Liberty (5 page)

A
small raccoon
sat at the breakfast table, buttering toast. His shirt was blue; his vest and pants were navy; his feet were bare. Josiah Crabtree was the son of their host, Mr. Earl Crabtree, who sat at the head of the mahogany table. The raccoons were the guardians of the ferry, and, as such, the Crabtrees occupied a prominent position in Rock Island society. Their home was the newest—and largest—in Rock Island. Greek Revival architecture was sweeping the east coast, and the Crabtrees had built in the latest fashion. The white-columned house sat on a bluff, like a Greek temple, overlooking both the Rock River and, in the distance, the V where the Rock River met the Mississippi River.

The dining room was elaborate. Corinthian columns flanked a fireplace, and above the mantel hung a huge family portrait.

Josiah saw Penelope studying it. “My grandmother,” he said.

“You look like her.” Penelope only said it because it was expected. From the gilded frame, the old raccoon's face grimaced above a pink silk dress. Penelope didn't think the matriarch looked like Josiah or his father.

But the comment pleased Mr. Crabtree. “It's my mother. She was the first of my family to come to this world.”

Penelope decided the old raccoon looked so stern because she had to wear that pink silk dress. Penelope squirmed inside her borrowed blue taffeta dress. It didn't give her room to move. Sailors need pants, she decided. After the meal, she'd ask for something more suitable.

“What is this world, exactly,” Santiago asked.

“It's a parallel world, one you can only enter by certain ferries or ships in certain locations. It's called many things. The ancients called it the Mutare Fata, the place where fates can change. Natives of this land called it the Quinnipiac, the place on the river where you change course. Around here, we just call it the Land of Liberty. Or just Liberty.”

Penelope liked that. A land named Liberty was just the sort of place she'd like to live her life.

“Why do you want to go to sea?” Josiah asked. He brushed toast crumbs from his clothes and helped himself to oatmeal.

“It's been my dream, our dream,” Santiago said. Unlike Penelope, he looked comfortable in his clothes, as if he'd grown up wearing shirts, vests and pants.

Mr. Crabtree pointedly picked up a spoon and showed it Santiago. Then, he scooped oatmeal into his mouth. Santiago awkwardly shoved the sterling silver spoon into the cleft of his hoof. Using hooves for picking up things was hard for both pigs. With careful movements, Santiago managed to take a bite. He looked up and smiled at his host.

Mr. Crabtree beamed back. “You're learning fast.”

They finished breakfast in silence, for which Penelope was grateful. She had to concentrate on using her own spoon.

Finally, Mr. Crabtree pushed back his plate and poured a cup of coffee for everyone. “This is a comfortable border town,” he said. “You should settle down here. Maybe become a guardian, so you can cross back and forth. We go over a couple times a month, looking for animals like yourselves who want to come to Liberty. Not all get to cross, you know.”

“Like the brown bear and possum we saw?”

“We've been watching them. But the bear is old, and the possum, well, she's always angry. We only let young, healthy intelligent creatures come to Liberty.”

That policy made sense in some ways, Penelope thought. Still, it made her sad. Her parents, for example, would never get to come here.

Santiago held his cup between both hooves and took a sip. He grimaced at the bitter coffee. “We don't want to go back. How do we get to New York Harbor from here?”

Penelope had followed Josiah's lead by pouring milk and spooning sugar into her coffee. She let Santiago taste hers, and he promptly doctored his own cup.

Mr. Crabtree sighed. “I'll show you my maps.”

“Maps?” Santiago set down the coffee cup and leaned forward.

“Yes, I've got several good ones. It's late fall, though. I'd recommend you stop in Philadelphia and stay there a few months. Get used to Liberty.”

“We'd like to sail right away,” Santiago insisted.

“Boats don't sail much in the winter anyway. You can arrive in the spring, in time to get positions on good boats. Besides, you'll need to talk to the Freedom Society. They have seed money for animals such as yourselves, to help you get a start.”

“Money?”

“Yes, you'll need to learn about money.”

