I stagger down the side of the road, my arms wrapped around my body, trying to preserve any heat left inside my ice-encrusted clothes. I have been cold before, but never like this. But I haven’t been warm much either.
Sometimes, back there, I was allowed outside. I would swing the ax, splitting logs, pile firewood, cut brush away from the house with a sling, or dig holes as deep as he demanded, spending every minute under his critical eye as he sat in the shadows, caressing his shotgun, silent except for hurled criticisms.
Those are the best memories I have. Working, moving my muscles, and taking pride in my accomplishments felt good. His harsh words would ring in my ears—I was too slow or doing it wrong—but they were simply the price I paid to be out in the midst of the hottest summer day. Suffocating humidity cloaked the still air, but the shade and altitude kept the temperatures cool. Beams of sunlight penetrated the thick canopy of leaves wriggling their way to the moist ground and dancing among the detritus from rotting trees and vegetation.
Detritus. That’s a good one. Loose material such as rock fragments or organic particles that results directly from disintegration. It felt good between my bare toes, a welcome respite to the hard-packed floor of the basement. I savored the time outdoors, as rare as it was.
Soon enough, though, he tired of watching me work. I stored the tools under his incessant gaze, which prevented me from smuggling even the smallest implement. Then he marched me back inside the gloomy house, where the air sat stuffy and still. The grimy windows filtered the indirect light. No electric lights illuminated the interior, so the house was always cloaked in thick, cool shadows.
While being outside was a delight, being inside was not. I never wanted to linger, praying under my breath that he wanted nothing else until he extracted his keys, unlocked the padlock, and opened the cellar door. Lest he changed his mind, I moved quickly down the creaky steps and into the dank room below.
Only a little light slipped through the few small, rectangular windows of broken glass high above our heads. I knew from my time outdoors that the portals were mere inches above ground level, hidden behind the weeds and brush growing against the house, but inside, they were out of our reach, just below the floor joists.
A hint of sunlight but nothing more leached through to us below. The stone walls and dirt floor kept the temperatures cool through the day. At night, in the darkness, the room chilled, and we shivered in our sleep. Still, the summer was more tolerable than the rest of the year.
Spring brought torrential rains. Another terrific word: torrent—a violent stream of a liquid.
Violent was right. The temperature plummeted. Lightning flashed through the sky, briefly illuminating our world below. The crashing of thunder followed, felt through the trembling walls as it rattled the windowpanes. And then the water would fall in waves. It seeped underground and through the walls of the basement, leaving slick, slimy layers of mold on the exposed fieldstone, chilling our bodies if we dared lean against them. We huddled in the center of the dark room, wrapped in threadbare blankets, shivering and hoping to steal body heat from each other. We warmed our hands from a flickering candle or a smoking oil lamp when we were lucky enough to have those, which was only when he forgot and left them behind.
Despite the frigid nights, at least spring brought the promise of summer. The falling temperatures and shortening days of autumn, however, hinted at the misery of the winter to come. The leaves fell from the trees outside, so more sunlight hit our sparse windows, but that only teased us as the days grew shorter and the nights longer. We would wake most mornings to our own breath forming fog in the air.
The winters were the worst of all. Fierce winds whipped over the mountain ridges, rattling the denuded tree branches before whistling into our confines through the gaps of those meager windows. Snow trickled through the shattered glass and piled into drifts on the dirt floor, creating yet another obstacle for our bare feet. We wrapped them in the burlap sacks we used as blankets. We weren’t allowed shoes.
The temperatures dropped so much on the worst days that the moisture accumulating on those stone walls froze into sheets of thin ice, removing even the slight comfort of being able to recline against that support. The chill pooled and extended its icy tentacles throughout our dungeon, making escape from its arctic grip nearly impossible.
Upstairs, the logs I had carefully gathered and stacked during the warmer months blazed in the old stone fireplace. Plastic taped over the frosty windows trapped the radiant heat and kept the temperature inside his little den tolerable, though the rest of the drafty house was barely better than being outside.
The crumbling chimney restricted the escaping smoke, so some of it curled through the room and streaked the walls with soot. The fumes slipped under the cellar door and crept down the steps, taunting us with the scent of heat without giving us any of its comfort.
But not even the chance to warm ourselves in front of those flames made any trip upstairs worthwhile. There are things worse than being cold. Much worse.
When he opened the door and stood at the top of those stairs, scanning us as we cowered in the shadows, we always prayed the same thing—Pick someone else. Not me. Please, not me.
He would indicate his selection with a gesture or a mumbled name. Those of us unchosen would cast our eyes down at the ground, silently whispering our gratitude. The poor boy selected would look to us with wide, begging eyes, knowing in his heart that we were doing what he would have done if one of us had been selected but begging and praying this time would be different.
It never was.
We never revolted. None of us except the selectee wanted the man to change his mind and pick someone else instead. I didn’t want to hear my name. No one else did either. The condemned, knowing we were not going to rise up to defend him, would trudge up the stairs, resigned to his fate.
Hours later, the door would open, and the boy would slink back downstairs, curl in a corner, and cry until exhaustion brought sleep. When he finally awoke, we carried on as if nothing had happened. Some topics were better not discussed. We all knew what went on upstairs.
We also knew that sometimes the door never reopened to return the chosen one. We never discussed that, either, mostly because we couldn’t decide whether it was better to return or not.
But now I know the answer. Anywhere, even freezing to death in a snowstorm, was better than there.
The chilly basement, even with its ice-covered walls and drafty windows, afforded some protection from winter’s assault. Out here, I have nothing to block the howling wind and blowing snow. But I never plan to return, even if the only alternative is that the cold kills me.
I am here, wherever here is. That’s an improvement.
Back there, death was certain.
Out here, it’s only likely.