The Sleeping Room

Rais'n Up Catfish: Eighteen

For my dear paid subscriber friends who, like me, may sometimes ache for the small kindness of a story read aloud, and because it’s Thanksgiving weekend, a time for sharing, for anyone and everyone else, as well.

I slept alone in a dreary, half-furnished room to the drone of an arthritic fan and the music of crickets. Unlike the bathroom, almost nothing about this barren space made me feel warm or secure, so I spent as little waking time as possible within its lonely walls. But an amazing transformation took place at bedtime. Long after the sun’s last rays had disappeared into the fading wallpaper, in the very instant the bare bulb was snuffed for the night, that room grew somehow, assuming fuller, more comforting dimensions, a palpable layer of shadow, the whispered voice of time-acquired wisdom. 

I rather liked my sleeping room in the dark.

Often, I lay there amidst the comforting smell of line-dried sheets, transfixed …the slow dance of coal dust shadows on the walls, unseen voices filling the air, growing thicker and sweeter in the dun. Like spreading honey they coated my darkened room in drizzled layers, creating an illusion of utter, peaceful calm.

Nighthawks plied tranquil, dark skies beyond with silent wings and told their sad stories in hoarse, solitary voices. Countless unseen crickets recited nightlong serenades to an inky, black sky while the fan’s archaic motor growled and wheezed its stale breath across my face.  

A lonely train wailed through distant gloom, announcing the highway crossing a mile or so south of town.  

Each sudden slap of a rusty screen door conjured images as well: a half-dressed old man scurrying for the outhouse or taking a seat on weathered steps to roll his evening’s last smoke. Beyond thin curtains I pictured the flare of the match, the faint glow at its end and the fragrant white puff of smoke carried away by a faint breeze already trailing the voices of a dozen stray dogs and cats, and lonely tree frogs calling to unfound mates.  

Somewhere in these nightly rituals the elusive Sandman of my childhood stole into that room, unannounced, whisking me away into a world of dreams, replacing that dance of nighttime shadows.

More than fifty years have passed since those summer nights but I still relish and pay homage to them. I continue each summer to recreate that room’s nighttime character for sleeping and awakening with another gravel-voiced fan purchased long ago.  Grumbling breezes still caress me on humid nights, though now I merely dream of crickets, for I somehow came to live in a city without them.  

The room I dreamt in there was as pure a sleeping place as I have yet known. And the moist, layered, timbre of the night was my lullaby.

© David E. Perry. All rights reserved.

When I was fifteen I lived in a boarding house in Mississippi during the summer and worked, seventy and more hours each week …on a catfish farm where I earned just a dollar an hour. The work was honest, if the circumstances surrounding it were not. My mother was dating the fish farm’s married owner. His wife wrote and signed my paychecks every week. He knew I knew. I knew he knew. I was both liability and oddity, a hard worker trying like hell to be worthy of my paycheck rather than the nuisance brat of some fancy piece of tail.

It was complicated.