Odd Road to Kabul

By Patricia Keen-Diaz

This is the remarkable story of survival and a child’s unique ability to pull through a harrowing fourteen-year cycle of neglect and abuse. The Keen household is strewn with the wreckage from mental illness and a brutal marriage that isn’t working, until Mary brings a Ouija Board home one day. The family begins to change dramatically and in the period of a few months they sell their home and all their belongings to move to Kabul, Afghanistan, where they plan to build an international church. But nothing lasts forever and it isn’t long before everything begins to unravel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patricia Keen-Diaz
• Release date: Jan 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452476117

Book preview

ODD ROAD TO KABUL

A Memoir

By Patricia Faith Keen-Diaz

Copyright 2010 By Patricia Faith Keen-Diaz

ISBN 978-0-557-94810-9

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please retrun to Smashword.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Dedicated to my wonderful husband who supported me in every way.

CHAPTER 1

1958

Mother balanced the lacquered woven laundry basket on her plump hip while she lumbered from the washing machine, on the back porch, to the clothes lines strung between two not-so-straight T-shaped poles. She carried a home-made ivory-colored bag, sewn onto a coat hanger, in the other hand. I ran after her from the back porch where I’d been playing jacks with Dinie. I was four-years-old and thought I was Mother’s little helper, always underfoot, and anxious to be in the middle of whatever she was doing.

Lord have mercy, sister. The humidity’s thick enough to cut with a knife, she complained. I’ll be damned surprised if these clothes dry before it’s time to hang tomorrow’s laundry. Mother sat the basket of laundry down and dabbed the perspiration droplets from her forehead, with a corner of her gingham apron.

She hung the coat-hanger bag over one of the lines and took out three wooden clothespins that looked like duck bills, wearing little caps. She retrieved two white tee-shirts from the basket. As she hung the tee-shirts, connecting the corners in the middle, I sang, softly.

Red Rover, Red Rover, send sister right over. That’s what it reminded me of, the way she pinned two corners together, joining hands, from one end of the line to the other. I scurried to the laundry basket and grabbed a handful of socks. A huge orange butterfly fluttered out of the basket and disappeared over the top of our house.

We rented a 1920’s French Creole white-clapboard, single-story cottage. It had two-bedrooms and a low, sloping tin roof that made a racket any time it rained. Mother’s hyacinth, daffodils, gardenias, tea roses, and hydrangea filled our front yard, except where Ollie and Mother parked, on a dirt driveway. Ollie was Mother’s live-in boyfriend. He towered over her and smelled like sweaty clothes, cigarettes and beer. I didn’t like Ollie and he sure wouldn’t have been living with us if Father was home.

A porch wrapped all the way across the front of our house. Mother called it our gallery. Two old rocking chairs, with the white paint chipping off, and a dinged-up, white wicker end-table decorated the front porch where Mother and Ollie liked to sit in the hot summer evenings drinking their beer, talking in hushed voices and laughing. He propped his dusty black work boots, with yellow stitching around the soles, up on the white railing that ran between the plain, slender wood posts, like he owned the place.

We didn’t have air conditioning, so outside was cooler than inside, but not by much. After a few beers, Mother always hauled out her faded and nicked acoustic guitar and played all her favorite songs, like Hang Down Your Head Tom Doolie or She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain. If she had a little too much beer, which was often, she’d move on to the church hymns she’d learned from Granddaddy Furtick - Just As I Am or On A Hill Far Away. Ollie sang along with her and that seemed to make her happy.

The chain-link fenced backyard had a Nuttall oak tree that must have been eighty feet high according to Father. When I asked him how tall it was, he had said, Well, let’s see now, I’m six-foot-two-inches and you could turn me end-over-end, the length of that tree, at least a dozen times. That’d make it about eighty feet high. I spent hours under that oak tree, with my big brother Mike and my little sister, Dinie, scooping acorns up with our bare hands, into a bushel basket Mother had given us to play with. Mike’s head looked like Mr. Potato Head, with skinny arms and legs. Dinie’s hair was cut in the same boyish bob as mine. Timmy, the baby, tried to eat the acorns, so he had to stay inside. When we got bored picking up acorns from the ground, we lobbed them at each other, and took turns taking cover under the bushel basket until it was time to go inside for lunch or dinner.

