Rufus M.

by Eleanor Estes

  Absentmindedly, Jane scrutinized the barn . . . weather-beaten, wide open at the front. The doors had been taken off years ago and were propped against the barn on the honeysuckle side. Therefore, you could always see inside, though there wasn’t much to see. The main thing was an ancient sleigh, an old-fashioned sleigh, not very large. It was already in the barn when the Moffats moved here from the Yellow House on New Dollar Street.

  Jane began to think about the sleigh. Really, a sleigh like this should be in a museum.

  It was then that the idea of the Moffats having a museum popped into her head. A museum in the barn! A special museum, a collection of things that had been important to one, some, or all of the Moffats. THE MOFFAT MUSEUM!

  In this town named Cranbury, where three thousand people lived—it said so on a sign at the Cumberland Avenue Bridge: ENTERING CRANBURY, POPULATION 3,000—there was not one museum! There were schools, stores, houses, the library, the Town Hall, a green with two churches on it; and there were little brooks, large fields, some cows, and plenty of places to go to, take walks to, or take a trolley car to: Savin Rock, Lighthouse Point, and more. But no museum of any sort . . . art, science, or anything! “There are museums,” Joey had told her, “for every known thing somewhere in the world.”

  “Museums,” mused Jane, “for every known thing!” She remembered a teacher she once had who said there was a museum in a town in England just for shoes, shoes from the earliest time to the present.

  Joey liked best a museum in Washington: “first” things . . . first airplane, first steam locomotive, first trolley, everything “first”!

  “Ah!” murmured Jane, standing up now and going close to the barn. She addressed it. “Barn! You may soon become the first and only museum in Cranbury. No museum here? We’ll change that! ‘First’ things or any treasured things of any Moffat!”

  Wait till the boys came home and heard this! Wow! Where were they, anyway? Here was a museum all in her head. She needed Joey and Rufus or someone to tell her plan to. Oh, if only Nancy Stokes, her best friend, had not gone off to Maine so early! Nancy’s house was on the next street, but her apple orchard garden and backyard and Jane’s backyard were separated only by a green wooden fence. Nancy’s mother had let the girls take one wide green board out, put hinges on it, and it had become a secret door between the two yards.

  Oh, how Jane missed Nancy! Missed seeing her squeeze through the secret door, missed hearing her whistle—“Peewee!” like the sound of the peewee bird.

  No sense wishing for Nancy. She just wasn’t here. Anyway, the boys were more important right now. She needed other Moffats.

  She looked past the house and to the street. No sign of them.

  This place in front of the barn and near their neighbors’ fence was a perfect place to view whoever might come to visit the museum. Jane smiled happily. People might come from far away, from Montowese, or even from England, to see how a museum in Cranbury, Connecticut, compared with a shoe museum somewhere in their land!

  Jane stretched out her arms as though welcoming a large part of the population to The Moffat Museum . . . if news of it got around, that is.

  “Oh, pooh!” she said. “This museum is really for us Moffats, to have in it loved things, really just for us and a friend or two, and their friends’ friends.”

  Again Jane held her arms out to extend a welcome to a friend or a friend of a friend.

  In the distance she could hear the tinkling sound of a ragman and his voice, as from far, far away, yet coming nearer: “Cash paid for rags . . . cash paid for rags . . .” She thought nothing of it, no more than of the humming of the bees she had been listening to.

  What was nice was that while she was stretching out her arms, welcoming an unknown into The Moffat Museum, her two brothers did come riding lickety-split up the narrow walk. Rufus rang the bell and rang the bell, urging Joey to go faster and faster!

  You’d have thought he was going to ride right through her and into the barn, out the other end, and then through the secret gate. But he put on his brakes in the nick of time, making the dirt fly.

  “Don’t do that,” said Jane. “It scares me. Feel my heart, how it’s pounding. I have gooseflesh, see?”

  “Oinck! Oinck!” said Rufus. “But what were you doing there, standing like a statue, holding out your arms?”

  “Statue!” exclaimed Jane. “You’re getting close. What do you see there? Look!” She pointed to the barn.

  “The barn!” said the boys. “So what!”

  “Oh, no!” said Jane. “What you see there is . . . or will be soon, when we get going . . . a museum! The Moffat Museum!”

  The boys liked the idea right away. Both of them did.