Penelope squirmed against the uncomfortable dress. There were many things they needed to learn in this new world.

After breakfast, Mr. Crabtree led them to the library where he spread out maps on a wooden desk. Santiago eagerly hunched over them, trying to make sense of the drawings.

“Here's the Mississippi River, from New Orleans to St. Paul. We're sitting right here, at Rock Island, Illinois,” Mr. Crabtree explained.

While Santiago was initiated into the mysteries of maps, Penelope sat on the upholstered seat of a bay window and gazed out at the rivers. A gleaming white paddle wheeler was turning from the Mississippi River into the Rock River. She watched in awe as it chugged upstream, steam billowing. It moved so fast. Could sailboats go faster?

Mr. Crabtree noticed the paddle wheeler, too. “We get steam boat traffic almost every day now. You could stay here and make a good living on the riverboats.”

Penelope and Santiago looked at each other.

It was tempting, Penelope thought. They had come so far, and maybe they should stop here and be content with this corner of Liberty.  Moving on meant more risks; but she wanted to see the whole world, not just the Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. Paul. She shook her head slightly.

Santiago nodded back, then said to Mr. Crabtree, “No. We're going to sea.”

“Foolish, if you ask me,” Mr. Crabtree said. “Steamboats, not sailboats, are the future.”

Santiago ignored the comment. “Do you have maps of the whole world?”

When the raccoon showed him a globe, Santiago was entranced. He spun the globe, watching the lands go around and around. Then, he closed his eyes, stopped the globe and pointed. “Please tell us about this place.”

The game engrossed everyone for hours, as Mr. Crabtree told about Japan, the Indian Sea, the southern polar continent—Wilkes' Land, it was called, after the famous explorer.

Adventure. Penelope whispered the word to herself. It was everywhere in Liberty. She thought about what Mr. Crabtree had said: Not every animal gets to cross.

They had done the impossible by escaping the farm with its threat of pigs becoming bacon. But what were they do to now? No other family member would ever come here—unless Runt made it. That fact alone made her uneasy about thinking of taking the easy way out, the first option they saw. For the sake of those left behind, she couldn't live a small life. Mr. Crabtree had considered them important enough to bring over to Liberty, and she would imitate his attitude. There would be no little people—animal or human—and no little places.

They stayed a week with the Crabtrees, studying maps and getting used to the sight of intelligent animals standing upright, talking, conducting business with human and animal. The dogs, especially, startled Penelope at first. But every one she met was courteous and soft-spoken. Perhaps intelligent dogs were all kind instead of cruel.

They met with the Freedom Committee who provided seed money for creatures coming into Liberty. The director of the local committee was Mrs. Newcombe, a large woman who wore huge bonnets and wide hooped skirts. Penelope endured several hours of lecturing about the latest clothing fashions before flatly refusing to try on a hoop skirt.  Only afterwards did the wonder of talking with a human occur to her, but Liberty freely mixed humans and creatures, and it just seemed natural.

With money from the Freedom Committee, Santiago bought his first map. More practical, Penelope chose a set of clothes for each of them. She compromised with a cotton split-skirt which she would wear until they reached the sea. But she insisted on a piece of traditional sailor clothing for each: a black pea coat. A few meager supplies for their trip eastward finished their shopping.  By the end of the week, they were ready to head east.

“Some day soon,” Josiah Crabtree said, “I'll put in a train line from Chicago to here. It'll be the first rail line to the Mississippi River. I'll put Rock Island on the map.”

Even as she wondered what the train would look like, Penelope had no doubt Josiah would do exactly that. For now, though, they had no choice but to climb into a coach for a bumpy ride to Chicago.  The ornate yellow and gold coach was pulled by a family of intelligent horses who made their living running the coach lines.

Because they had just arrived in Liberty, the horses allowed them both to travel for the price of one. The mare taking fares shrugged off their thanks. “Pass it on by helping someone else when you can.”

“We will,” Penelope agreed.

