Penryn Boys

Penryn Boys

Frederick W. Penney

A Pennco Publishing Book Publising it at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold 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 return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is dedicated to Frederick E. Penney Jr. who figured out that the country was what was best for his boys.

The Penryn Boys

Published by Pennco Publishing & Frederick W. Penney.

Smashwords Edition.

Copyright 2011 Frederick W. Penney.

Publisher: Pennco Publishing and Smashwords

Editor: Mark Hayward

Cover: Keith Brown

Typography: LB Designs.

First Edition: October 2009

This book is available in print at most online retailers.

NOTE: This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally.

• Table of Contents •

The Penryn Boys Summer of ‘73 Prologue

Chapter 1 – The Carpetbaggers

Chapter 2 – Plumball

Chapter 3 – Old Man Shepman

Chapter 4 – Bear

Chapter 5 – Dinner at the Toothly’s

Chapter 6 – The Ridge

Chapter 7 – Church

Chapter 8 – Shotgun!

Chapter 9 – Witching

Chapter 10 – The Ollis Well

Chapter 11 – Back to the Ridge

Chapter 12 – The Train

Chapter 13 – The Dark Family Plants

Chapter 14 – The Dark Boys

Chapter 15 – Uncle Art

Chapter 16 – Getting Shot At!

Chapter 17 – Bickford Ranch Mine

Chapter 18 – Back to the Mine

Epilogue Book One

About the Author

• The Penryn Boys •

Summer of ‘73

Prologue

In 1864 a man by the name of Griffith Griffith came from a town in Wales called Penhryn and moved to what was then a wilderness area near Smithville (Loomis), California. Griffith bought some property from the Southern Pacific Railroad near English Colony for what would be the first Granite Quarry in the area. Soon, many ranchers, miners, and farmers would move into the area to use the newly discovered rich granite soils deposits of ore in English Colony, now renamed Penryn. Also, the fruit and cattle industry began to flourish by the 1890’s.

Gold mines began popping up all around Placer County in the 1800’s, and many prospectors came looking to strike it rich in the hills of Penryn. Many of these mines were bored right through the side of a mountain, usually right near a fruit orchard or cattle ranch. However, as the times changed many of the mines were abandoned and left to fall apart by the gold seeking miners. Many of the mines were in areas that were thick with trees, vines and grasses. Eventually the entrance to these dangerous mines would be covered by thick wild vines, trees and bushes. Their deep shafts would slowly fill with spring water bubbling up slowly in a number of the tunnels. Soon, no one would know where the mines were located except through some old records kept at the county concerning the locations of each mine. Many of these abandoned mines were not even recorded with the county and sat unknown, hidden, and abandoned long ago.

These abandoned gold mines were difficult to find and often sat undiscovered for years until someone stumbled upon them by accident. After I moved to Penryn as a child, I heard of a mine rumored to exist in the area called the Bickford Mine. This was one of the many deep, dark, hidden mines that only a few local people knew existed in Penryn. Mothers worried about their children falling down a deep shaft of one of these abandoned mines. Rumors swirled around all the local schools of men and women being murdered and their bodies tossed down abandoned mines. Kids and adults alike talked about the spirits and ghosts that visited the mines, still trying to strike it rich even after the mines were stripped of their gold.

Bickford Ranch was a large 2000 acre ranch that took up a large portion of the area around Penryn. The ranch straddled the Southern Pacific Railroad land that ran directly through the ranch toward the great Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. Some of the best cattle in the valley grazed the tender grass of the rolling oak-studded hills. As a young man I never thought of the potential of this land becoming anything but a large cattle ranch for the Bickford family.

As time crawled on, the Penryn area farmers and ranchers began to disappear. By the 1960’s many of the cattle ranches were gone and only a few select ones stayed, with the owners barely making a living and trying to resist the temptation of selling to big land companies who wanted to bring a larger population to the beautiful rolling hills of Penryn. The small fruit orchards had brought money and people to the small town of Penryn. These orchards of Penryn were more productive than those of other areas because they yielded more of a crop with a smaller plot of land. However, the orchards began to disappear as did the ranches as the land was sold off.

As Sacramento, California began to expand farther out toward the country, my father, Frederick Nickel Jr., began to worry that the urban sprawl might affect his boys. Father had a rough upbringing and did not want his boys to endure the same hardships that he had to go through. Father was the son of a single mother that had a drinking problem. He would spend many nights as a very young child sleeping in a car out in front of a bar. By the age of fourteen he was out of the house, living with relatives in Lake County, California. By the age of seventeen, Father was getting into trouble and decided that he would enlist in the Marines to keep himself out of trouble. Before Father knew it, he was fighting on the front lines in Korea, carrying a machine gun up ahead of everyone else. He told many stories in his later years about how he was one of the main night scouts that would sneak around the jungle to find the enemy camps. His two serious wounds from the war eventually took his life when his boys were still very young adults. When we were little, his strong belief was that country life did boys good and hard ranch work made boys into men. Mom believed that Dad had a jaded take on living in the country. She fought him to the end to stay in the city with her boys. However, Father prevailed, bringing with the family and his in-laws, Floyd and Myrna Davis.

