Foleytown

The Mound

    (subhead) In which I learned that it can be dangerous to make casual assumptions about world-famous serial killers. 

The summer of Nineteen-Seventy-Three was probably the last real summer of my Foleytown childhood. 

I was thirteen, and my eldest sister, Sarah Anne, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Foleytown Sisters’ Saturday Morning Clean-Up Club, had gotten married that June, breaking up the “Almost March Girls” – as we four sisters called ourselves – 
forever. 
My sister Nan was in her third year of college in San Francisco, and my sister Elaine was in her last year of high school. My three brothers were all either married or living on their own. 

Soon, even Elaine would head off to college, and I’d be stuck all alone in Ulloa City with our parents, and then Foleytown would be finished at last. In Nineteen-Seventy-Three, however, the Foleytown caravan of family memories was still rumbling along, in some sense or another. 

Nan would come home for long visits on weekends and in the summer, in between temporary jobs and classes, and sleep in the old room that we four sisters grew up in. When Nan was home, it would feel almost like we were back in the days of the Almost March Girls, except that “Our Meg”—my oldest sister Sarah Anne—was engaged to be married and spending all her time in San Francisco with her fiancée. 

That was also the summer my eldest brother, Kenny Junior, returned from a few years in Kansas and Illinois with a new bride in tow, desperately needing a job. 

Jobs were scarce in Ulloa City in those days, and Junior was having no luck in the employment market. My parents suggested he turn to the time-honored Foleytown strategy for picking up extra money in a hurry: prune picking. Ulloa City was, after all, the Prune Capital of the World, as my mother conveniently reminded him.  

She called it “Prune-Why-Oh-ing.”  The nickname came from the song she always sang when we all went out to work in the orchards, Prune-Why-Oh, which was all about prunes, but was sung to the cloying tune of Kumbaya, the beloved folk-song of thousands of guitar-strumming Catholic nuns. 

By that summer, however, my parents themselves had long since abandoned Prune-Why-Oh-ing. With most of their offspring grown, there wasn’t as much of a need for the extra household income. And besides, they were too old for it now. At least that’s what they said.

They still had plenty of energy to work and bicker obsessively in their garden—and my mother still spent hours scouring Germs and Disease off of every surface inside and outside of our house.

But nobody put up The Doughboy, creaky, old, above-ground pool that it was, for the first time in ages. Elaine was a very grown-up seventeen and busy working at a summer job at a bank, and I didn’t feel like wading around in it all by myself. 

So I volunteered to go Prune-Why-Ohing with Junior—a bit nervously, I must admit. Working in the orchards was a sensitive subject in the early Seventies, and everyone knew why: the Juan Garcia murder case. 

Juan Garcia was a labor contractor who had hired migrant farm workers for large fruit ranchers in the Ulloa City-Theresaville area for years. Two summers previously, he’d been arrested for killing twenty-five of them, and then burying their mutilated bodies in shallow graves among various orchards surrounding the twin towns. 

In Nineteen-Seventy-Three, Juan Garcia’s first trial was underway, with all of the gruesome details dredged up again in the media, after they had died down somewhat in the two years since his terrible crimes were first discovered. 

Garcia’s victims were almost all down-on-their-luck drifters in their forties or fifties. Their habit was to arrive in town during the harvest season, driving in with an old junker car, or catching a ride on a railroad boxcar. They would rent some cheap motel room, usually on the outskirts of Theresaville, and work enough in the orchards to pay their motel bill and, many times, bury their troubles in some cheap whiskey or wine. Men like this had been toiling for years in the Northern California farmlands—downtrodden nomads with few roots and no real family ties. 

Few of the locals noticed them when they were in town for the picking season, and that was how Juan Garcia managed to dispatch an awful lot of them without anyone really catching on. That is, until a local peach grower spied a suspicious mound on his land one spring day in Nineteen-Seventy-One, dug it up, and found a body inside. 

Then the sheriff’s men from our county, Marshall County, came out to that orchard and found more bodies, and then even more graves, other orchards. In short order, there were twenty-five corpses, all lined up in the Marshall County morgue, all dispatched with either a machete, or bludgeoned to death with a shovel. 

It was the biggest thing to hit Ulloa City since—well, since forever. 

When the awful story first broke, my parents wracked their memories of prune-picking over the years, trying to recall if our family had ever worked in any of the orchards where Garcia had buried his victims. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded, for, after awhile, all the orchards around Ulloa City and Theresaville seemed to blend together into one giant sea of plump, purpley-pink prunes.

Both of my parents breathed a huge sigh of relief when our local paper, the Appeal-Republican, reported that Garcia didn’t bury any bodies in Ulloa City’s prune orchards; he had only buried them in the peach orchards. That was important, because we had never worked in anything but prune orchards in all of our years of living in Ulloa City.

“Thank God that Juan Garcia didn’t like prunes,” my mother sighed. “He only really seemed to like peaches, and then only the Clings. I’ll never look at a can of Fancy Cling Peaches in Heavy Syrup the same way, ever again.”