When they were safely settled in the coach, Santiago pulled out his new map and traced their route for Penelope. They had to cross six states—Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York—before they would finally reach New York Harbor. It would be a long journey.

Still, they were young and free, and they were in the midst of their own adventure.

They traveled steadily. With new sights and new ways of doing things greeting them daily, they depended on each other even more.  Penelope remained cheerful despite hunger, bad weather, or small injuries. At dark moments, she recalled a line of Mrs. McDonald's poetry to cheer their hearts. For his part, Santiago always made friends with other travelers. They learned much about the customs and history of Liberty through many a congenial conversation.

In Chicago, they climbed aboard the noisy, smelly train, and they came finally to Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. Here, they lingered through the late fall and winter, getting their bearings in Liberty.  During the day, they both worked for Mr. Skype, a stooped black man who wore a monocle, a single eyepiece, in his left eye. Mr. Skype's produce store was successful because it brought in fresh vegetables from the countryside; in Liberty, everyone was vegetarian. The store's back room became their home. Mr. Skype deducted the cost of the room from their pay.

Even so, Santiago managed to save a mite each week. “For our own boat,” he said. He kept a leather purse beneath their mattress and counted it once a week, smiling in satisfaction at how the pile of coins grew.

At night, they went to Portico Row to one of the brick and marble row mansions where they struggled to learn letters and numbers with Mrs. Mellie, the widowed Siamese cat schoolmarm. While they enjoyed their lessons, the best part was Mr. Purtle, her butler, who was an old box turtle. He owned a small sailing dinghy, and on nice days, he took them out on the Delaware River. They struggled to learn how to furl and unfurl sails; the hardest was furling, or rolling sails up smoothly.  Then Mr. Purtle turned the Duke Luke into the wind, and they struggled to learn how to tack—zigzag back and forth—to make headway in the white-tipped waves of winter. It was a gentle beginning to their education as sailors.

They spent long evenings listening to Miss Mellie's stories of her hometown, Boston. It was a sailing town, and to prove it, she had stories about captains, packets to China, speed records, and—most of all—shipwrecks.

“That's how I lost my dear husband, the late Mr. Mellie,” Mrs. Mellie sighed. “He was a fine-looking rat, and a fine sea captain, too. But a wretched sea serpent wrecked his ship.”

Penelope and Santiago learned everything they could from Mrs. Mellie's stories.

By late winter, Mr. Purtle sent them out on their own for long, glorious days with their faces in the wind.

Penelope and Santiago were together, they were learning to sail, and they were content. Still, when the first robin returned to the north, Penelope said, “Soon.”

And Santiago agreed. “Boston Harbor, then, instead of New York Harbor?”

“Yes,” Penelope said.

Before they left in early March, Mr. Skype went through the store and helped them pick out sturdy gear and clothing suitable for Boston society. “If you want to get ahead in the world,” he said, “you need to dress right.”

In her backpack, Penelope carried a book of poems and a journal in which to write her own poems. Santiago had his purse of coins, a book of maps and a journal in which to draw his own maps.

Thus they came, at last, in the early spring, to the Boston Harbor, the home of the tall ships. The harbor was fringed with the bright yellow-green of spring, and a sea breeze tickled the Talbert's noses. But it was the acres of canvas sails that caught their eyes and their imagination. A brisk wind blew the Union Jack or Stars and Stripes straight out, while departing ships unfurled sails, and incoming ships furled them, making it a place swarming with activity: seagulls dipped, horse-drawn carts and wagons loaded or unloaded at long wharves, and everywhere, to and fro, there moved men and intelligent animals on important business.

Penelope and Santiago looked at each other with delight. By evening, surely, they would have a berth on an outgoing sailing ship.

