Chapter 17
A Little Girl's Toy

From Clift's Cove William saw his house across the water. Above it rose the rocky South Side Hill. That was where he wanted to go when he saw the fresh cod in Clift's lane. Boxes, not barrels. Not salt fish. He recalled fish flakes around the harbour in summer. There were more before the 1892 fire. Soon they would all go. He could not keep up with the changes.

He looked at his house. No, he thought, Roddy Dawe and that O'Neill man don't fit into the golden dream. And I do not.

His house. Iris and Alice Maud. The smell of kippers in a pan on the stove. Alice Maud is in her bed. Iris has folded the quilts to keep her cool. Alice Maud is reading. Her friends come to the door with comics. Torn ones they don't want back. You have to burn things that go in the sick room.

Alice Maud has one thing in her room she loves more than anything. It is the stuffed seal Iris's brother gave her. He caught it last year. Alice Maud keeps it by her. She talks to it. Last night Iris listened on the landing.

"I'm so hot, Peppy. My throat is so sore. Uncle George says they found you on the ice. The ice must have felt cool. I wish I was a seal. I'd float on an ice pan. I wouldn't mind how cold it was. I'd love the cold ice, and the cold wind."

That's what Alice Maud said to her seal. We told her if she kept him in her room we'd have to throw him out when she got better. But she promised to rub disinfectant in his fur and begged us not to burn him.

William turned back onto Water Street. The cold was damp. He wouldn't mind a shot of rum now. But places where you could get one were getting fewer.

Police made criminals out of innocent people. These days if rum didn't ruin the buyer, it ruined the seller. On one hand you had the likes of Roddy Dawe's father, always drunk. His children left to starve. Then you had Tom Kelly's third cousin, Bridgett Gunn. Her children were left to starve as well.

Tom told William all she did was buy one pot of rum. She did it after her husband died. She did not know what else to do. She hid it under the bed. She meant to sell a drink now and then to help feed her twelve children. Tom went to visit her in jail. She told him she never sold the first drink before the police came. She told him some other things, too.