Rufus M.

by Eleanor Estes

  In front of the drugstore he couldn’t resist taking one or two good slides back and forth on the thick green ice that had piled up there. Many colors were reflected in the ice, red and blue ones from the big globes in the drugstore window and purple ones from the street lamp. “Well, I better go now and get the wood,” said Rufus, and he made ready to take one last good slide.

  He ran a way to gain momentum and then he flopped down on his sled. As he was skimming along the ice, his eyes watching the glassy surface go slipping by, he thought he saw something shiny, something shiny frozen in the ice. He thought it looked like money. It looked like a lot of money—not just two cents.

  “Probably some old bottle tops,” he told himself in order to keep his hopes under control. Nevertheless, he dragged his feet behind him so that he would slow up and he edged his sled backward toward the spot where he thought he had seen something shiny in the ice. He dug his toes and his fingers into the ice, getting a grip to pull himself backward. It might have been a mirage such as people see in the desert. They think they see something they want to see, like water or a city, when it isn’t really there at all. But he hadn’t even been thinking about money. He had been thinking only about getting the wood. Where were the shiny things? Maybe he had imagined them. No! There they were! There they were!

  Rufus stopped his sled. He stopped right over the shiny things so he could look at them from between the front runners of his sled. He stared at them for a long, long time. They were money. They were not bottle tops. There were two quarters, three dimes, and two nickels, spread out, frozen solid beneath the surface of the ice. Rufus felt as though he were glued to this spot. He gazed at them, fascinated, taking them in. The coins were there, and they couldn’t get away. Nobody else could get them, either. He, Rufus, was on top of them on his own sled, nailing them down, laying claim to them like the miners in the Alaska goldfields.

  For a long time Rufus was content just to look at the coins. The flickering street lamp made the shadows on the ice ripple like the sea, and Rufus studied the coins as he might study a little school of fish.

  “Criminenty!” he murmured. He wiped his nose on the back of his black stocking mitten. “If it’s only real,” he said.

  He closed his eyes for a second. Then he opened them, first one and then the other. The money was still there all right, two nickels, three dimes, and two quarters. And he saw them with both his eyes open and even with just one eye open. He could buy the dinner with this much money, he thought. He laughed to himself when he thought of how surprised all the Moffats would be when he staggered in with a load of food.

  “How’m I gonna get it out?” he asked himself.

  He didn’t have his knife with him. If he went home for it, somebody else might come along, somebody who did have his knife with him, and dig up this money. “Let’s see now,” he muttered. He’d have to figure some way of getting this gold, this money, out of the ice.

  Supposing he left his sled right over it, covering up the spot where the money lay embedded in the ice. No, that was a foolish idea. The sled would just attract attention and, besides, somebody might take his sled into the bargain and he didn’t want to lose that. “I know what,” he said to himself. He took off his black stocking mitten and tossed it about three yards beyond the money. People would be so busy seeing his mitten and wondering what it was that they wouldn’t see the money. “A decoy,” he murmured, using a word he had heard Joey say lately.

  Rufus hoped he wouldn’t lose his mitten, either, but certainly with all this much money at stake he would have to risk something. He wondered if he had placed it in the right spot. He backed off a few paces and studied the decoy. Maybe a few inches farther . . . He picked his mitten up, wiped his nose on the back of it again, and again tossed it carelessly down so it would look as though someone really had dropped it. He took one more look at the money. It was safe. It was frozen deeply in the ice and it must have been here for some days. So far no one else had seen it. Now he’d run quickly, get the ice pick and the chisel, his knife . . . quick . . .

  That was what he did. He picked up his sled and tore. He belly flopped up the street and across the empty lot so fast he didn’t see Mr. Price coming until he was right up to him. Mr. Price had to leap into the air to avoid being knocked down.

  When Rufus reached home, he could hear Mama and Joey still banging pipes down in the cellar. Janey was shaking down the cold ashes in the kitchen range, getting it ready for a new fire.

  “I’ll bring home some wood in a minute,” Rufus yelled at her as he banged out of the house with the chisel and his knife. All the while he kept asking himself, “Are they safe?”