  “Yes!” said Jane eagerly. “A museum! The one and only museum in the town of Cranbury.”

  “Population circa MMM,” Rufus put in.

  “It’s going to be a museum just for Moffat things!” said Jane.

  “Bikey!” said Rufus. He ran to the side of the yard behind the raspberry bushes, where he had a garage for his special things. But Bikey, as they all fondly called this bicycle, was gone!

  Silence! Then into the silence came the sound of the ragman’s tinkling little tin bells. Suddenly the bells stopped. A horse neighed and stomped his feet. The ragman stopped his chanting, “Cash paid for rags!” He bought more things than old rags, though. Junk, just junk, like an old baby carriage, or an old bicycle?

  Some people might call Bikey junk. That’s what the children thought.

  They rushed to the street. They were right! There was Mama about to hand Bikey over to the ragman as a piece of “junk.”

  “Ten cents,” they heard the man say.

  “All right,” they heard Mama say.

  “Oh, no!” shouted the three children. “Mama! Don’t sell our bike! It’s valuable. Every one of us has learned to ride on it! It’s like a pet!”

  “Here!” said Rufus, stripping off his sailor blouse. “Take this instead!”

  Mama laughed. But she gave the ragman back his ten cents, and he gave her back the bike, and off he went with his bells tinkling in the breeze and his singsong voice chanting, “Cash paid for rags . . . cash paid for rags . . .”

  Mama apologized. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Bikey is for the museum we are making our barn into,” Jane explained, so that Mama would not feel guilty. “You didn’t know about it. Neither did Rufus and Joey until now. Bikey is going to be one of the most important things in the museum!”

  Mama came around the house, paused on the back stoop, looked at the barn, and said, “A good idea! A very good idea! I’m glad you rescued Bikey . . . a fine artifact!”

  “What’s an artifact, Mama?” Rufus demanded.

  “Oh, things, just . . . things,” said Mama as she went inside.

  At first Rufus was going to put Bikey right inside the barn, but Jane stopped him. “We have to pull the sleigh out to make room for all the other things we’ll be adding to the collection. Hide Bikey way back in his raspberry garage where he will be safe. He’s an artifact now.”

  This famous bike! Every member of the family, beginning with Sylvie, the real owner—a Christmas present when she was ten—then Joey, then Jane, and finally Rufus, had learned how to ride on it!

  Even Mama herself had once ridden old Bikey down the narrow walk leading from the front porch to the street to see if she could still ride a bicycle! Although it was not the kind that she had learned on, with a big wheel in front and a small one behind, nevertheless she rode it from the porch to the street and did not once let it wobble onto the lawn, nor did she once fall off! The children were proud. One wheel bent, one tire flat, yet Mama rode it!

  Well, Bikey was saved! Now to get on with the museum! Sleigh next. Out it had to come to be an outside museum attraction. “People will spot the sleigh,” said Joey, “and say, ‘Oh-ho! Here is The Moffat Museum!’”

  Even though the sleigh was not a Moffat sleigh, it didn’t matter.
At one time or another, all of them had sat in it, Rufus the most often. He’d take the crumbling leather reins in his hands and say, “Giddyap! Giddyap!” to an imaginary pony, wish that a real pony, even an old one, had also been left behind by this sleigh’s former owner. Catherine-the-cat liked this old sleigh, too. It was a place to get away from them all, to curl up on the seat, listen for a bird, or take a long snooze inside the rounded front of the sleigh . . . hidden. So of course this sleigh should be part of the museum!

  Now then, to get the sleigh out!

  “Let’s get going!” said Rufus. “People can sit in the sleigh waiting for their turn to go into the museum. I like this museum plan, Jane.”

  Jane smiled.

  Joey got a long piece of strong clothesline from the back entry. He tied it around Rufus’s waist. Joey and Jane pushed. Rufus pulled. At last the sleigh began to budge!

  “Been in here a long time,” said Rufus, puffing and red in the face. “Circa one hundred years maybe. Now I’m its pony! Neigh!” he said.

  All of a sudden the sleigh got going. Out it went! It slid down the slight wooden slope at the door and was now out in the open air! They settled it at a good angle near Mrs. Price’s honeysuckle vines. Anyone sitting in it could see who was coming and also overhear the comments of visitors inside.

  There would be visitors, of course. News gets around.