B
oston Harbor was created
by the deep waters where the Charles River and Mystic River spilled out into the sea; the depth allowed ocean-going ships to dock and unload their wares. In Boston itself, the wharves arched out into the harbor. At the north end, the Charles River Bridge connected Boston with Charlestown and Bunker Hill, which rose above the town. Wharves jutted into the Charles River. Curving around on the Boston side, the oldest and biggest wharves were at the eastern end. Long Wharf—half a mile long, built in 1710—and India Wharf—built in 1807—boasted large counting houses. The bottom floors held offices and display rooms where merchants could view goods just arriving. Upstairs were the actual auction houses. Here, offices humming with secretaries who clacked out letters on typewriters or added up accounts on adding machines. If a sailing ship was a queen bee, here were the drones that kept her healthy. Toward the south end of the harbor, the wharves were smaller and serviced smaller ships.

“This is it!” Penelope struggled to keep her hooves still as they stepped onto the first wooden wharf. Clip-clip-clip-clop. Fortunately, the nervous clatter was lost in the general hub-bub.

Penelope and Santiago didn't have even a fourth of what they needed to buy their own boat. Even if they had saved enough money, they agreed that they needed experience under a good captain before they would sail by themselves. So, they hopefully worked their way up and down each wharf, stopping at every ship on the south side of Boston Harbor and asking if it needed two sailors.

“Aloft, you wouldn't last an hour,” said Captain Eznick, a large orangutan with long fingers and toes. He commanded the
Cormorant
, a sleek sloop with triangular, lanteen sails. Penelope longed to climb into the rigging, but the First Mate hustled them down the gangplank before she could suggest a trial.

“Never had a pig as a crewman before,” said Captain Brice, a short stocky Irish woman who spoke with a heavy accent. Hers was a square sailed schooner, the
Enduranc
e, but it was small, and her crew numbered only eight. “Well, I can take one of you, that's all.”

But Penelope and Santiago had vowed to go to sea together. They tried their luck at the next boat. And the next. No one, it seemed, wanted two pigs as crewmen.

Finally, at dusk, they came to the middle of the harbor at the eastern end of the semicircle of wharves. From this vantage point they could see the shore curving off in both directions. Commercial Street ran around the harbor, echoing the contours of the land. Here were two- or three-story buildings, mostly brick or wood, with colorful carved and painted signs hanging before doorways. Lantern light from those being lit just now reflected off the dark water. Spicy smells spilled from tavern doorways, along with laughter and song.

“We need a place to sleep.” Penelope hurt all over; her jaws ached from talking so much, trying to convince some ship captain to take them on; her leg muscles were tight, aching with a longing to climb rigging, any rigging, on any ship; her eyes burned from all the bright white canvas and unshed tears of frustration. “Tomorrow we'll talk to the rest.” She waved at the north side of the harbor. Breathing deeply of the salt air, Penelope studied the boats docked there. Will we find a position tomorrow? Hope mingled with nervousness. Soon, she whispered to cheer herself, we'll go to sea.

They strolled along Commercial Street, watching for signs of inns. At the Tea Party Inn, they asked about rooms, but they were expensive here on the waterfront. The Talberts had watched their money carefully but had little left except the leather purse with their boat money, and Santiago had vowed not to spend that. The innkeeper, a cheerful man with tattooed arms, suggested, “Try down some side streets.”

As they trudged down Lime Alley toward Charter Street, suddenly Santiago tapped Penelope's shoulder. “Look. This way,” he said, and hurried Penelope across the street and along a bit until he stopped in front of a small shop whose sign read, “Maps. Cricket Mansfield, Proprietor.” In a clean, brightly lit window was a smaller sign: Help Wanted.

Eagerly, Santiago pushed open the door, and they walked inside. Directly ahead, Penelope saw a wooden box holding upright rolls of yellowed maps; indeed, similar boxes were crowded in tight groups throughout the room. To the right, though, was a viewing wall where maps could be tacked up and studied. Right now, it was covered with a three-foot square map of Boston itself. Lanterns hung at either side of the wall, casting a warm glow on the oiled paper. Santiago stood with his forelegs behind his back and leaned forward so his white snout was just inches from the surface.

“Look,” Santiago waved at the map. “The penmanship. The scale. The colors. The lines.”

Even to Penelope, the map looked like the work of a master.

Santiago bent to look closely. “Is it signed? Who made this map?”

