Redding Up

By Snodgrass

In the working class dialect of Western Pennsylvania around Pittsburgh, the phrase redd up means to put in order, to tidy or make neat, such as after dinner we helped redd up the table. In the stories of Redding Up, the final volume of the critically acclaimed Books of Furnass, we see character

• Language: English
• Publisher: Calling Crow Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781736599488

Book preview

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, businesses, companies, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2022 by Richard Snodgrass

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the author constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property.

Published by Calling Crow Press

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Book design by Book Design Templates, LLC

Cover design by Jack Ritchie

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-7365994-8-8

Library of Congress catalog control number: 2022911628

For the memory of Ted,

and, of course, as with all things,

for Marty

Also by Richard Snodgrass

The Books of Furnass

All That Will Remain

Furrow and Slice

Book of Days

The Pattern Maker

Holding On

Across the River

All Fall Down

Some Rise

The Building

Novels

There’s Something in the Back Yard

Books of Photographs and Text

The House with Round Windows

A Memoir

An Uncommon Field: The Flight 93

Temporary Memorial

Kitchen Things: An Album of Vintage Utensils and Farm-Kitchen Recipes

redding (up or out)

verb

present participle of redd (up or out), chiefly dialect

Synonyms & Antonyms of redding (up or out)

to make neat

It’s time to redd up the garage and get rid of a lot of the junk we’ve accumulated.

—Merriam-Webster

The terms redd and redd up came to the American Midlands from the many Scottish immigrants who settled there. In the meaning to clear an area or to make it tidy, redd is still used in Scotland and Northern Ireland. In the United States, the word is especially common in Pennsylvania as part of the phrasal verb redd up.

—The Free Dictionary by Farlex

Western Pennsylvania English, known more narrowly as Pittsburgh English or popularly as Pittsburghese, is a dialect of American English native primarily to the western half of Pennsylvania. . . . Commonly associated with the white working class of Pittsburgh.

— Wikipedia

Contents

When There Was Steel 1 — Photographs

Her Father’s Daughter

When There Was Steel 2 — Photographs

The Wheel

When There Was Steel 3 — Photographs

Remaindered

When There Was Steel 4 — Photographs

Redding Up

When There Was Steel 5 — Photographs

Letting Go

When There Was Steel 6 — Photographs

Coda

Tell Me What a God Sees

Acknowledgements

Preface

. . . The good times for the steel industry in general and the valley towns of Western Pennsylvania in particular came to a crashing halt when the mills began to lay off in earnest during the early 1980s. Nationwide, more than 200,000 steelworkers lost their jobs, and more than four hundred plants and divisions shut down. North of Pittsburgh, more than 20,000 steelworkers got their pink slips, and the area lost five major plants: American Bridge, Armco, B&W, Crucible, and the Aliquippa Works of J&L. In the region, the number of people who made their living from steel had declined to fewer than 4,000, down from more than 35,000 only four years earlier, and from 80,000 in the late ’40s. More than 125,000 manufacturing jobs disappeared from Western Pennsylvania in the space of a few years. As a result, people did the same thing that brought them here in the first place: they migrated someplace else. Between 1980 and 1998, Pittsburgh’s population declined almost 20 percent, the highest of any city in the Northeast. As for those who chose to stay, waiting for life to return to as it was when there was steel, the heart has reasons that even the heart doesn’t understand.

When There Was Steel

1

Her Father’s Daughter

She drove along the fence of the abandoned industrial park, the site she knew once upon a time as Furnass Landing, pulled over in front of the locked gate, stopped, and got out. A woman of middle age, in her mid-fifties, attractive, stylish, tall, fit, wearing a long gray skirt and matching shorty jacket cut in bolero style, over a lighter gray light knit turtleneck, gray on gray, high-heeled wine-colored knee-high boots, driving a silver Mercedes G-Class SUV that seemed designed more for a military campaign than a visit to her hometown. It occurred to her to unlock the gate and go in; the lock looked like the one she put on the chain nearly thirty years ago, she probably still had the key for it somewhere, though there would be no point to going inside the fence other than to prove that she could, and all she’d accomplish would be to get her boots dusty. She could see everything she wanted to see from here, on this side of the fence.