  Fortunately it was really very dark now, although the lights in the drugstore window cast a glow that lit up Rufus’s mitten. Nobody had taken that anyway. If only nobody had taken the money. “Be there! Be there!” Rufus ordered, hardly daring to look. Now here was where the money should be, and here it was! Here it was! The same thing—two quarters, three dimes, and a couple of nickels. No one else had seen them. Rufus sat on his sled and he scraped and dug, chipped and filed, and finally he had them all out. He warmed the coins in his chubby, chapped fist.

  While Rufus was standing in the red glow from the window, warming his money, Spec Cullom, the iceman, came along. What luck for him, out of all the people in Cranbury, to be the one to come along right now! Because in the wintertime Spec Cullom was also a plumber as well as the iceman. Not many people bought ice in the wintertime and a great many people needed help with their water pipes at this season. He had his plumbing kit with him right now, as a matter of fact. He stepped into the drugstore. Rufus heard him ask for a package of Bull Durham tobacco before he was inside the door.

  Rufus waited for Spec Cullom to come out. Rufus remembered the day the iceman had given him an empty Bull Durham tobacco pouch. “Here, fella,” he had said. “Put this in your pocket.” Rufus kept it there along with the postcard from the soldier named Al. It gave his pocket a faint smell of tobacco that he liked. Rufus looked in the drugstore window. The iceman was drinking a soda. Then he came out and he saw Rufus.

  “Hello, fella,” he said, starting to spar around a bit.

  Rufus didn’t spar back this time. His fist was full of money wanting to be spent. “Look,” he said, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “I dug this up out of the ice.”

  “Lucky fella,” said Spec Cullom, shoving his hat back on his head.

  “How much of this money would it take to fix our pipe? It busted,” said Rufus.

  Spec rolled a cigarette, wetting the edge of it down with his tongue. “How much do you think it’s worth?” he asked.

  Rufus looked at his money, studying what he was going to do with each piece. It was worth more than a nickel to have pipes fixed. He knew that. If he gave Spec one of the big pieces he might not have enough left to buy the supper. However, a pipe is important. He held up one of the quarters and looked up at him anxiously.

  But Spec shook his head. Reluctantly Rufus added the other quarter. Now he could buy hardly any supper. But Spec Cullom shook his head in disgust. “Five cents does it, fella,” he said.

  “A nickel?” asked Rufus incredulously. He picked one of these coins out and gave it to the iceman.

  “That does it,” said Spec, and he flipped the coin in the air, caught it, and stuck it in his pocket. “I’ll drop right over,” he added.

  “Will you tell Mama I paid already?” asked Rufus.

  “Right, Boss. So long!” And he winked at Rufus and hastened up the street with a careless, loose stride.

  “S’long,” said Rufus, looking after him admiringly and smiling to himself.

  Then he crossed the street to the grocery store with as loose and careless a gait as he could muster with a sled to pull. Rufus laid all his money on the counter. He bought two packages of kindling wood, for of course he had given up the idea of going way over to Second Avenue after all that had happened. He bought a small sackful of good, har
d nut coal. “Not that soft by-two-minutes kind,” he said. “We have some of that.” He bought some apples, some oranges, some eggs, and some potatoes, and he went home feeling like Santa Claus.

  This time when he reached home Mama and Joey were in the kitchen, too. Somebody else was down in the cellar, bang-banging at the pipes, and Rufus knew who that was. Spec Cullom!

  Joey and Mama had to heat some water to thaw out the pipes. “Now what am I goin’ to start this old fire with?” Joey asked in perplexity. And right then was the time for Rufus to drag in his sledful of treasures.

  “I found the money in the ice!” he yelled, jumping up and down so hard that Spec Cullom came dashing up the stairs to see what was wrong now.

  Joey lost no time in making the fires, and Mama heated the water to thaw the pipes. It wasn’t long before Spec had the break soldered together and then Mama went to the faucet to turn on the water.