Mother grew her own tomatoes, green beans, corn, cucumbers, watermelons, pumpkins, snap peas and okra in a big garden opposite the oak tree in the bright sun, so we had vegetables every night. Granddaddy Furtick had chickens and hogs, so every once in awhile we had chicken or ham with our vegetables. Sometimes all we had was a ham hock, which Mother put in a pot of green beans. If we didn’t have chicken or ham, we might be lucky enough to have tuna. Mother mixed a little milk and a couple of eggs with the tuna, shaped a big spoonful into tuna-fish patties and fried it up in a pan of melted lard. Whether or not we had meat, we always had white cornbread with our vegetables. The kind you make with buttermilk and pour into a cast iron skillet with melted lard. I developed a deep appreciation for the smell of cornbread baking in the oven when I was four.

Our kitchen was in the back of the L-shaped cottage. The 1940’s sea-foam green gas stove that Mother used to bake our cornbread, cook our vegetables and fry our meat, sat next to the door that lead into the furnace room, just behind the kitchen. Our water came from the well on the other side of the furnace room wall. I didn’t know much about the well. It was inside a screened porch that ran the length of the backside of the cottage and we weren’t allowed near it. We might fall in and drown. The washing machine was also in that screened room.

Magnolias, birch, red oak and Tupelo gum trees lined our street of Creole cottages and people seemed to know where I lived whenever I escaped from the backyard and wandered off by myself, wearing nothing more than my underpants and a coon-skin cap, with the bushy tail dangling over my face. My need for nakedness caused much angst between Mother and her sister, Aunt Edith.

Mary Frances, I swear, if you don’t keep clothes on that girl, some pervert is going to grab her one of these days, proclaimed Aunt Edith. "And ‘I told you so’ will be all I’m able to say."

Good Lord, Edith, Mother retaliated. Don’t be ridiculous. Patricia’s not the kind of child perverts go after. She looks like a tadpole with those skinny arms and legs and her daddy’s nose. Dinie’s the one I have to keep an eye on and she don’t take her clothes off, she laughed.

I didn’t entirely know what she meant. Most people could tell we were sisters so we must look alike. And some folks thought we were twins, even though I was half-a-foot taller and a year older. For some reason, Dinie could make the perverts stop and take a look, but not me. And honestly, I wasn’t even sure what a pervert was. Still, I felt a little jealous.

*****

I heard Mother call me from the house. Patricia Faith, you march your butt in here right this minute. I pulled myself away from acorn- hunting and went inside, through the kitchen, past the dining room and into our bedroom, knowing full-well, I was in trouble, and why.

Mother yanked the sheets off the plastic-covered lower bunk-bed mattress. Three giant yellow circles stained the Clorox-white sheets.

I’m sick and tired of doin’ all this extra laundry because you’re too lazy to get up and use the damned toilet, Mother said. She frowned until her eyebrows met in the middle and her lips puckered in, like the stem-end of a ripe tomato. I left this sheet on your bed, thinking it might shame you if you slept in your own piss. Since it didn’t, I think I know another way to break you of this habit.

She tossed the sheets at me and they covered me up. I moved my arms up and down, pretending to be a ghost. If you think pissing the bed every night is going to make me send Ollie away, you’ve got another think coming, young lady. Take those stinking-assed things out to the washer and wait for me there. Mother knew I didn’t like Ollie and wanted him to go away.

I found my way out of the smelly, still-wet cotton sheets and half-carried, half-dragged them outside to our old Maytag Chieftain wringer-washer. That washer scared the living daylights out of me.

It looked like a huge, white frog waiting to be fed. It had four stout legs. Each leg had a round, black shoe so the frog could roll around, or run-away. Its white belly sat right on top of the legs. The frog’s only arm hung rigidly at its side until Mother raised it, and she only raised it when she was ready to feed it our clothes. A long black hose, which looked to me like a snake, drooped from the belly. When Mother saw that the frog was through chewing our clothes, she stuck the snake’s head into a pipe that went into the ground. I watched the water drain out of the frog’s belly, through the snake’s mouth and into the pipe. On laundry days, I would stay awake late into the night, worried that frog was going to get me.

