Raising Cubby

by John Elder Robison

  Whenever we opened the door to the glass shop the little bells would tinkle, and if we were quick, we’d see Zeke and Pete’s tails swish as they slithered out of sight behind the counter. Some people said it was unfair, the way they had to hide on the floor, but I thought it was for the best. After all they’d been through, it was no wonder they were shy. George always said they were happier keeping to themselves.

  Anyway, as long as you stayed by the door, you could glimpse the fire lizards at work, and it was truly a marvel to see. From that vantage point, we watched George shape bowls, vases, and other glassware as Zeke and Pete blew jets of blue fire up through holes in the stone benches. George always worked barefoot, using his toes to press his lizards’ tails to signal the precise amount and temperature of fire he needed. Watching the three of them, it was as if they were telepathic. It was an ancient trade, like fortune-telling or the Gypsy arts.

  We always knew Zeke and Pete as big, gentle, slow-moving creatures. As I told Cubby, it takes a massive reptile to blow that much fire. Not surprisingly, they ate a lot of food. George always had a pile of meat in his shop, and Zeke and Pete were known far and wide for the way they cooked their own dinners. Some say that’s where our caveman ancestors got the idea.

  Given his attachment to Zeke and Pete, it didn’t surprise me that Cubby wanted to know all about Gorko. He asked how flying lizards differed from fire lizards and whether fire-breathing lizards were the same as dragons. He even wondered why Gorko didn’t live in Shelburne Falls too, since it seemed to be a lizard-friendly town.

  I did my best to answer his questions. I explained that ancient people called flying lizards that blew fire dragons, and that many books had been written about the age-old struggle between dragons and humans. Gorko, being a young, modern lizard, was a lot mellower than the dragons of old, I told Cubby. He watched TV, played games, and seldom got into fights. Also, he got along with humans. There was a time, long ago, when lizards ruled the world. All that had changed, I told Cubby, thanks to helicopter gunships and radar-guided missiles. Now humans were in charge of most worlds while the great lizards were relegated to Flying Lizard Land. The lizards that ventured out into human space were the ones that could get along with people without getting arrested or shot down by fighter jets.

  They surely had their fun, playing pranks, doing stunts, and being big kids. They did all the things I’d have done if I had wings and a tail. Cubby loved it all, and when bedtime came, he couldn’t wait to hear more.

  Those were the creatures that Cubby went to sleep with every night.

  When I was growing up, the adults around me were quick to tell me I’d never amount to anything. As the years passed, and I became commercially successful, people stopped taunting me with words like that. By the time Cubby came along, people were actually telling Little Bear and me what good parents we would be, something that struck me as pretty peculiar, given our family backgrounds.

  Neither of us had any idea what to do with a kid. Yet there we were, raising Cubby. We’d read a few books, and visited some zoos and jails, but we remained totally lacking in functional role models. Both our dads had been nasty, mean drunks when we were little. Now that we were all older, their dispositions had mellowed, but it was too late. We were adults; our chance to grow up with wise and wonderful parents had passed. However, Cubby’s arrival gave all of us a second chance. To my amazement, our dads actually added real wisdom to the pool of knowledge we deployed in pursuit of that enlightened goal of Perfect Parenthood.

  I had never imagined my father as a baby-centric sort of guy. Of course, until Cubby came along, I’d never seen him with a little kid either. Whenever I was present, my father was very thoughtful and reserved, not the sort of person you’d associate with babble and drool. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, because I am exactly the same way.

  My dad taught philosophy at the University of Massachusetts. He took his work very seriously. Actually, he took everything seriously. They voted him department head in the 1980s, and by the time Cubby was born, he had turned UMass Philosophy into one of the top-ranked departments in the country. My dad could discuss Heidegger or Kant all day, but talk of Dr. Seuss or Thomas the Tank Engine brought him to a complete and sudden halt. He’d say, “Yes, Jack, that’s nice,” and wiggle Cubby’s baby paws with one of his own giant fingers. Beyond that maneuver, I didn’t think he had any idea what else to do with a baby.