  Cr-unch! Cr-eak! Cr-rack! The water was trying to come through the ice. Then with terrific spasms that shook the faucet the water did burst out of the pipe, first in rusty spurts and then in a good clear stream!

  Spec Cullom left and Mama started to cook the supper. She made lots of apple fritters, using the supplies that Rufus had brought home. “Tell it again!” first one and then another asked Rufus. And he had to tell again the whole story of how he had found the money in the ice.

  Naturally all the Moffats were excited about it.

  “Imagine finding so much money in the ice!” marveled Jane, and she slid over the ice very carefully for some days, hoping she, too, would find a treasure. As for Rufus, he was the happiest of all. He went to bed that night right after supper, thinking about his luck. Finding the money in the ice more than made up for the disappointment about the Indians. He really felt like a hero. He hadn’t had to hold his finger in the leak in the pipe. But he had come home with the money and everybody had had a good dinner. Furthermore, now the house was good and warm.

  8

  Rufus’s Beans

  Rufus sat in the third seat in the third row in Room Three. His head was bent low over his arithmetic paper. He was trying to find the least common denominator. He heard someone come into the classroom and he looked up thinking more about how he could make six go into four than about who was at the door. Then he jumped and almost upset his inkwell. There was Mama walking across the front of the room from the door to the teacher’s desk with those short hurried steps of hers. Rufus was really shocked. Here was Mama in Room Three! Am I crazy? thought Rufus. He closed his eyes and then opened them again, half expecting the apparition of Mama in the schoolroom to disappear while he had them shut.

  But it didn’t. Mama was at the desk now. She said something in a low voice to the teacher. Then she turned her head, took in the room with a quick glance, found Rufus, smiled at him, and hurried out.

  Well! Rufus bent his head very low over his arithmetic paper again. The boy across the aisle, Hughie Pudge, whispered, “Hey, Rufe, that was your mother.” And the whole class looked at Rufus. After a while they stopped looking, for Rufus kept his eyes right on his arithmetic paper. Mama had come into Room Three. All right. What of it? That’s the way he was trying to act.

  Once he had seen Mama come walking across the Green. That time if he had been thinking where Mama was he’d have thought she was at home in the kitchen. But he hadn’t been thinking and suddenly he happened to meet her on the Green. He was quite taken aback that time. Away from home Mama looked so familiar and yet like someone you didn’t know, too. But to see Mama come into Room Three in the middle of the arithmetic lesson was even more of a shock than seeing her come across the Green in her blue suit.

  The morning wore on. Fractions gave way to spelling, spelling to reading “By the Shores of Gitche Gumee,” Gitche Gumee to singing “Hats Off, Hats Off, the Flag Is Passing By,” and, when school dismissed, Rufus was still asking himself why Mama had come into the schoolroom.

  The teacher called Rufus to the desk and told him Mama had left a message for him. She and Sylvie had had to go to New York unexpectedly, and Jane’s and Joey’s teachers had been told this, too, and they were all to play around the house and not roam all over town. Jane was going to fix the lunch and the supper.

  Jane was waiting for Rufus, Joey was waiting for both of them, and Nancy was waiting for Jane, so they all walked up the street together, talking excitedly about how Mama had gone into every room where there was a Moffat.

  “Why’d they have to go to New York?” Rufus finally thought to ask.

  Whenever Mama had gone to New York in the past she had prepared for the excursion a long time in advance. She would take some of Sylvie’s programs, an example of Rufus’s left-handed writing, one of Joey’s good Latin papers, and a robin drawn by Jane. Everything to show the people in New York what four smart children she had.

  “Yes,” said Jane. “And why do you think they went all of a sudden?”

  “Probably wanted to go to the zoo,” Rufus speculated.

  “Aw, zoo nothin’,” said Joey. “Said she had to go to New York to see Tonty. She’s sick. She sent Mama the tickets for her and Sylvie. Special delivery.”

  “Oh,” said Rufus. Tonty was Mama’s sister and she lived in New York. All the Moffats had been to New York at least once to see Tonty.

  “Gee,” said Jane. “I hope Mama and Sylvie don’t fall into the hands of counterfeiters, the way they sometimes do in books.”