The Maytag Chieftain stayed outside on the back porch, next to the well because we didn’t have room or plumbing for it inside the house. I shuddered. My eyes widened. I felt my heart beating fast in my chest.

I deposited the wet sheets next to the ‘frog’ and inched toward the well, looking over my shoulder. I heard Father’s words in my head, Don’t run away from things you fear - look ‘em right in the eye and say ‘You don’t scare me!’. When I was close enough to the well, I climbed up the two steps Father made for Mother so she could draw water. I pushed the round wooden lid to the side and leaned over the edge, peering into the pitch-black well. The air felt cool on my face and smelled like wet rocks.

I pulled an acorn from the pocket of my striped coveralls and dropped it in. I counted…one, two, three, four… before I heard a tiny splash as the acorn hit the water.

That didn’t sound so deep.

Get away from that well! Mother yelled. What have you been told about getting near that thing? Her loud, shrill voice startled me and I toppled forward. She grabbed the strap of my coveralls with one hand and pulled me away from the well.

I braced for a whack on the head. Stay away from the well, I said warily. Instead of whacking me she rolled a weathered pickle barrel from its position as a table, between two chairs on the back porch, to a spot next to the one-armed frog.

Climb up here, she said, patting the top of the pickle barrel. She lifted the lid off the washing machine and set it aside, while I climbed up onto my rickety perch.

Put the sheets in the washer while I draw the water.

I shoved the sheets into the frog as best as I could while Mother drew four buckets of water from the well and poured them into the frog’s belly. She usually heated the water on the stove, but that day she was in a hurry. Then she poured in a cup of Tide and flipped the switch. The frog started churning the sheets, pulling them into its belly. When they were completely drowned, Mother put the lid back on, then stuck the black snake’s head into the drain pipe.

Now you stand there and watch until you hear it stop making noise. Then you come and get me, she grumbled.

Okay, mommy.

I stood on that pickle barrel and listened closely to the frog chewing up my sheets. When it finished spitting out the water and soap, and ground to a stop, I ran into the house to get Mother. I didn’t have to go far.

She and Ollie wrestled a pin-striped mattress through the furnace room door. It looked heavy. When they finally got it through the door, I ventured in to see what they were doing. They laid the mattress on a sea of metal springs tethered to four steel posts.

Is someone coming to live with us? I asked, not really wanting to hear the answer. I didn’t even like Ollie living with us.

Mother glared at me. This is where you are going to sleep until you stop wetting the bed.

Why? I squeaked.

Because I’m tired of your piss smelling up the whole house, she snarled. I looked at Ollie for help. He said nothing. When Mother left the room, he winked at me with those squinty brown eyes and said, It’s going to be okay, baby girl.

He followed her into the kitchen. I sat down on the lumpy, naked mattress and picked up my naked baby doll. One eye was stuck closed so she looked like she was winking at me.

*****

Mike, Dinie and me were playing hide and seek in the back yard and the best hiding spots in the corn or under the raised porch or behind the huge oak tree made it too easy to find each other since we’d all taken a dozen turns hiding there. We weren’t supposed to leave the backyard though. Mother restated those orders before she left for her weekly bargain-hunting spree.

I need a better place to hide. A place where Mike won’t think to look.

After Dinie hid under the back porch and pulled the bushel basket in front of her, I slipped out of the gate, making sure to close it tight. I climbed into the rusty bed of Ollie’s faded blue 1930- something pickup truck. He hadn’t driven it for awhile because it had two flat tires and the side was caved in from where someone ran into him.

Ollie was supposed to be watching us, but he was in the house watching Gunsmoke. I smushed myself down against the truck’s bed as far as I could. The steel under my body felt like hot coals, even through my coveralls, but I was determined Mike wouldn’t find me this time. I heard him counting off all the way from the backyard.

Ninety-nine, one-hundred! Here I come, ready or not! Mike yelled. He was 6 years old, two years older than me and the only one of us who could count that high. Since Dinie and I couldn’t count to a hundred, Mike showed us how to count to ten and draw a line in the dirt. When we had ten lines, we yelled out Here I come, ready or not. I heard Mike starting his search. Within minutes he found Dinie and she squealed.