  I was wrong.

  As soon as Cubby was able to stand on his own, Little Bear began to alternate dropping him off with my mother or my father while she went to school. My father and his wife, Judy, only worked in the office part time by then, and they were surprisingly enthusiastic about watching a tyke. My father even put together a basket of toys that he pulled out whenever Cubby came calling. I don’t know where he got the stuff; some of it was older than me! He had a real Lionel train and a big green sack of Lincoln Logs, just for Cubby. Seeing them brought back memories of my own Lincoln Logs and the way they tasted as I chewed them in my sandbox.

  My father seemed to share my own philosophy when selecting toys for Cubby. Both of us bought him things we’d loved when we were little. To us, time-tested wood and metal toys were infinitely superior to the modern plastic stuff they advertised on TV.

  Little Bear’s father was in many ways the opposite of my own. He paved driveways, and people called him the Old Boy, or Easy Ed. Friends from the paving industry, where smoking-hot asphalt is laid down four inches thick, had their own name for him: Half Inch. My father was distinguished and very well spoken. The Old Boy was a genial thug: three feet wide, five feet tall, with a firm handshake and a ready laugh. My father had stopped drinking years ago, but the Old Boy still loved his whiskey.

  The Old Boy and his second wife, Alice, loved to feed the wildlife, and there was plenty of it where they lived. He’d built a house at the base of Mount Norwottock—a few miles from our home—with nothing but woods for miles behind him. Black bear, raccoons, squirrels, foxes, deer, and just about every other creature that lived in those parts came calling on the back patio, all clamoring for treats. Visiting their house was sort of like being in a zoo at feeding time, except that there were no cages and we were in the way.

  The Old Boy and Alice presided over their wild kingdom, doling out meat to the carnivores and corncobs and table scraps to the plant eaters. It was a remarkable thing to see. Predators and prey would be side by side on the patio, eating the Old Boy’s food. Foxes and turkeys might have been sworn enemies in the forest, but they got along fine at his place. I never saw a fight.

  Cubby’s grandpa also liked to get the family together for picnic dinners, thinking the same model of harmony through food could be achieved with humans. After attending a few of those dinners, I became a little leery of them. So did Little Bear. After all, anytime you mix twenty people, a lot of liquor, and hungry wild animals there is good potential for trouble. There were moments when it really wasn’t clear which of us were the eaters and which were the food. One night I was sitting peaceably at the picnic table when a raccoon walked right up into my lap and took a piece of meat off my plate. When I say raccoon, I’m not talking about some soft, cuddly woodland creature. This was a burly thirty pounder with teeth an inch long and claws to match. Not the sort of thing you want to fight over a scrap of steak, especially when it’s already in its mouth. The Old Boy laughed as that fat old coon wandered into the woods with my dinner. I got a new steak off the grill, where the Old Boy stood guard with a big set of tongs. He was the undisputed Duke of the Patio. No beast dared to take food from him.

  I realized at that moment that what seemed friendly might not be, and it was possible the animals were all putting on an act just to get food. I know some of the people were that way, though it was the liquor that lured them, not corn on the cob.

  Cubby had an even harder time. Not only did he have to watch for aggressive wildlife, he had to keep an eye out for pets, too. The Old Boy had two dogs, Bailey a
nd Beaver, that were just about his size. They were friendly as could be, but if he walked onto the patio with a donut they wouldn’t think twice about taking it for themselves. They’d chase him, knock him down, eat his chocolate cream donut, and then lick him good. He was left on his bottom, empty-handed, with sugary chocolate slobber all over his face as two laughing dogs divvied up his dessert.

  Cubby didn’t like being bullied by hounds. At first he grabbed his mom for protection, but he got bigger fast, and pretty soon he stood up to the dogs himself. When one or the other of them grabbed for his food, he’d swat it on the snout and yell “Bad!” as loud as he could. The dog would tuck its tail down and back off with the most awful hurt expression.

  Raccoons were another matter. “Don’t swat them on the nose,” I warned him. “They’re liable to bite your paw off if you do.”

