Read the First Chapter of What the River Kept

Delia Montrose printed 300 copies of her memoir in May, and a book club in her hometown of Alton, Illinois, carried it the rest of the way. What the River Kept follows her down the Mississippi in the wake of a trip her father took in 1982 and never fully explained. We chose this opening because it is honest about how little a daughter can know, and because it makes that gap feel like the start of something rather than the end.

Chapter One

My father kept exactly one photograph of himself as a young man, and in it he is standing in a river up to his waist, laughing at someone we will never meet.

It is a small square print with a white border. The colors have gone the way those colors go, toward orange and green. He is maybe twenty. He has no shirt on and his hair is wet and pushed back with one hand, and the other hand is raised, palm out, the way you raise a hand when someone has just said something so outrageous you need them to stop talking so you can breathe. Behind him the water is wide and brown and bright with sun. You cannot see the far bank.

He kept it in his wallet, behind his driver's license, for as long as I knew him. When I was small I would ask to see it, and he would slide it out with two fingers and hold it where I could look but not touch.

"Who are you laughing at?" I asked him once. I was seven or eight.

"Somebody funny," he said, and put it away.

That was my father's way with most questions. He answered them in a manner that closed the subject, politely, like a man pulling a screen door shut so the flies won't get in. I did not think of it as secrecy then. I thought of it as how fathers were.

His name was Frank Montrose, and he spent most of his life on the Mississippi or within sight of it. He started on the towboats at seventeen as a deckhand, throwing lines and chipping paint and learning, he said, every way a river can take your fingers. Later, when his knees went, he ran a bait shop on the Alton side near the Clark Bridge. It had a chest freezer full of minnows and a radio that played the Cardinals whether or not anyone was listening. The shop smelled of river mud and cigarette smoke and the peppermints he kept in a jar by the register for the children of his customers. I have never smelled that combination anywhere else and I do not expect to.

In the summer of 1982, when I was six and my brother was four, my father took a borrowed johnboat from the landing below the bridge and went down the river to the Gulf of Mexico. He was gone five weeks. My mother has told me that he said he was going on the Monday and left on the Wednesday. She has told me very little else, and I have learned not to ask her for more, because the asking costs her something I am not entitled to spend.

I remember the leaving only as a feeling. A kitchen with too much light in it. My mother at the sink, not turning around.

I remember the coming back better. He walked up our street in the evening, sunburned nearly black, with a duffel bag on his shoulder and a beard I did not recognize, and my brother hid behind the couch. My father got down on the floor, on his stomach, and put his chin on the carpet and waited. It took a long time. Eventually my brother came out.

For the rest of his life, my father talked about that trip. He talked about it at Thanksgiving and at the bait shop and at my wedding, where he stood up with a glass of beer and told a story about a catfish near Cape Girardeau that no one believed. He talked about a sandbar below Memphis where he woke up one morning with a heron standing in the boat. He never once talked about why he went.

He died in the spring of 2021, in the hospital across the river, with my mother and my brother and me in the room. He had been quiet for most of that last week. On the second to last day he woke up, looked at the window, and said, very clearly, "It's high this year." Then he went back to sleep. I have thought about those four words more than anything else he ever said to me. I still do not know if he meant the river.

The coffee can turned up in October, when my brother and I cleared out the shop. It was on the top shelf of the storeroom, behind a box of fishing line gone brittle with age. I nearly threw it away. It was heavier than an empty can should be.

Inside, wrapped in a bread bag, was a spiral notebook with a green cover. On the first page, in my father's square capital letters, it said ALTON TO THE GULF, JUNE 1982. Below that was a list of supplies. Below that, a column of dates, and beside each date a river mile, and beside each river mile a few lines. Some entries were a single word. A few ran on for pages, in handwriting that slanted harder as it went, the way it did when he was angry or had been drinking or both.

I sat on the floor of the storeroom and read the whole thing while my brother carried boxes out to the truck. When he came back for me, the light had changed and my legs had gone to sleep.

"What is it?" he asked.

I held up the notebook. I could not think how to answer him. It was our father, and it was a stranger. It was the man in the photograph, finally turning around.

I knew, sitting there, that I would have to go. I did not know yet that it would take me two years to work up the nerve, or that the river would keep some of what I went looking for. I only knew that he had written it down, which meant that some part of him had wanted it found.

What the River Kept by Delia Montrose (independently published, 248 pages, $17.99 paperback) is out now.