It was the site of her first project when her father put her in charge as project manager, a girl twenty-five years old, barely out of college; and it was the site of her first triumph, a career- defining success that set her up for the position and success she held today. Her father had worked the original deals that saw their company, Sutcliff Realty, manage the destruction of the old mill, the Allehela Works of Buchanan Steel, as well as the development of the new industrial park, and ended up with Sutcliff Realty owning the land itself, the kind of sleight-of-hand deal her father was famous for. Jennifer had a hand in the design of the industrial park, themed on paying homage to the steelmaking heritage of the site, with the old brick buildings that housed the pickling works and the rolling mills converted into office buildings and access roads named Slag Hill Drive, Bessemer Lane, and Blast Furnace Way. But after the untimely death of her father and the company abruptly dumped in her lap, Jennifer began to have second thoughts about the direction they were taking for Furnass Landing. It occurred to her that the young entrepreneurs and scientists, the start-ups in computer science and robotics and medicine that they were trying to attract, wouldn’t necessarily appreciate all the steel mill references, in fact might find them anathema to what they were trying to achieve, anything that referenced Pittsburgh’s image as the Steel City hopelessly out of step with the times and to be avoided.

So she took a gamble. She approached the investors in the site, a firm from Philadelphia with a history of industrial makeovers, and offered to sell them the property. The principals in her company said she was crazy, that the value of the land would only increase over time; her own mother, when she heard of the proposal, accused Jennifer of purposely trying to destroy her husband’s legacy and Sutcliff Realty. When the investors heard the proposal, they credited it to Jennifer’s youth and inexperience, but that didn’t stop them from snatching it up, paying a sum that was double what Dickie Sutcliff paid originally but was half of what the land was currently appraised at. Then came the crash of the commercial real estate market in the 1990s, and Jennifer looked like a genius. She celebrated by firing all her company’s principals who hadn’t backed her, promoted those who had, and moved the main offices of Sutcliff Realty to downtown Pittsburgh, where it and Jennifer became major players in the rebirth of the city after the turn of the century. And in the process made Jennifer a very rich and prominent woman.

Before getting back in her SUV, she turned and faced the town, stepped up the hillside of the valley on this side of the river, like confronting the bowl of a natural amphitheater. The rows of peaked roofs of the small frame houses among the trees lining the narrow streets an audience critical of her every move. She supposed it wasn’t actually her hometown; she had been born and raised in the suburbs in the hills beyond the town, attended private schools, so her contact with Furnass was very limited. But it felt like her hometown, or the way she thought a hometown should feel, a feeling of familiarity and dread, welcoming and censure; it was where her father’s office had been, she would come into town occasionally on summer vacations or school holidays to do some incidental shopping with her mother, visit her dad at his office, then head back to the suburbs as quickly as possible. When it came right down to it she knew very little about the town, the people who lived here. She only knew in passing the few people who had worked in the local office after she moved the main office to Pittsburgh, a few of the town’s business folks or merchants when she had been called in from the main office for particular problems. But now all that was gone too after her latest restructuring of the company. After today all her ties with the town would be over. Terminated.

There was no sense putting it off, the sooner she got through her business here today, the sooner she could get on to bigger and better things. It was almost a kind of mantra for her. How she had risen to the position she held today. She gave a little bow to the town on the slope, a momentary bit of whimsy, feeling somewhat girlish in light of her memories, then got back in her car, heading up a steep brick-paved street to the main drag. All business.

The thing about a dying mill town is that there are always parking spaces available—no, that’s too cynical even for me.

