He liked to listen to stories, and the stories that his parents and his brothers and sisters told him and read to him were what had kept him alive, he was certain, during those first years. For he made the stories work for him.
He told how he made the characters—Peter Rabbit and the Gingerbread Man and Little Bo Peep and all the rest of them—keep on working overtime after he had heard the stories. He would lie in bed, he said, and relive the stories over and over again.
"But after a while, those stories got pretty threadbare. So I improved on them. I invented stories. I mixed up the characters. For some reason or other Peter Rabbit and the Gingerbread Man always were my heroes. They would go on the strangest odysseys and meet all these other characters, and together they would have adventures that were plain impossible.
"Except," he added, "they never seemed impossible to me."
Finally he had got to be the age where kids usually start off to school. Cooper's Ma had begun to worry about what they should do for his education. But Doc Ames, who was fairly sure Cooper wouldn't live long enough for an education to do him any good, had advised that they teach him whatever he might be interested in learning. It turned out that about all Cooper was interested in was reading. So they taught him how to read. Now he didn't have to have anyone read him stories any more, but could read them for himself. He read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and Lewis Carroll's works and a lot of other books.
So now he had more characters, and Peter Rabbit had some rather horrible moments reconciling his world with the world of Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the Mock Turtle. But he finally worked in, and the imagined adventuring got crazier and crazier.
"It's a wonder," said Cooper Jackson, "that I didn't die laughing. But to me it wasn't funny. It was dead serious."
"What do you read now, Cooper?" Charley asked.
"Oh, the newspapers," Cooper said, "and the news magazines and stuff like that."
"That's not what I mean," Charley explained. "What do you read for relaxation? What takes the place of Peter Rabbit?"