From the opposite corner, a voice piped up. “Cricket Mansfield, at your service.”

Leaving her drafting desk, a slight Oriental woman wove her way through the boxes of maps and bowed before Penelope and Santiago. Liberty was full of such surprises that Penelope had almost expected a real cricket instead of this tiny woman.

“You are new to the city and need a map?” the woman asked.

“This is magnificent,” Santiago said. “How much?”

Cricket Mansfield gave the Talberts an appraising look. “Too much for your taste.”

“How much?” Santiago insisted.

“$50.”

Santiago looked at Penelope helplessly, and then gestured at the map again. “I've never seen the like.”

“Nor likely to, either,” Cricket Mansfield said with a British accent. “I learned my trade at my father's knees, and he was the best cartographer, or map maker, in China. I sailed the South Seas and learned how the Polynesians navigate. I charted the currents of the Arctic Ocean before I went to Oxford, England to consult with the Royal Cartographer's Association.” She spread out tiny, ink-stained hands. “My maps are the best in the world.”

Santiago's eyes shone bright with envy. “What kind of ink did you use here? Where did you get such fine paper?”

Cricket's eyebrows shot up. “Ah, you're a map maker?”

She unpinned the map and laid it out on her drafting desk and for the next hour, she and Santiago were engrossed in mapmaking. Penelope amused herself by looking randomly through the maps. When she found an interesting one, she took it to the viewing wall and tacked it up. After sorting through several dozen bins, she saw something folded up, lying in the bottom of one. It was a ragged, ancient map, badly colored and lettered, but with strange islands dotting the Atlantic. She pinned it to the wall and studied it. The mapmaker had drawn strange creatures, whose coils and scales dipped and hid amidst the islands. Around one island had been written, “Here be Sea Serpents.”

Hideous beasts. Here in Liberty, she had met many intelligent dogs and was slowly learning to accept them without fear. It seemed to her that sea serpents were the wolves of the sea and would be far worse than the hounds back home. It wasn't necessarily the killing that bothered her because that was the way of nature. It was the cruelty that scared her, angered her. Penelope shivered. She could imagine sea serpents toying with a victim before killing it. Quickly, Penelope took the map down, re-folded it, and replaced it at the bottom of the bin, as if she could escape the fear by hiding the map.

Finally, grouchy and tired and hungry, she stomped over to the drafting table. “Santiago, my stomach is growling.”

He looked up, eyes bright, ears perky. “What? Oh.” He blinked. “I'm hungry, too, I guess.”

Cricket's long braid had fallen over her shoulder and lay in dark loops on the map in front of her. She straightened up and flipped it to her back, where it hung to her knees. “Right. You can start in the morning. I've a room—tiny, but clean—that I'll throw in with your wages.”

She reached over and removed the “Help Wanted” sign from the window.

Santiago blinked, not understanding. But Penelope saw immediately that Cricket was right. Before they could take off to sea, Santiago needed to learn mapmaking. She sighed. It probably meant a year's delay, but without it, Santiago would never be content. “We'll take it,” she said.
At least
, she thought,
they were in Boston
. While Santiago learned mapmaking, she would study the seafaring world, too.

And so, the summer and fall passed. Santiago barely noticed the seasons changing, but Penelope chafed at the wait. Yes, she grudgingly admitted, it was time well spent even though she resented each day spent on land.

While Santiago sat day after day at the drafting table, Penelope put on sailor's dungarees and picked up odd jobs. Her first job was as a stevedore, unloading goods brought from India by the East India Shipping Company on the Mermaid. The receiving officer in charge was Evelyn Russet, a large poodle. Her long black hair was twisted into curls, much like the dreadlocks of the humans from Jamaica.

“We're bred to be water dogs,” Evelyn said proudly. “My hair sheds water as well as any polar bear's fur.”

The work was hard, lifting heavy boxes of goods and passing them along a line of workers, stretching from the deep hold up to the deck and then off the ship to the dock. The last in line loaded the box onto a wagon to be taken to the counting house. Sometimes she caught a whiff of a pungent herb or spice. Penelope liked to guess at the contents of these boxes: cinnamon, curry, and black pepper.