She parked on Seventh Avenue near the corner of Fifteenth Street, in front of the narrow three-story brick building, squeezed in between The Pub on the corner and the Blue Room Pool Room that had housed her father’s, and before that her grandfather’s, real estate office; above the aluminum and glass storefront, added sometime in an attempt to update the firm’s image, the sign for Sutcliff Realty, now removed, had left its mark on the brick facade, ghost letters. She took the keys from her purse before stashing the purse under the seat, and went to unlock the front door. She found the light panel in the vestibule and turned on the rows of overhead fluorescent lights, then made her way through the large empty space where once there were service counters and cubicles and desks, the only traces now of the busy office life that went on here the marks and indentations on the filthy wall-to-wall carpet. At the rear the door to her father’s office was standing open. She was about to go inside when she heard someone come in the front door behind her.

Hey, what’s going on here? Where is everybody?

Hello, Harry Todd, she said, recognizing his voice before she turned around.

My favorite niece, Harry Todd said, coming toward her across the open space, the slow measured slogging walk like he was making his way through mud, his hands open at his sides as if ready for a hug.

I’m your only niece.

Harry Todd stopped in his tracks and laughed harshly, as if it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard in his life. He started toward her again as if still hell-bent for a hug; she gave him a dubious look, turned away from him, and went on into the empty office.

He was just as she remembered him, unchanged from the last time she’d seen him, three or four years earlier, though that was at their office out in Seneca; if she wasn’t mistaken he was wearing the same off-white sport coat, cherry-colored pants, and scuffed white loafers. Lord, what a mess. Her father’s older brother, a disgrace to the family, to the memory of her father, to the company. Once something of an Adonis even into middle age, his blond good looks now as if melted over his face, a wax god that flew too close to the sun. Did I really think of sleeping with him, when he came back from California? That was when I was fresh out of college and had only started working for Dad, the tripping of a young girl too full of herself and her newfound power over men, that she could turn them inside out with just a whiff of promise, too sexed for her own good. Well, I got over all of that soon enough, didn’t I? But he certainly rose to the bait in a hurry back then when it was thrown to him, wonder if he remembers any of that now.

When she got to the space where the desk had been, as indicated by the dirt lines on the carpet, she turned and faced him as she would have if the desk was present.

So what’s going on here, Jennifer? What happened to the office?

I didn’t think you were aware of the changes.

Well, if somebody would tell me. . . .

I know for a fact that we did tell you, in a letter dated a month ago, when we first implemented the changes. I’m afraid it shows that you don’t read your mail, or at least the things we send you from the main office in Pittsburgh.

What, I’m supposed to keep up with all the correspondence as well as all the other things on my plate?

Your plate is pretty empty as far as I can tell, Jennifer said, crossing her arms, tilting her right foot back on its boot heel. You haven’t sold a property or developed a lead, even the ones we’ve sent you, in over a year and a half.

How can I be expected to have time to follow up any leads when I have to run in here to this office all the time for any secretarial work I need done because you won’t let me hire a secretary for my office?

Which only goes to show you haven’t had any secretarial work that needed done lately. If you had, you would have seen for yourself that this office was closed. She tilted her head at him: Gotcha.

Harry Todd looked as he would have if he’d found a bug in his coffee. And knew she had put it there. So why did you close it?

We’re consolidating all our operations into the Pittsburgh office. That’s where most of our business is these days. And we’ll be able to keep track of everything better.

"You mean, you are consolidating the operations, you will be able to keep track of things better."

If you prefer. Yes.

It was obvious that it was beginning to dawn on Harry Todd what was going on. And you called me in here today, what? Wait, you’re not thinking of closing the Seneca office, are you?

Jennifer just looked at him; her right foot resting on the heel of her wine-colored knee-high boot wagged back and forth.

You can’t do that.

I’m afraid I can. Jennifer was getting weary of talking to him; she went across the room to a filing cabinet and started to pull out each drawer to make sure they were empty.

My brother, your father, set me up in that office so the company would have a presence there in Seneca, to take advantage of any new opportunities that opened up in that area.