He’ll never find me!

About that time I heard the front door close. I sure hoped Ollie didn’t need anything from his truck. I hated to be alone with him and thought about crawling out and giving myself up to Mike. I heard Ollie’s boots lumbering towards the truck, then the flick of his cigarette lighter. Suddenly, and without making a sound, Ollie lifted me out of the pickup truck by my coveralls, held me close to his chest and hauled me around back.

Your momma told you to stay in the backyard, Ollie said in his thick southern drawl, as he spanked me hard four or five times. Go to your room and stay there ‘til your momma gets back. He turned to Mike and Dinie who watched my humiliation a little too gleefully and said gruffly, You two stay out here. You come in the house and you’ll get your behinds paddled too.

I sat on my bed in the furnace room, trembling. I wanted my daddy. My room smelled like the kind of fuel oil they put in big trucks and it was hotter than the rest of the house. I stared at the unpainted wooden walls behind the furnace. My eyes drifted to the single pilot light burning in the bottom of the big black box.

Then Ollie came in and closed the door behind him. He wore a sleeveless, ribbed tee-shirt and the light brown hair in his armpits was as long as the wavy brown hair on his head. He looked at me and smiled.

How’s my little girl doing? he asked soothingly. I didn’t answer. "Ah, don’t be mad at me baby. You know I have to whup you

when you go out of the backyard. Now I’m going to make you feel all better." He moved closer and I drew my skinny legs up under my teardrop chin. He smelled of stale cigarette smoke and beer. He gently touched my cheek with his index finger. He pushed my hair back away from my face and tucked it behind my ears. He kissed my forehead. I jerked away.

I don’t want to play with you today, I whimpered. He pushed my legs down and unfastened the straps of my coveralls. He pulled them off and slipped my pink panties off.

I know, baby, but you’ll change your mind in a minute, he said. He slid his index finger inside me and moved it in and out until I stopped trembling.

Then he unzipped his brown corduroy pants and they dropped to the floor, over the tops of his yellow-stitched black work boots. The heavy belt buckle with the words US Army thudded next to them. He pulled his dingy white briefs down and sat on the bed next to me. I shirked away, but he picked me up and forced me onto his lap, facing him. His breath smelled like garbage. When our skin touched, I shivered, but Ollie stroked my back and kissed my face gently until I stopped. I felt his hot breath in my ears and eyes. Then he slipped Little Ollie inside me like a fist. It didn’t bleed any more but I still cried out from the pain. Maybe Mike or Dinie would hear me and charge into the house any minute. He bent over, pushing me back until he could put his mouth over mine. After a few minutes the burning, throbbing pain subsided, leaving only the sensation that I needed to go to the bathroom. He raised me up and lowered me back onto Little Ollie over and over. He bit my throat and I cried out again. I felt myself float out of my body. I stared at the gray concrete wall behind my bed. A picture I’d drawn of my happy family stared back at me. Daddy, mommy, Mike, Dinie, Timmy and me. I noticed our smiles were straight, black lines and thought about making them curve upward. And maybe I should make them red. We had big, blue, lopsided eyes and hardly any hair. I needed to give us more hair.

From the ceiling, where I hovered, I watched Ollie lift me up and put me on my hands and knees on the bed. Then Little Ollie was inside me again. Only this time, it was where my poop came out. Ollie went in and out, moaning the whole time.

Then he turned me over and sat me on the bed facing the furnace. He stood in front of me and rubbed Little Ollie’s head against my lips. His penis looked like a big sausage and stunk but I knew it would be over as soon as Little Ollie spat up in my mouth. Then Ollie would give me a bath and when Mother came home, he’d tell her he had to bathe me because I’d wet myself again. That’s what he always did.

Ollie slid his hand back and forth on Little Ollie then shoved Little Ollie’s head into my mouth. As I waited for Ollie’s cream to fill my mouth, the door to the furnace room flew open. Mother came down the brick steps into my room and stood as still as a leaf in the calm before the storm. She didn’t say anything at all for what seemed to me like a whole minute. Her eyes were the size of silver dollars and her nostrils flared, like a bull just before it charges the red cape.

