Trouble

A soot-smudged street waif, half starved and wholly unloved, is dragged from the orphanage’s yawning gates into the clangorous underbelly of a tenement where copper pipes sweat and the air tastes of rust. The plumber who claims him—broad as a boiler, voice like a hacksaw—brandishes charity like a blunt wrench, then locks the boy in a cellar of perpetual chores. Hunger becomes the child’s silent twin, gnawing until desperation turns him into a pint-size apprentice; when he dares to seal a leak himself, water erupts in a silver torrent, a glistening mockery of his hope. Salvation arrives in the guise of disaster: a copper’s life teeters on a frozen lake, the ice crackling like distant artillery, and the ragamuffin—fingers blue, heart blazing—becomes the unforeseen hero, toppling his tyrant into the iron jaws of justice. With the brute hauled away in shackles, the boy and the plumber’s wan, wounded wife flee the dripping city for her parents’ sunlit farm, where wind combs the wheat and the scent of warm milk promises that hunger, at last, has been left to drown in the melted snow.