  “Aw, they wouldn’t,” said Rufus in disgust. “They know money from paper.”

  “It doesn’t matter if they know money from paper,” said Jane. “What they have to know is regular people from counterfeiters, so they don’t fall into their hands.”

  “I wonder if they’ll go to the Hippodrome,” said Nancy. “I went there once. Saw elephants on the stage. Well, so long,” she said, turning into her house.

  “So long,” said Jane and Joe and Rufus, and they crawled through the gate in the fence that separated their yard from Nancy’s and went home to lunch.

  Mama had left some lentil soup for them on the stove. They ate it and while they were eating Jane said, “Listen! Let’s be good to Mama. The minute she says to any one of us, ‘Go to the store,’ we’ll go. We won’t say, ‘Aw, you go, Rufe,’ or ‘You go, Joe.’ Whoever she asks to go, that person, go!”

  “Yeah,” said Joe.

  Rufus was busy scraping his plate clean, but with the spoon in his mouth he nodded his head up and down, too. They all felt good, full of fine intentions, and then they all went back to school.

  Rufus hung his hat in the cloakroom on peg three. He went into the schoolroom and sat down in his seat. The first thing this class did in the afternoon was geography.

  “Where does the River Penobscot rise?” the teacher asked. “Hands?”

  A lot of hands were raised, but before the teacher could call on anybody the door opened and a man came into the schoolroom. This was not the music supervisor, the writing supervisor, nor the Superintendent of Schools. And this was not a soldier to tell some of his experiences. This was an ordinary man. Mama had come into the classroom earlier. Maybe this was somebody’s father. But he wasn’t. He was a man who started right in talking about gardens.

  Everybody in the class should raise a Victory Garden, he said; plant seeds and raise vegetables, so this country would have food enough for the armed forces and the stricken nations, and thus help win the war. He stated that he would go up one street and down another teaching the people how to plant their gardens and how to take care of them. “My name is Hogan,” he said. “Be looking for me. I’ll be there.” And he left.

  The man’s plan sounded good to Rufus. In the past the four Moffats had planted small gardens and sometimes they had had real radishes, carrots, and lettuce from them that they could eat. He could hardly wait to get home and start his Victory Garden, especially after the teacher passed around bright packages of vegetable seeds to all the children. They were two cents a package and the children could br
ing the pennies for them any time during the week. Rufus chose beans, string beans.

  When school was out, Joey and Jane met Rufus again. Nancy Stokes ran up. Everybody in the school yard was talking about the man. Rufus found that he had been in every room telling everybody about Victory Gardens. Joe and Jane and Nancy had bright packages of seeds, too. But they were not supposed to plant them until the man came to their house, looked their yard over, and gave advice.

  The children hurried home as fast as they could. The man might come to their house first. They sat down on the front porch and waited for the man. “My name is Hogan,” he’d said in every room. “I’ll be there,” he’d said. The Moffats waited for him but he didn’t come. They waited at least fifteen minutes, jumping up every few seconds and running to the street to look for him. They hoped that by now he was at least next door. But no, he was nowhere in sight. They grew tired of waiting. Of course, they reasoned, the man couldn’t be everywhere at once. He probably began over on the other side of town or up on Shingle Hill. Why wait for this man any longer? They knew how to plant gardens—dig up the earth, pick out the chunks, the roots, the rocks, and the boulders, drop in the seeds, water everything, cover up the seeds, pat the earth down, put up signs telling what was planted where, and let it grow.

  Why wait for this man any longer? they asked themselves again, running to the corner and giving him one last chance. At this rate spring would be over and summer gone while they sat here and waited for a man to show them how to plant. That man was good for people who did not know how to plant, they decided, but they did know how. Moreover, consider the nice surprise for Mama and Sylvie when they returned tonight to know the gardens had been planted!

  Rufus was the most impatient. He looked at his big fat envelope of beans. Lovely bright green vines and beans were painted on the cover. “Wait, if you want to, for the man,” he said. “I’m diggin’ now.”