The Night I Almost Froze

It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark. I remember that night strangely well, considering it was spent mostly in a hypothermic coma.

The smell was what one might have expected from the slums of a large city with an overwhelming amount of wandering beggars who have no proper sewage outlet. The Industrial Revolution had begun to leave its mark. There was a visible haze—mingling with or, rather, encasing the smell of homelessness and destitution—of thick, choking smog in the bitter night air.

I remember I tried not to breathe, and my lungs despised me for it.

I was only a young child. Maybe seven years old. I was alone. Either abandoned to the wastes, or a tiny runaway. I don’t recollect that part especially well. Whichever cold origin it was, I'd crawled through a lot of hard times with hard people and seen hard things. As a result, I'd already become more than a little hard. Despite my youth, I'd found it difficult to be shocked by anything, and I know it was unlikely I’d rise above my poverty. I was lonely, exhausted, angry, and, though I don't like to admit it, scared.

People hated me. Especially me, although nobody really likes any street urchin from the ghetto. Everyone made it quite clear why. My sore ears had heard it a thousand times, both viciously muttered and openly spat; I was dark. A ‘gipsy’. Dark-tanned skin, black hair, and almost black eyes, so everyone assumed I must have had a shriveled, black heart and a cold, black soul to match.

Maybe I do. Maybe it's in the blood.

But I couldn't understand why, and it still hurt.

I trudged through the scummy, wet streets, feet aching, nose burning, head pounding, and frame shaking. The warmer rain from earlier had turned to a thin flurry, marking the first snow of the season. It was only November, but it was still night, and it was still snowy, so I was still cold. The icy fog seeped through everything I was wearing—which wasn't much.

My stomach contorted in an empty, fragile protest, and I buckled over, hugging myself and wondering how something so weak could hurt me so badly. I'd been forced to become the thief everyone had already predestined me for, merely for survival, but I hadn't been able to get any food for days. I could feel that fact in every single part of me. The memory is painfully vivid even now.

A stiff breeze made me sway on my feet. I didn't realize I was falling before I was already hitting the ground, but I figured that it didn't matter. It just increased the ache on my left side, mostly my arm. I curled up on my side, hugging my knees to my chest to feel warmer and to wait for the dizzying pain to end.

Maybe I was finally dying, I wondered through the widening frost in my brain. Somewhere, that idea was a little disappointing, but it held mostly grim relief at the time.

It would all have been over…how nice that would have been. I wonder now whether I’d have been better off.

The growl in my stomach had dissipated, although it never stopped hurting completely. I found it getting harder to think as the blur in my head spread. I started to feel sort of numb, but in a tingly, unpleasant way. My eyes began to close automatically in sudden, overwhelming fatigue, and I'd decide there was just as good a place as any to fall asleep. Maybe once I woke up—if I woke up—I'd be strong enough to find something to eat. I could keep looking then. I was desperate.

I’d only sleep for a little bit first…

All of a sudden, someone was picking me up. My eyes flew open, and I struggled to find my way through the mental mist to understand what was happening, and why, and how. A man I did not recognize started speaking, but I couldn't force the words to make sense in my head, and I was far past the ability to respond. I know now he was speaking English, the language of the land, but I couldn’t understand it at the time, and the people couldn’t understand me.

The man carried me around, asking people questions, and then set me on my feet just long enough to take off his great coat and wrap me up in it like an infant. Kind of him, I suppose. Something seemed to break from inside the cloak, I recall now. It’s a worthless detail, I suppose, but it’s so fierce that I might as well mention it. Maybe it was just a strong hallucination.

I wasn’t cold anymore, more importantly.

I could vaguely sense that it wasn’t likely to be a good thing, being carried off by a man I didn't know during the night. However, I wasn’t what I’d call ‘anxious'. I suppose I can blame either the starvation mindset or the fact that I had no superior alternative at hand, or both, if necessary.

I woke up only a little more over the next full day, but enough to recognize some of the words the man said. He gave me food. I don’t remember what food it was because I do remember that I practically inhaled it. I was still hungry, but I wasn't nearly dead anymore.

The man seemed to be in a hurry. Night fell, but he kept moving. The air was clearer as we went—easier to breathe. I managed to stay awake, but sleep was threatening before the man opened a door and stepped through it.

