I was bad to sleepwalk when I was a child. I would get out of bed and slip through the house, then out into the night. I would awaken to the crunch and sting of frost on the soles of my feet, or, in the summer, to the sound of crickets and night birds. Once I walked all the way to my aunt Nita’s house, fifty yards away, knocked three, slow times on the door, and turned around and shuffled back home again, a pint-sized zombie in pajama bottoms with horses on them. I was never afraid when I would awaken, because the path, the trees, the dark outlines of the cars and pickups and small houses were all so familiar to me, and I have never been afraid of the dark. And I knew I would never be alone. The house we shared with my grandma wasn’t big enough to afford my momma a bedroom, so she slept in the front room, on the couch. The banging of the screen door would wake her and she would follow me, not waking me because she had heard it was dangerous, that it was safer to just steer me back to my bed. But sometimes I would come to my senses outside and see her just standing there, beside me. I never cried. I just looked up, wondering. “You’re okay, little man,” she would tell me. “You just been travelin’.”