Your brother, my father, set you up in that office because he felt sorry for you when you came back from California and it was obvious you weren’t going anywhere as an artist. And as for taking advantage of new opportunities in Seneca, my dad was the one who developed that area in the first place, the shopping center, the office towers, the residential, and we’ve continued to keep all that business with me in Pittsburgh. She closed the bottom file drawer and turned to face him. That office was opened for the sole purpose to give you something to do, to keep you off the streets more or less, to give you some sort of income to live on so it didn’t look like we were simply carrying you, though that’s what it’s ended up being. Carrying you. Well, we’re stopping the pretense now. I’m stopping the pretense now. We’ll continue to support you as we have been but we’re closing down the office.

Suppose I don’t want to close it down. Suppose I want to keep it open. Suppose I pay to keep it open myself.

Jennifer walked back to her place behind the no-longer-present desk. In other words, so you’ll have someplace to go in the mornings. So you’ll look like you’re still employed.

You don’t know, I could turn up something.

No, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you this, that office still has four months left on its lease. We’ll keep it open until then. But after that, the name Sutcliff Realty comes off the doors, off the letterheads, off the contracts. If you do land something, you contact me immediately so we do all the paperwork and we’ll take it from there. If you don’t do that, we will sue you for every penny you imagine you have, I won’t mess around with this. I’m taking a big risk letting you even think about pretending to carry on business on your own. I won’t let anything have the potential to soil the good name of this company. Hear me on this.

I hear you, all right. I wonder if you hear yourself.

We’re through here, Harry Todd. Jennifer walked past him and stood beside the open door, waiting for him to leave.

He continued to stand where he was, looking at her. What would your father say if he knew what you were doing?

He’d ask me why I carried you as long as I have.

Harry Todd shook his head, looked at his feet, gave a rueful laugh. You certainly are a different girl than the one I knew when I first came back from California.

There are reasons for that.

That girl, as I remember, had a bit of a soft spot for her uncle. In fact more than a soft spot. I remember one time she suggested I go skinny-dipping with her out at some quarry. I got the idea that girl wasn’t interested in just swimming with her uncle.

So he does remember. Amazing. I really did consider balling him back then, who was that girl? Thank heaven it never happened, as interesting as it sounds. I did some crazy things back then, just to show that I could. The time I was driving in Squirrel Hill and saw that guy going into a bar and I wanted him, just like that, I parked and went inside, found him and chatted him up and did him in the back seat of the car. That girl.

Think what you want. I’m no more that person now than you are the guy you were back then. Before you start throwing any stones this direction I’d take a good look at yourself. At what you’ve made of yourself, what you’ve become—or what you haven’t. Now, unless you want me to lock you in, it’s time for you to get on your way. Whatever or wherever that is these days.

She held the door open for him, her hand on the knob, looking at him as she would a recalcitrant dog or cat, waiting. He shook his head again, laughed to some unseen audience, and shuffled past her, too close, brushing across her, looking her in the eye as he passed, close enough to kiss. Pathetic. No, sad. She watched him cross back across the empty office space, under the harsh light of the fluorescents. Look at him. No, it’s not like he’s slogging through mud or something. He walks like a man whose feet hurt. No, he walks like a man whose shoes are too large for him, like he’s trying to keep them on his feet. Shambling along like a child trying to walk in his daddy’s shoes. Probably true, too. Both the sons struggled all their lives to fill Daddy’s shoes, live up to Harry’s reputation in business, ruthless, uncompromising, blow over anyone in his way. Live up to Harry’s reputation in town with the women as well, the primal stud. if the stories about Harry are to be believed. Funny, in their lifetimes both sons were counted their father’s sons as far as sexual reputations went—there was Harry Todd, living up to the reputation from all reports in high school to the point of getting a girl pregnant, then banished to California. Who knows what he was up to out there, but when he came back twenty years later the best he could do, as far as Jennifer could determine, was try to make a pass at her a couple times, otherwise he seemed as celibate as a monk. Or maybe it was sexless. Regardless, women from all appearances had played no role in his life since his return.

And then there was her father, Dickie, the eternal younger brother. Ask anyone in town during his life and Dickie was reported to be a sexual hellion, hide your wives and daughters, people, Dickie Sutcliff was on the prowl. Yet since his death, through her many inquiries to salve her curiosity, she had failed to find any woman who had actually had a sexual relationship with him—oh, plenty of flirtations, inappropriate touching by today’s standards, suggestive language as a matter of course, but no accounts of actual affairs with her father. Not a one. Except for Pamela DiCello.