He collapsed into a chair, breathing heavily and laughing and chattering in intervals to the people who'd come into the room. He opened the cloak that I was in, and four people were looking at me as I spilled out of it. Two women and two children. Or just one child, since one of them was almost a man himself. The old man said something as he set me on my feet, and one of the women looked angry. The other looked afraid. The older boy and the young girl had wide eyes.

I looked at them and the room, which was big and fancy and dark. I asked where I was over and over, but none of them seemed to understand. Either that, or they just weren't listening to me. That was very possible; they never really improved over the years.

One woman started yelling at the man—I recognized more of those words, the angry ones. Especially the word ‘gipsy'. I'd heard that one the most, so I knew it best. The other woman stood in the back, looking pale. After the angry woman started to calm down, the boy and girl moved. The boy checked the pockets of the man's coat and started blubbing at something, which I learnt quickly was par for the course. Little nit. The little girl—who looked like she might have been my age—started making faces and spitting at me.

The man smacked her and scolded her, and she stopped. He motioned to the pale woman. She took me into a separate, smaller room to wash me up and give me new clothes, better clothes than I’d ever had before. Then, she put me on the staircase landing, as if I were a bag, and left.

I didn't have to speak their English yet to see that every person the man lived with hated me, much like every person on the streets of Liverpool.

The girl began to befriend me most quickly, which raised the final tally to two who didn’t want me dead. More than some, I suppose.

Helpful.

* * * * * * * *

I'm a family man. I have a nice life in the country.

It was the end of fall, and I'd chosen to go on a small trip to Liverpool. It smelled wretched, far more smoggy and dirty than the country air I’m accustomed to, but that's the city for you. I’d only been there for a day, and I'd gotten small gifts for my two children. I was up early, before dawn, to start back home, which was sixty miles away. I was walking, because that was what I'd chosen to do before I knew it would snow. Before I’d gotten far, though, I saw a small child curled up alone on the icy, increasingly more snowy street.

I dropped down next to the child—a dirty little gipsy boy—and could tell immediately that he was starving. Homeless, too, most likely, given his ragged physical state. I helped him up, and his dark eyes opened in a second, but he looked bewildered. I asked his name and where he lived, but he only stared at me, mute. I couldn't leave the poor thing there to freeze or starve to death, so I picked him up and asked the nearby people if he was theirs. If not, I asked if they knew whose he was.

I got no help. I was running short on time, so I decided that, rather than deal with the mess to keep on searching, I'd take the boy home with me. It didn't seem likely that he'd be missed.

I wrapped the boy up in my great coat, since he was obviously half-ice by then, and I started home at a quick pace. I got the boy some food, and he consumed it like a wild animal. I went as fast as I could to get home, hurrying more as the time elapsed and the cold got fiercer. It was even worse on the way back from Liverpool than the way to, due to the boy and the rapidly plummeting temperatures.

I was quite exhausted by the time I fell through the door to my house, near midnight, with the boy still curled up in the coat in my arms.

I dropped into a chair, huffing and laughing heartily at myself and the stupid walking trip. My wife and children and maid flocked around me like a gaggle of indignant geese, squawking and wondering why I was so late and what had happened and for God’s sake, was I all right.

I waved them off, swearing sincerely by my very breath that I wouldn't take another 'walk' like that again for anything. To solve the mystery, then, I revealed the starved and ragged child to my wife, telling her that she should see it as a gift from God, albeit an unexpected one. We’d been unable to have more children of our own, and she was always blubbing about it, so she could content herself with this.

I set the boy on his feet, and he merely stared about and jabbered away in whatever gipsy language he spoke at the time. I would see to his learning a civilised language as soon as possible.

My children gaped in shock like fish while my wife scolded, demanding what I was thinking by bringing a gipsy creature into the house when I already had our own children to provide for, and what I meant to do with the boy, and whether or not I had lost my mind. Shocking behavior. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t!

Finally, she calmed down, but she would have nothing to do with the boy that night. So, I instructed the maid to clean the boy up and have him sleep in the room with the other children. I had a soft spot for him already. He was a cute, stray little pet. He could make a good young servant. He could easily be a favorite.

My son and daughter were disappointed about the forsaken gifts, but I knew they'd get over it. After all, I’d brought them a stray playmate already peer-age instead, which was more than any other boy or girl they knew could boast. Sure enough, my daughter started to adjust to the boy nearly immediately, much faster than my son. My wife didn't like the poor boy at all, unfortunately, but she didn't much like the dogs, either.

It was inconsequential in the end. I liked the little gipsy, and they would too, eventually. Why wouldn't they?