Like Father, Like Son

I woke up sometime in the middle of the night. An enormous and brilliant moon shone over the cotton field where I was standing, still in my gown. It was not a dream and I knew immediately that it was not a dream. I was where I thought I was, and I had come here by walking in my sleep. I came awake that night the way I always have when I’ve gotten up in my sleep and walked. Terrified. Terrified almost beyond terror because it had no name and was sourceless. My heart was pounding, and my gown was soaked with sweat and sticking to my freezing skin. My mouth was full of the taste of blood where I’d chewed my lips. . . .

When I got to the door, I opened it quietly and went down the hall to the little room where I knew daddy was sleeping on a pallet. It was where he often had to sleep when he came in drunk and out of control and mama would not let him into their room. He lay, still dressed, curled on the quilt spread across the floor under an open window through which bright moonlight fell. I sat down beside him and touched his face, traced the thick scar of perfect teeth on his flat high cheekbone. The air in the room was heavy with the sweet smell of bourbon whiskey. Sweat stood on his forehead and darkly stained his shirt.

“Daddy,” I said. He made a small noise deep in his chest, and his eyes opened. “Daddy, I’m scared.”

He pushed himself onto one elbow and put an arm around me and drew me against him. I could feel the bristle of his beard on my neck. I trembled and tried not to cry.

“Sho now,” he whispered against my ear. “Everybody’s scared now and then.”

“I was in the cotton field,” I said, “Out there.”

He turned his head, and we both looked through the window at the flat white field of cotton shining under the moon.

“You was dreaming, boy,” he said. “But you all right now.”

“I woke up out there.” Now I was crying, not making any noise, but unable to keep the tears from streaming down my face. I pushed my bare feet into the moonlight. “Look,” I said. My feet and the hem of my gown were gray with the dust of the field.

He drew back and looked into my eyes, smiling. “You walked in your sleep. It ain’t nothing to worry about. You probably got it from me. I’as bad to walk in my sleep when I was a boy.”

The tears eased back. “You was?” I said.

“Done it a lot,” he said. “Don’t mean nothing.”

I don’t know if he was telling the truth. But hearing him say it was something that he had done and that I might have got it from him took my fear away.

“You lie down here on the pallet with your ole daddy and go to sleep. Me an you is all right. We both all right.”

I lay down with my head on his thick arm, wrapped in the warm, sweet smell of whiskey and sweat, and was immediately asleep.

A passage from Crews’ 1978 memoir, “A Childhood: The Biography of a Place,” one of the selections in “Sons on Fathers: A Book of Men’s Writing,” edited by Ralph Keyes (HarperCollins: $20; 315 pp.). Also new is a similar anthology: “Fathers and Sons,” edited by David Seybold (Grove: $19.95; 201 pp.).