Raising Cubby (12 page)
Authors: John Elder Robison
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Autism, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #Personal Memoir
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
.
Like every explorer, Santa had heard of unicorns and winged beasts. But there’s a big difference between just reading about them and actually flying with mythical creatures. He and his crewmen held on tight. It was a long way down, and they were moving fast. It was as if the reindeer knew the way to shore all by themselves
.
Soon they came within sight of land and alighted at the boundary of grass and snow. The reindeer seemed tired, so Santa turned them out to pasture. Five minutes later, they were contentedly chewing grass with no sign that they’d just flown across fifty miles of ocean with several sleighs full of sailors in tow
.
The next day, the ship’s carpenter made wheels for the sleighs, and the reindeer pulled them all the way home to Boston. They arrived just in time for Christmas, and to celebrate his safe return home, Santa and his men spent the holidays delivering presents to the needy children of Boston
.
That was how Christmas got started, but it almost ended as quickly as it began. After the first Christmas, most of Santa’s former crewmen returned to sailing. He could never gather and hand out all those presents alone, but he was serious about his promise, so he started looking for help
.
“Where did he look?” Cubby asked.
I told him that Grandpa Santa had opened a bar on the Boston waterfront called the Sailor’s Rest. In fact, it’s still there today. Cubby and I visited it on a number of occasions. We sat beneath the famous lighted Budweiser sign and admired Santa’s old whaling
harpoon that hung in a place of honor above the cash register. He remembered that as I continued my story …
Seamen of all sorts frequented the Sailor’s Rest. That was where Santa found the answer to his crew problems. They’d arrived by the greatest of good fortune on a cargo ship from Finland: elves. The Finns had been using elves as crew on their ships for years. The elves were small, so they could go places regular sailors couldn’t. They didn’t eat as much as full-size people either, and that made them less expensive to keep. Santa signed up an elvish crew and off he went!
He sure made a strange sight when he headed out for Christmas: a fat old sea captain on a sleigh pulled by reindeer with a pack of seedy-looking elves following in his wake, handing out presents everywhere they went. The kids loved him, and the grown-ups just stared in wonder and shock
.
Santa’s fame grew with every passing year. By the turn of the century, he had a team of one hundred elves, and he could barely keep up with all the deliveries. Santa kept his presents in a warehouse right behind Boston’s Black Falcon Terminal. It was filled to the brim with toys the elves had liberated from ships that passed through the Port of Boston
.
The demand for toys is one of those things that never stop growing. When I was a kid, we played with sticks and rocks, and we were glad to have them. By the time Cubby came along, it took a hundred dollars’ worth of the latest toys just to keep a kid in a sandbox.
I don’t know where parents would be if not for Santa. We sure are lucky his kids continued the Christmas tradition, even though the reindeer are only a memory. Years passed, and Donner, Blitzen, and the rest of the team got old and died. As they passed on, the
memory of flight seemed to die with them. The younger reindeer didn’t even have wing buds! By the turn of the century, reindeer didn’t fly at all, but the original herd continued to grow, and there were more elves on the job every season
.
Today Santa’s great-great-grandson handles Christmas. He’s no longer in Boston, because he had trouble with the law over all the toys in the Black Falcon warehouse. There were allegations that some might be stolen, and of course there was the matter of customs duty. To avoid those troubles, he moved to Rotterdam, the busiest seaport in the world. There, from his perch atop a container crane, he spends the entire summer unloading ships and picking off the very best toys from the shipping fleets of the world. He calls what he does “liberation for the children,” while insurers write checks for theft and pilferage. Meanwhile, the elves stack the containers of toys and spend the whole year getting ready for an orgy of gift giving every December 25
.