Auf Den Lenner (In the Country)

"Junior Rieth"

Junior could practically smell the money he was going to make; he wanted this house as he had never wanted anything. He stepped heavily around the pieces of stone tat were collected in a heap at the foot of the chimney. George Nolt, the real estate agent warned him, “Hey Junior, watch your step, yeah?  We don’t want no accidents.”

“I hear you, I hear you,” he wheezed. “And I see the stones. I ain’t blind.”

“Now those stones are gonna need to be replaced and re-pointed, ‘n that’s no cheap job. Nolt’s finger was jabbing at the air. “But yer lucky, you got the springhouse all ready to go. That’s a good rental right there. It’s been closed up awhile, sure, but she gets a coat of paint and you open up the windas and get some air in her, and she’s good. That’s a nice little house for someone, retiree with no family, or a farm worker or trucker, maybe,” his voice trailed off, running out of possibilities. He scratched the back of his head as an unlikely, yet not impossible thought entered, “You thinking of living here, Junior?”

Junior mopped his head with a handkerchief; it was warm for spring. He ignored George’s question and continued to gaze around the house and the surrounding expanse of green, grown long with neglect, reeds shading the stream that poured out from the spring under the springhouse, huge maple trees, a weeping willow.  This was something he could make a go of, this house, this property. His heart was racing and his mouth tasted like metal. He adjusted his belt up his ever-expanding girth and lumbered up to where George was standing in the front of the house. His thighs were chafing from even the little bit of walking they’d done. He wasn’t used to walking at all, that’s for sure. It was getting harder and harder to haul himself around.

The house was built on the topside of a gentle grade facing the road; the backside sloped down toward the springhouse and creek. Huge pieces of fieldstone and limestone had been painstakingly set in place over a hundred years ago by Caspar Redcay, the house built for his wife, Tillie, who hated the noise and dust of the streets in Riethsburg.

Now it was empty, not counting the squirrels and raccoons; had been empty awhile, and was for sale. Catherine Redcay was Caspar and Tillie’s only grandchild, the only child of Christian and Madelyn and had inherited the land from her father. For the last 40-some years she had been parceling off the land, selling a lot every few years and doing who-knew-what with the money. Lord knows she didn’t need it to live; Christian had built up a fortune shipping limestone from his quarry to Reading and Philadelphia via the old canal before they shut it down. The pieces of Christian Redcay’s property had been assembled like a patchwork, accumulated over his lifetime, spreading out from the central junction of two roads in the middle of rolling farmlands, cow pastures, corn and hay fields.

 “Apartments, huh?” George didn’t hide the skepticism in his voice. The notion was still a new one, even to the town’s real estate office. There were a few apartments in town; some of the older homes that were built by the owners of the cigar factories in the 1870s and 80s had been passed down and when they finally came to the end of family lineages were sold, chopped up and rented out to young couples and workers in the nearby factories in Elizabethville. “How many do you figure you’ll have?”

“Well. I figure the top floor there’ll be one; a nice sized one, maybe for a young couple who won’t mind climbing the stairs. Then the second floor is at least two, and two on the first floor. We got that back door there, and the other door too, the one that went into the old store, and a big plus in apartments, you know, is a private entrance, makes it more house-like. People like that.”  Both men nodded.

All the possibilities were crowding his mind now, clambering for attention. He could see a sun drenched kitchen on the third floor at the back, looking out over the willow tree. He saw gleaming new appliances, ready to produce meals, clean laundry, cool air in the summer, and heat in the winter. He saw how the rooms would be divvied up, saw the layout of the apartments, saw what the doors would look like, where the mail boxes would go. Junior had always been able to see things that others couldn’t see, potential, opportunity. What he couldn’t see was the way to successfully make it happen.

There was no question that Junior could afford the property. And it could be something, sure, in the right hands, but in Junior’s clammy white paws, any promise would surely dissolve. George Nolt was ashamed, he actually felt ashamed to be turning this place over to Junior, under whose care it would more than likely collapse like a house of cards despite its potential. When old man Reith died, Junior was left with a bundle and everyone knew it. The house in town was paid off, of course, and with the profits from the sale of the store; he could live comfortably but modestly for the rest of his life. He didn’t need this house, didn’t need to take up another lost cause, except to prove something, maybe.

“So you really gonna sell the store?” George squinted into the midday sun, not looking at Junior, his eyes following Tobias Good in his pickup, way up by the tree line of his land, like Apollo in his chariot making his way across the horizon.  Junior was rumored to be considering selling his father’s drug store to a chain for a pretty penny. Junior grunted by way of a reply; he was getting tired of everyone asking him about that blasted store. Couldn’t they see this was business? Didn’t they recognize a shrewd businessman when they saw one?

“You ready to go? Let’s get going” George tried to steer Junior toward their cars parked on the stubbly grass that insisted on poking through the sparse gravel at the side of the house.

George thought about all the attempts he had seen Junior make at success. His ideas might have been a good, but the execution all wrong, or the idea was just plain strange, and wouldn’t have worked no matter who tried it; it just seemed like everything Junior tried was destined to fail.

It was practically legend around the area; Junior Rieth couldn’t seem to make a go of anything. It started with his paper route when he was just 11 and continued as a pattern in his life: the cleaning products sold door to door, the “antiques” he tried to sell at the big auctions in Adamstown, the vitamins he took on then couldn’t convince his own father to carry in his drug store. He never got discouraged, that was one thing that could be said for him, when plan after plan failed, he came right back with another one, to the astonishment of everyone around, who wondered how one man could be so unlucky all the time.

His parents had accumulated money for Junior to attend college, hoping that he would take up a business course of study, or perhaps follow his father and go into pharmacy school, then later take over as druggist in the store.  It should have been evident to them that those things were not to be, but, being equipped with the hopeful vision that parents have of their children, they kept on right on hoping, until it was too late.

Now Junior’s own hopes and plans were settling over the old Redcay place like a swarm of gnats above the surface of a slow-flowing creek, endlessly multiplying and ultimately useless.