, assuming that the hex was Terry's doing (!), she begs him in the letter to reverse, to cancel this evil spell.

"She's a regular churchgoer, a devout Christian," Terry told me, "and still, she plays with Tarot cards, visits these fortune tellers.  What am I to do?"