Ollie was going to get it now!

I always suspected it was wrong for Ollie and me to play this game every time Mother went shopping. He told me I couldn’t tell her because she’d be furious with me. I believed him. Ollie’s face froze and he looked scared.

What the hell do you think you’re doing, you no-good son-of-a- bitch? she screamed, dropping the car keys. They clunked against the uneven brick floor while Ollie wrestled to pull his pants up.

It’s not what you think, Mary, Ollie said.

You cheated on me you bastard, in my own house and with my own daughter no less! Mother yelled, loud enough I’m sure the neighbors down the street must have heard.

"Hey, she came on to me. I’m just a man, for crying out loud. What did you expect me to do?" Ollie explained, smugly, zipping his pants. I didn’t know what to do, so I sat perfectly still, naked, tears streaming down my face, praying for the Lord, from my nighttime prayer, to make me invisible.

I expect you to leave your wife. I expect you to marry me. I don’t expect you to screw my daughter! Mother screamed, sniffling now.

Oh come on, Mary. This is nothing, Ollie said defensively. Mother turned and marched out of my room her jaw set with determination. Ollie followed her, closing my door behind him. I curled up on my bed and wet myself. The screaming seemed far away now, in someone else’s house, not mine. When the front door slammed shut, the house shuddered and so did I. Ollie was gone. I never liked the game we played at first, but it felt good to have some one care about me. I missed him within minutes. He spanked me every once in awhile, but he was mostly kind to me. Mother had never been kind. At least that I could remember.

I don’t know when she started hating me, but it was before she caught me and Ollie playing our game. Nothing, I did, ever pleased her and my bedwetting, since Ollie came to live with us didn’t help. I began wetting myself and the bed right after we started playing I’ve Got A Secret, Ollie’s favorite TV game show. The first time we played, he put me in the bathtub to wash the blood off my wee-wee. I couldn’t help it. I peed right in my bath water. I watched the red and yellow swirling around each other, rushing to the drain when Ollie quickly pulled the plug. Guess he didn’t want me sitting in a tub of bloody, pissy water. I wished I could have gone down that drain too.

It was quiet for a long time after Ollie left. I heard Mike and Dinie still outside, playing. Timmy was probably taking his nap. Mother said he was the best baby she’d ever had.

I wanted Mother to come back to the furnace room, to hold me and pat my head like they did on television. I wanted her to tell me what a good little girl I was and how everything was going to be alright. I wanted her to love me.

The door to my room slammed opened. Mother stood there in the doorway, filling it up, scowling. Her eyes were swollen and red. Without a word she yanked me up by the arm and hauled me into the bathroom. Sure, she was about to drown me, I grabbed onto one of the claw-feet on the bathtub. She pried my fingers loose, jerked me up and deposited me into the white porcelain tub. Then she filled it with steaming hot water.

Mommy, I wailed. I want my daddy.

Shut your mouth! she snapped. She pulled my head back and examined where Ollie bit me on my neck. He gave you a hicky?! she yelled. I looked at her blankly. I didn’t even know what a hicky was. When I didn’t answer, Mother slapped my face for the first time, I can remember, in what would become a common practice over the next thirteen years.

She scrubbed me like I had leprosy or some other disease that left visible marks. I whined and sniffled through my entire bath. I usually looked forward to bath time. All that changed after that day. No longer did the bathtub feel safe. It became a scary place where monsters came out of the drain and sucked you in.

Mother told me to put my nightgown on and go to bed. I knew the bed was still wet and I knew it was too early to go to bed. I said nothing. I wanted to tell Mother how sorry I was that I hurt her feelings. How Ollie told me not to tell her. I pulled my white nightie with the little pink roses and lace hem, on over my head and crawled onto a dry spot on my mattress.

The door opened again.

Let me tell you something, you damned little whore - you’ll never do this to me again. And if you so much as breathe a word of this to your daddy, I swear, I’ll beat you to death, Mother snarled before pulling the cord dangling from the light bulb over my bed. The windowless room became as pitch black as the well, and Mother left, slamming the door behind her.

I’m good at keeping secrets, Mommy.