  The Old Boy and Cubby went fishing together, too. He was an avid sportsman, both at home and at a cabin he built in the Maine woods. He was also active in the preservation of nature, though that idea didn’t mean much to Cubby at his age. He had spent many years on his town’s conservation commission. In fact, the year before they had named a small body of water in his honor: Easy Ed’s Peeper Pond. He took Cubby there to catch bluegill. He loved the name, but it didn’t help with their fishing. They would stay there all day with nothing to show for it but sunburn and bug bites. Not even a nibble. Luckily, the Old Boy had a stuffed fish at home, and he showed Cubby what might have been.

  Easy Ed wasn’t the only grandparent who loved the outdoors. My dad—John senior—spent as much time as he could in the woods, and he owned a whole mountaintop in rural Buckland, Massachusetts. He had a hundred acres up there, with a big tractor and a shed full of machinery to take care of it. Cubby was happy to help.

  My father and Cubby spent hours chopping firewood and stacking it under the deck for winter. Cubby helped with the big two-handed saw, working it back and forth to take down a tree and strip off the branches. My father never used his chain saw when Cubby was around. “Too dangerous,” he said, “and the old ways work just fine.” His own grandpa had been a county agent for the Department of Agriculture, helping farmers in northwest Georgia. They worked slowly and carefully, with the same hand tools his Grandpa Dandy had used back on his farm.

  The two of them managed the forest, repaired the old stone walls, and even planted a vegetable garden. They caught toads, watched birds, and picked rocks out of the meadow. My dad taught Cubby the names of all the plants in the yard, which Cubby was proud to repeat to me. Of the vegetables they grew, his favorite was squash. Not for the taste, mind you, but for the shape. He’d pick up big ripe squashes and swing them around his head. Grown-ups may have seen them as food, but he imagined squash as war clubs, rockets, and missiles. They were the best thing going, until the tomatoes started to rot.

  Then there was the machinery. Besides the tractor, my father had a Honda four-wheeler that he used to ride around the property. He towed a wagon with his tools and used a chain to drag firewood back to the house. Cubby loved to ride it with him, but after a few trips he wanted to do more.

  “Let me drive,” he said. That was an audacious suggestion, because he was barely three feet tall. “Okay,” his grandpa told him. “Put your hands on the bars and I’ll help you steer.” Cubby grinned real wide and squealed with delight as they motored across the meadow. “One day you’ll be able to drive it all by yourself,” my father told him. Cubby never forgot.

  Sometimes my son would climb the trees to survey the countryside. He wasn’t very tall yet, so being in the treetops gave him a real advantage. He also liked climbing because it was one of the few places my father couldn’t follow him. His arthritis was too bad for that. My dad would stand on the ground, watching closely and making sure Cubby got down safely.

  Cubby was almost out of diapers the first time Little Bear left him with my father overnight. I was at the car auctions, she had to be out late, and my dad was eager to keep him. When bedtime came, my father and Judy led him down to the guest room, in a cozy corner of the finished and decorated basement. Nice as it seemed to my father, there was no way Cubby was going to stay down there. Monsters eat kids in basements. Wild “aminals” might come in the windows. Even at two years of age, he was determined to survive the night. Cubby followed them back upstairs, to my father and Judy’s warm bedroom in the third-floor loft. He turned to my stepmother. “You stay down there, and I’ll stay here with Grandpa.” And that’s what she did. From then on, Cubby stayed upstairs with his grandfather and Judy stayed in the guest room.

  They loved having him there. My father kept that box of toys in a corner for the next ten years, just for Cubby’s visits. Cubby outgrew the toys, but they didn’t care. When the holidays came, they decorated a spectacular Christmas tree together and made a Christmas village. The only thing missing was the story of Santa, and I provided that.

  Most kids don’t know the history of Christmas; they just know it’s the day they get lots of presents. I wanted more for my son; I wanted him to know how it came to be and why we celebrate. After all, an informed child is a happy child. Not only that, an informed child will be full of stories to share with his friends. I’d never done too well at childhood story sharing or friend making, but I had high hopes for Cubby’s greater social success.