She worked hard, so the other stevedores accepted her easily. This meant that whenever there was a new ship to unload, someone sent a message to let her know; she was kept busy loading and unloading goods from around the world. It was good work, but it made her want to go to sea even more.

On weekends, she helped the tattooed cook at the Tea Party Inn. Fish was a favorite food in Boston Harbor, either grilled or in stews; everyone agreed that fish with scales weren't intelligent creatures, so it was fine to eat them. While she cooked or served, Penelope listened to the captains gossiping, so that, within a month or two, she knew which boats had good captains and which had cruel ones. She was glad they hadn't signed on with Captain Brice. The wild Irishwoman had a reputation as a miser; they said she never lost a crewman, never lost a cargo, and never let a penny escape her tight fist.

After work, the Talberts lingered in the tavern, where Penelope fell in love with sea shanties; something about the beat or the work-rhythm of the songs fell pleasantly on her ear.

“Hey-lee!”

“Ho-lip!”

“Wey-hey!”

“Yo-heave-yo!”

She was almost embarrassed to write a sea shanty in her poetry journal, but soon it was brimming with them, and she had to start a second journal.

For his part, Santiago was in heaven, learning everything he could from Cricket Mansfield.

“Slow down,” she often told him. “Take the time to do it well.”

“But time is so short; when we finally go to sea, I'll have time to practice then.”

“Oh, ho! You think a sailor's life is a life of leisure?”

“No, but—”

“Then, start this map again. Your lines are too crooked.”

And in spite of his complaining, Santiago was glad of a master who held him to a high standard.

At night, he was full of new information to share with Penelope. “Did you know,” he asked her, “there aren't just seven seas to sail? There are 54.” He named them, then promised, “We'll sail them all.”

One day, he showed her a new book,
Wind and Current Charts
by Lt. Maury, a Navy man. Maury had worked for several years compiling information from thousands of Navy log books. The result were the most accurate charts ever seen that showed currents and winds for seas across the world. Previous charts had just shown major currents or winds; these showed details such as minor variations within the Gulf Stream, one of the major currents in the Atlantic.

“It's like they've been sailing blind,” Santiago said. “With these new charts, sailing will be faster and faster, as captains take easier routes.”

“Do the captains realize this?”

“No, but they will. Cricket is putting this information into her new maps. It's a great time for me to be learning mapmaking, just as these new charts are coming through.”

At odd times, they snuck away to sail on borrowed or rented boats—always using the new charts. Sometimes they managed short one- or two-day runs, and once, in Cricket's yacht, they sailed for a week up to a farm in Maine. The Hilldebrands, a family of rabbits, was especially good at making fine papers for her maps; Cricket made trips to their farm every year to inspect and order new papers. The pigs' skills in handling any size sailboat were growing.

Deep winter was a time when ships stayed home, and there was little work on the wharves. The icehouses still had plenty of work, said the other stevedores. Penelope heard this was back breaking work. She might've taken it easy for the coldest months, but she was handing over too much money to Cricket.

It started their first week at the map shop. Cricket bought an old map from a sailor needing money; she showed it first to Penelope. Not sure if she was repelled or fascinated by the sea serpent it showed, Penelope bought it.

“Crazy,” Santiago said. “We could save that money for our boat. Besides, I could draw one better than that.”

That wasn't the point. This one was old, even Cricket said so. After that, Cricket secretly showed any map with sea serpents to Penelope, and she bought every one. Her repulsion had turned to passion. She wanted to know more about sea serpents. No, she wanted to know everything about sea serpents. She let it be known along the wharves and taverns that anyone who had a tale about a sea serpent would find her a good audience. Many a strange crewman sought her out to tell his wild tale. In the fall, she started a new journal in which she wrote sea serpent stories; that winter she filled another. She decided one thing: she never wanted to meet a sea serpent. The maps would show her places to avoid.