In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s the population of Penryn, California was slowly growing to where it was reaching close to 700 people. Most of the people in town and at the ranches were migrant workers picking and packing fruit. There were fruit packing sheds all over the area with a steady stream of laborers coming from all over the country to find seasonal work. The neighboring towns of Loomis and Newcastle were bustling during the summer with the fruit trucks driving around the towns loaded down with the fresh crop from their fields to the Blue Anchor and High Hand fruit packing sheds next to the railroad tracks. This was an exciting time as all the children were out of school, and most of them were working on a fruit ranch or at the packing sheds. The few cattle ranches that still existed employed the toughest of the kids from school who could wrestle a cow or two. You could always tell these young men in town with their straw cowboy hats and pointed cowboy boots. They rarely took the time to hang out with anyone else other than their own type.

Everybody knew each other in Penryn. The local watering hole next to Moto’s Market was the main social hangout in town. The population of Penryn was made up of a fair number of Japanese Americans, many of whom were the very individuals that were put in detention camps during World War II. Many of the farms in Penryn were owned by Japanese families that had lived in the area for decades. You could see the old Japanese farmers sitting on the front porch of the local watering hole, their own front porches, or at Moto’s market just in town. They would just sit and pass the time away talking about the good old days. They were past their time and probably felt that their great depth of knowledge of farming and how to grow beautiful sweet fruit were no longer needed. The slow paced, simple life was slowly leaving Penryn (and Loomis), and city people were just starting to learn of the area and move in. The Nickel boys were part of that unwanted crowd that brought their fast paced city ways with them. At least that was what the locals believed and they could not be told otherwise.

Penryn was in a transition stage at the time the Nickel boys moved to their small ranch in the early 1970s. Moto’s market would see new customers that did not speak Japanese and that did not want to walk next to the large fish counter with octopus and squid as the main selling item. The small town was in for a change: the busy-body out-of- town Nickel boys were moving in and all hell was about to break loose.

• Chapter 1 •

The Carpetbaggers

June 1973

The Nickel family stood out like a sore thumb the first day we came to Penryn, at the start of summer vacation in 1973, and not just because of the car. Granted, it was only three years old, wasn’t leaking oil, and had all of its hubcaps, but that was not our family’s only oddity. Simply put, we were city folk, which was plain enough to see when you saw the matriarch of the family. Mom was tall and slender, and the house she had kept in Sacramento was as immaculate as her perfectly manicured fingernails. Her eyes became wider and wider with each house we drove by, as barnyard animals, rusted Fords, and dirty barefoot children composed a picture quite different from the Norman Rockwell scene she had envisioned. Two particular specimens were giving each other mud baths in front of their shambled old house. Mom groaned, and I heard her mutter a desperate prayer.

Dad at least looked the part more than Mom did. Even though he was in his forties, Dad could never find a shirt that fit his bulging biceps. He had been a cop and was a former Marine who had fought the Communists hand-to-hand in Korea, and he made sure that everyone saw the large Marine First Division tattoo on his right shoulder and arm. Hippie protesters usually shut up pretty quickly when Dad growled down at them. He had a vein that popped out of his forehead when he got mad, and that was usually enough to get them to mutter something about supporting the troops, just not the cause and scurry away. I knew that look, too, and was smart enough to run when I saw it. He was actually kind of a softie deep down, but we made sure not to let on that we knew it. Dad would do just fine in the backwoods, and he also believed that old fashioned country values and the American work ethic would do more for his sons than what he perceived as the liberal educations we were getting at the hands of the teachers’ union in the big city. Dad wanted us to go to an old fashioned country school, one where the principal used the paddle often and ran the school like a Marine drill sergeant.

That was fine by us…well, not the work ethic part, but our humble new home looked a lot more exciting than any of the suburbs we had lived in. I hated reading for school, but I was a big fan of Louis L’Amour, and the landscape around me looked like one of his novels come to life. We had left the freeway and were driving on an old cement highway patched with asphalt every few feet. We saw birds, beautiful gray California quail, running along the road in front of us. They acted like they were daring my father to run them over, and Dad took them up on the offer. Dad wasn’t the type to stop for a bird, and the birds apparently weren’t all that bright, because our fender was covered in feathers when we later stopped. The frequent potholes jolted the Dodge Dart station wagon. My brother David and I grinned, using the jostling as an excuse to start smashing Floyd between us every time the car hit a hole and we took a hit. He knew better than to complain, and tried dishing back, but we were bigger and stronger and he could do nothing to stop us.