  With that in mind, I told Cubby the greatest secret of Christmas: how Santa got his reindeer. The story began with Santa’s great-grandfather. He was the one, I told Cubby, who started the Christmas reindeer tradition, back in 1822, after he found himself shipwrecked in the far reaches beyond the Arctic Circle.

  Cubby bounced up and down, eager to hear the story. He liked to bounce when my stories got exciting. Here is what I told him:

  Captain Santa was whaling in the Northern Ocean, far, far from home. The weather had been unseasonably warm, and he’d ventured up the western coast of Greenland, farther north than he’d ever gone before. By late September, he was beginning to think he might make it all the way to the North Pole.

  Most years, the ice would have stopped his northward progress, but in 1822 the oceans were clear. He was in deep water, far offshore, without a single iceberg in sight. Little did he know that the sea and sky were luring him into a trap.

  The cool afternoon turned to bone-chilling night. It got so cold that sailors’ breath left masks of frost on their faces. The wind roared, and waves shattered the railings. Seawater froze against the rigging faster than the crew could chip it away. By morning, the ship looked like a fairy-tale castle of ice, and the heaving sea had gone silent, frozen solid.

  They were trapped. Within a few days the ice around the ship was five feet thick. It looked like they’d never get free, and the men fell into a state of deep despair.

  For the first week of their captivity, all they saw was ice. Nothing moved except the wind, and that never stopped. A frozen wasteland stretched as far as the eye could see. Santa was afraid they would all perish, but on the morning of the fifteenth day, the ship’s lookout spotted movement on the horizon. A series of dots were making their way toward the ship. By midday Captain Santa could see that the specks were a herd of reindeer. He’d heard legends about creatures of the arctic, but he’d never seen any up close.

  The reindeer approached with curiosity. Sensing that they might be hungry, Santa offered them bread from his meager stock of provisions, and they gobbled it up hungrily. With that gesture, he made some new friends and saved himself and his crew.

  I had taken Cubby to see the reindeer at the Roger Williams Zoo in Providence. They were gentle creatures, very different from the deer that ran wild in our local woods. Cubby even got a chance to pet one. He remembered the feel of its fur as I told him about Santa. Cubby always enjoyed having a personal connection to my stories.

  The reindeer settled down near the ship, eating Santa’s food and cavorting on the ice. As he watched them, an idea took shape in his mind. The ship was trapped in ice and going nowhere. But perhaps
he could build sleds from its wood and harness the reindeer to pull himself and the crew back to civilization.

  The men set about making sleighs with enthusiasm, and two days later, three fine sleds were ready. Sailors made harnesses from the ship’s rigging so that the reindeer could pull the heavy sleds. Everyone was amazed when the reindeer stepped willingly into the rig the crewmen had made. They loaded a month’s supply of food, some clothes, and some weapons. Then Captain Santa blew out the oil lamp in his cabin and left a note on his door for anyone who might someday find the remains of his icebound ship.

  It was an epic journey. Captain Santa and his crewmen fought off giant seals and ravenous beasts. Their whaling harpoons came in handy on more than one occasion, when enormous polar bears decided the men might be good to eat. They traveled hundreds of miles, always heading south. Things were looking good, until one morning when they reached open water as far as the eye could see. How would they cross the ocean? They had started in a boat, but now they had only sleds. Santa was not a religious man, but he knew one thing: If there was a time to pray for salvation, this was it. If you’re up there, he prayed, and you help us find the way home, I’ll retire from the sea and devote my life to helping kids. It sounded corny, and he didn’t know if it would work, but they were out of options.

  Santa pulled up on the reins as they approached the edge of the sea ice, and something magical happened. Instead of stopping, the lead reindeer flexed her powerful shoulders to reveal wings! As soon as the lead reindeer spread her wings, every other reindeer in the team did the same. With a great blast of air and much flapping, they lifted themselves, the sleigh, and a startled Santa straight up into the air. Looking back, Santa saw the other reindeer beating their own stubby wings and following him into the sky.