I picked it up, and my hands started shaking, because it was a book, hardbound, dark green, and my name was stamped across the front of it in gold.
THE RIVER YEARS, and under that, HOMER L. BRANTLEY.
Three hundred and eleven pages. My handwriting turned into print.
When I was nineteen and twenty I worked a dredge on the Ohio out of Marietta and I wrote things down at night in the bunk because there was nothing else to do — the men, the fog, a fellow named Tick Slaven who could play the harmonica and could not swim, the night we lost the barge below the Willow Island lock. Eleven spiral notebooks, and they went in a shoebox on the shelf in the closet in 1973 and they stayed there.
Della read them once in 1994 and told me they ought to be a book and I told her people don’t want to read about a dredge.
She typed them anyway. All of it. On the computer our daughter set up for her in the sewing room, two years’ worth of afternoons, my chicken-scratch turned into clean pages, and she left the spelling wrong where I had it wrong, which I noticed and which I have thought about a hundred times since.
In the bottom of that box under the book was the invoice from a print shop in Parkersburg. Twelve copies, hardbound, four hundred and sixty dollars. And a piece of paper where she’d written out who each one was for. Our daughter, our son, the grandkids, Tick’s widow in Belpre, the library in Marietta.
And a note, folded in with the invoice.
Homer — you have been telling me since 1994 that nobody wants to read about a dredge. Twelve people want to read about a dredge, and I made a list of them, and one of them is the library. The rest of the copies are behind the paint cans. I know you wanted a motor. You’ve had a motor. You have never once had a book. — D.
They were behind the paint cans. Eleven of them, in a box, wrapped in a feed sack, eighteen inches from where I keep the two-cycle oil.
I said you really outdid yourself, dry as sand, and set that keepsake box on the workbench, and she just looked at me, and a month later her heart went in the night and I never opened it.
I mailed Tick’s widow her copy in April. She called me and read me a paragraph about her husband over the telephone and neither one of us could get through it.
The library in Marietta put one in the local history room. There’s a card in the back of it and it has been checked out nine times.
The box sits on the shelf over my bench with my name painted crooked on the lid. I have started a twelfth notebook, which is a foolish thing for a seventy-one-year-old man to do, and I am doing it anyway.