We crossed some railroad tracks and turned east, and David and I gave up bumping Floyd to look out the window. Soon we were at Grandma and Grandpa Davis’s ranch, which was right next to our new ranch. The car came to a gradual stop, dust billowing up from the back of the car. We had been cooped up in the car for way too long, and as soon as Dad braked we were out the doors.

We bolted through Grandma and Grandpa Davis’s thick overgrown field, ignoring Mom’s shouts to come back and greet our grandparents. We knew them and could see them anytime, but this field was ripe to explore. Grandma and Grandpa’s property used to be a large thriving plum farm. In between the former Japanese owner being removed to an internment camp during World War II and Grandpa Davis’ purchase of the land, the field had degenerated into wild lands filled with animals and birds of all kinds. Dad had even told us that there were mountain lions and rattlesnakes in the area. He told us that very sternly, emphasizing that we were under no circumstances to look for or try to catch such dangerous predators. We had nodded solemnly while our imaginations conjured up a great lion or snake hunt. We were young Davy Crocketts and this was our wild frontier. No lions dared to show themselves that day, but there was plenty of smaller game that welcomed us to Penryn.

There were four of us. Floyd was the youngest of the Nickel boys, a short, stocky, eight-year-old blue-eyed blonde boy who had an even higher voice than most kids his age. Sometimes we called him Racing Stripe since he hated changing his white cotton briefs, which left him with a notorious brown stripe from days or even weeks of use. Stubbornness, of course, is a family trait learned and inherited from Dad’s side of the family. David was eleven years old and chubby. We called him Stoopy because he was kind of—well, stupid. Maybe a kinder explanation would be that he lacked common sense. Every thing he touched broke, every thing he was assigned to clean ended up dirtier when he was done, and every argument he was ever in ended up with him losing and in frustration yelling No, you’re stupid! Then there was Scott, who, at fifteen, was the oldest. He was actually smart, and, unlike most of us, had a lot of patience. He must have gotten it from Mom. Occasionally, though, Dad’s temper came out in him. It didn’t happen a lot, but when Scott got mad, you didn’t want to get in the way. In fact, it was easy to tell that he was starting to lose it when white, foamy spit started to form around the corners of his mouth. Floyd once ended up in hysterics when his favorite teddy bear ended up in Scott’s rampage path. Scott felt awful after, and used his savings to replace the newly-decapitated stuffed animal. Of course, it was kind of ironic that Floyd was upset as his favorite thing to do was to play with army men, killing each of the enemy with a kitchen knife and on occasion decapitating the enemy soldier.

My name is Fred, and most people called me Freddie in 1973. They also used to call me Fast Freddie because I was always on the go. My teachers called me other things because I was always on the go during their classes, but this is my story and I don’t have to share what they thought. I was thirteen years old in 1973.

Boys, get back here! Dad’s voice cut through the field. We knew that tone of voice, and reluctantly gave up chasing a pheasant to return to the car. Dad gave Scott a gentle swat upside the head. David sniggered, so he got one, too, that wasn’t quite as gentle. I knew to keep my mockery hidden, so I stayed quiet. Mom set us to work, lugging our stuff into Grandma and Grandpa’s mostly finished house. Our house wasn’t quite finished yet, so we were staying with Grandma and Grandpa until ours was ready for us to move in.

Grandpa was there at the car, helping Mom with her huge suitcase. When he saw us, he put it down and gave us each a huge bear hug. How are ya, my boys? he boomed, looming over us. Glad to be out of the city?

Yes, sir, we replied in unison. Huge was the word that went through anyone’s mind the first time they met Grandpa. Well, huge and bald, but he was huge enough that most people didn’t mention the hair loss. My dad was a big guy, but Grandpa’s huge arms made Dad’s look like pencils. Grandpa had grown up in the backwoods of Idaho, and after a life spent in the city, he had finally talked our city-loving Grandma into moving to Penryn. I hadn’t seen him since they left Sacramento, and the change was obviously agreeing with him. He exuded vigor in his faded pair of overalls, plaid shirt, and new straw cowboy hat.

You boys ready for some adventures? he asked. We’ve got some great stuff picked out for you….

Floyd! a loud voice barked from the porch. Stop holding everyone up and get those things in the house!

Yes, dear, he called back. If I didn’t love that woman so much, I’d kick her butt, he growled much more softly, shooting us a wink as he stooped to pick up Mom’s suitcase. We laughed, but knew not to let Grandma hear us either.

If country life was agreeing with Grandpa, it looked pretty obvious that Grandma was still trying to assert some of her high-society Southern California upbringing in Penryn. Her perfectly coiffed shoulder-length auburn hair still didn’t show any gray. Her back stayed ramrod straight when she hugged us, even when she had to stoop down to hug Floyd. Just