So, what am I supposed to do now that you’re running off with your lady friend? her mother had said. Jennifer heard her mother, Tinker, and her father talking in the kitchen while she was still in the hallway, and she stopped to listen.

You’ll keep on doing what you’ve always done, looking out for yourself.

You’re a fine one to talk, Dickie Sutcliff.

I said I’d always take care of you and I mean it. This house is yours, I’ve put it in your name and I’ve set up trusts to make sure everything about it is taken care of for as long as you want to live here. I was always just a tourist here anyway.

You were always too busy with your business to care about me and this house.

I was busy with the business so you could have this house and your pricey lifestyle, as well as your flower shop in town. I carried that business a good many years before you could make a go of it.

And what are you going to do now, move in with this Pamela What’s-her-name?

Pamela DiCello. I have a town house for us in Seneca.

Oh, isn’t that cozy.

I hope it is, but regardless that’s what I’m going to do.

That’s typical Dickie Sutcliff, isn’t it. Just go ahead with whatever you want to do and don’t mind who you might step on in the process. . . .

I was still in the hallway when he came out of the kitchen; he looked at me, rolled his eyes, and went on down the hallway and out the front door, the last time I saw him in the house in Highland Hills, though I saw him every day at work, either in the office or at the jobsite for the proposed Furnass Landing Industrial Park. He never told me directly what he was going to do, leave his wife and set up a household with Pamela, he seemed to assume I just knew about it as it happened; for that matter, I never had any contact with Pamela during the few months they lived together in the town house in Seneca, though it was obvious that he was the happiest I had ever seen him. His only comment came at the end of a long day a few weeks before he died; I was leaving his office on my way home when he said out of nowhere, Don’t blame me.

I stopped at the door and looked back at him sitting at his desk.

About leaving your mother and moving in with Pamela.

I don’t, I said. I’m surprised you didn’t leave Tinker before this, if you want to know the truth. She’s certainly not the easiest person to live with, or the nicest.

We were high school sweethearts, as you undoubtedly know. And after college and I started to work for your grandfather, it seemed like the natural progression of things, to get married and have children and continue what we started. I never thought about it, really; and when I did start to think about it, it was too late. I think she came to the same conclusion about the same time. Just because you start something doesn’t mean you have to continue it.

I didn’t know what to say, and ended up saying nothing.

He continued, going through a spreadsheet as he spoke, checking one column against another. I hope you’ll get to know Pamela. I think you’d like her. There’s things about her that remind me of you, her outspokenness. Her competence.

I guess I was embarrassed; I felt I had to say something, but it came out much more glib than I meant it. She sounds positively irresistible.

He raised his head and looked at me then. Don’t judge me until you get a lot older than you are now and have had a lot more experience, with love and life. Then when you look back on all of this you’re welcome to make any determinations you care to, what you think I should or shouldn’t have done. You’re not a fit judge of that until then. And then I won’t mind what you come up with.

I didn’t mean—

Of course you did. And it’s to be expected. I wouldn’t have it any other way, I know you and I know human nature. I just suspect things will look a whole lot differently then than they do now.

She watched as Harry Todd’s back disappeared out the front door, the door swinging shut behind him, the stillness of the empty office space settling around her once again like dust. And here I am, I’m at the age now that my father was then, and he’s right, things do look differently now. The irony being that I’m probably more judgmental of him now for his relationship with Pamela than I was then, less tolerant. I’m certainly less tolerant of Harry Todd now, how else could I turn him out on his own devices at this point. And I must be less tolerant of my father, or at least of his partner in that love affair, considering what I’m about to do. I’ll bet my father never expected that, but then I learned my lessons well from the expert of harsh decisions. Jennifer took one last look in the door of what had been her father’s office, at where she imagined the bloodstain from her father’s fall would have been, then closed the door and made her own way across the empty space, turning off the lights, and locking the front door behind her.