Redding Up — Richard 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 characters from other books of the series about the fictitious mill town of Furnass seeking closure or meaning from earlier events as they continue to live their lives. A successful businesswoman returns to her hometown to tie up some loose ends, dealing with a recalcitrant uncle and the living arrangements of her father's mistress. A Black homicide detective comes to Furnass to learn something of the life of a man he killed twenty-three years earlier. A grandmother makes contact with a retired minister wanting him to admit his presence at an outrage that happened to her when they were growing up. The daughter of one of the town's founding families returns to clean out the family home and finds more than she expected in the cluttered basement. A local hero finds himself fleeing his past even as he pursues it through his daily rounds, watched over by the glowing red eye of a great winged dragon. Or not.

In counterpoint to these stories of a mill town struggling to survive without a mill, there are portfolios of photographs taken by the author of the region in the mid-seventies when there was steel with the mills and valley towns flourishing. The book concludes with a Coda, which could serve as a Coda for the entire Books of Furnass series, an origin story of the time before there was a town here when a chief of the fictional Onagona Indians has to choose between expediency and survival when confronted with the spiritual.