The scary orange eye changed to yellow then blue and hissed at me angrily from the huge, black furnace across the room from my bed. It turned into lots of eyes, and then roared at me. I buried my face in my pillow. The pointy end of feathers poked through and pricked my cheek.

I heard myself sniffling. I felt bugs crawling down my cheeks. My fingers touched them, but before I could wipe them away, they turned into water drops and trickled into the corner of my mouth. I licked them off. They tasted like the salt I liked to lick off crackers.

I rolled over and curled up. The metal springs under me squeaked. No one heard. Even though the room was hot, I got cold. I pulled a blanket over my head. My eyes felt heavy and I heard myself breathing. With each breath, I missed my father and wished he would open my door and scoop me up and tell me it’s okay now, punkin’. But I knew he couldn’t come home. He was in some place called Panama.

CHAPTER 2

1963

My eyes opened just as the first sliver of Arizona daylight peekedaround the edge of the yellowing shade. My pink-flowered pajamas were soaking wet and cold, the sheets too. The tail on the Kit-Cat wall clock above our white shabby chic, before it was a popular style, dresser, clicked away each second. I could see the big white eyeballs with vertical black slits for pupils move with each twitch of the cat’s tail. I squinted but couldn’t make out the time on Kit-Kat’s black belly. I curled my index finger into a tiny hole that I peered through, like a telescope, tightening my finger, narrowing the hole to the size of a pinhead so I could make out the time. It was 5:15 a.m.

Fifteen minutes late.

I quickly scuttled out of bed and put on my brand-new pink and gray marbled cat-eye glasses. From the top bunk on the opposite side of the room from me and Dinie’s bunks, Mike rolled over and watched me for a few seconds, then drifted back to sleep. As stealthy as a cat burglar, I opened the top dresser drawer, took out a clean nightie and panties, changed into them and tossed my soiled night clothes onto my sheets.

Swiftly, I stripped the sheets from the plastic-covered mattress, gathered them into a bundle and carried them over to our closed door. I listened. Nothing. I should be able to sneak across the hall and deposit the evidence in the washer before Mother and Father woke up at 5:30. They seemed less disgusted if I was done cleaning up after myself before they got up.

I placed my hand on the slimy, from our disgusting brothers, doorknob, twisted it and pulled it open gently. It creaked and I thought I’d surely stepped on Tom’s tail. Tom’s one lucky cat or maybe we were one lucky family. Mother got tired of him hanging around our apartment, meowing, and one day cursed the cat so much that Father hauled him off to Perryville, twelve miles away, and let him go. We’d almost forgotten about him when he just showed up on the doorstep two whole months after Father dumped him. Skinny as a board, he still meowed contentedly and Mother said any cat that determined to be with this family can stay. From then on, Tom got to sleep and eat inside our apartment.

Tom’s a whole lot nicer cat than those two mean Siamese kittens Mother flung into our room at two in the morning the year Father was stationed in Greenland. She had been out drinking with her best friend, Ila Dee, who also lived in Avondale Circle, aka The Circle. Ila Dee, the opposite of Mother, was tall and thin and had an Oklahoma twang in her tongue. Mother’s twang came from Mississippi. Ila Dee’s almond-colored hair was cut short like Mother’s and they took turns giving each other perms.

Ila Dee’s Siamese cat had a litter and she convinced Mother what a swell idea it would be to surprise us kids with a couple of kittens. It was a surprise alright. Those two Siamese kittens scared the crap out of us kids and kept us up the rest of the night. Like Tasmanian devils, though I’d never actually seen one, they screeched, clawed their way up the curtains and slid down the drawn shade, shredding it to pieces. The four of us kids hid under our blankets. How Mother slept through that, I don’t know. The next day, she took the kittens back to Ila Dee.

I stood in the doorway for a few seconds, listening. Not a sound. Then I noticed light coming from under the bathroom door, next to the laundry room, which was really a converted closet.

As quiet as a mouse, I slithered across the hall to our new automatic Whirlpool washer. Our 10 year old Whirlpool had broken down from doing loads of pastels, coloreds, whites…and my sheets, every day and Mother didn’t want Father to fix that dilapidated old thing. She