  The sleigh had cobwebs in its corners. They dusted it; they rubbed it with stove polish. You could see yourself reflected in it. Also, now you could see the fine line of golden filigree that wound around the sleigh. It was pretty!

  Jane said, “When people come . . . if people, friends of friends, come . . . someone should always sit in the sleigh and keep order from up there. You know how people are! Even in church. Push, shove to get the prettiest geranium on Easter Sunday? Disgustin’!”

  “I’ll be the person that sits,” said Rufus happily. He climbed into the sleigh and sat. He held the crumbling leather reins in his suntanned little fists. “Ho-ho! ‘Over the hills we go . . .’” he sang. “Goes fine for a circa eighteen hundred sleigh.”

  “Where did you get that circa business?” asked Jane.

  “From Mama,” said Rufus. “And she should know! Grew up in New York, where they have museum after museum after museum . . . all sorts. Well, Mama said if the people who run a museum don’t know the exact date of something or other, they say circa this or circa that. Too lazy to go into a library, ask the library lady, or even go down into its cellar themselves, where they keep ancient books, and search for the real date. Circa covers everything.”

  “I like an exact date, if possible,” said Joey. He crawled under the sleigh to see if the creator of this fine old sleigh may have signed it: “Made by so and so . . .” and have given an exact date. But he wriggled himself out and reluctantly put in his little notebook: The Moffat Museum sleigh, circa nineteenth century.

  This was a new little notebook he had just bought. He labeled it The Moffat Museum, commenced on this day, June 14, 1919. “No circa about this fact,” he said. “And no need to run down into cellars of libraries to look it up!”

  “I like circa better anyway,” said Rufus. “When we are dead and gone,” he mused happily, “and people are excavating in Cranbury, they will come upon this museum. And they will put in their books, ‘An ancient museum named Moffat, circa twentieth century.’”

  “Circa early twentieth century,” Jane ventured to say. “But when we put the art and other ‘first’ things inside, don’t put circa on everything,” she pleaded. “Ignorant people, even friends of friends, who don’t know Latin, might think it stands for ‘circus’ and ask, ‘Where are the clowns? The acrobats on the high trapeze?’”

  “The tigers? The lions? An elephant?” Rufus added.

  They all laughed. “But anyway,” said Jane, “it’s time to get on with placing other things besides Bikey inside.”

  “Just one thing more this circa nineteenth-century sleigh needs,” said Rufus, “is a lap robe for me to sling over my legs in cold weather, ten below . . . A blizzard maybe,” he added.

  “Oh, I have it! I have it!” said Jane. “Stay still, Rufus! Still as a statue! I’ll be right back!”

  Jane ran indoors and grabbed a little rag rug she had crocheted one summer. She had meant it to be put on the floor to keep Mama’s feet warm. But the rug was too humped up in the middle and never did flatten down, so it stayed on the brown corduroy morris chair in the dining room. Catherine-the-cat loved it because it was close to Mama, the only person in the whole world she really loved.

  Now Jane tucked the rug in the rounded front part of the sleigh. There it stayed.

  Next, they swept the barn. Jane wouldn’t go in until she was sure that no spiders or centipedes were creeping around. Now, Bikey, of course, the first of all first things, went in, and they leaned him against the wall near the front, where he probably would be the first of all firsts to be seen.

  On the ledge that wound around the barn halfway up the wall, they put many other things: a conch shell, huge with a lovely pink inside, in which you could hear the ocean roaring if you held it close to your ear; Indian arrowheads found up on West Rock near Judge’s Cave; then rocks that Joey had collected that had mica on them; and next some flat cases, covered with glass, with insects mounted on pins inside them. One was named Musca domestica. “Ordinary flies,” said Rufus. “You see how you have to know Latin to know anything!” Miss Nellie Buckle had given these to the Moffats. They liked them but kept them in the cellar so Catherine would not sit on them and study the flies in there and, clawing, break the glass.

  Joey labeled everything. The way he could print! But he didn’t have to print any card for the next thing. Rufus had dragged out from his raspberry garage an old friend of his. This was a cardboard Uneeda Biscuit boy in a yellow slicker, faded, true, but still holding out his hand, offering a biscuit. This figure had been on the back of Rufus’s bike on many trips. He was a friend. They placed him near the front of the museum, on the left, near Bikey. He seemed to be welcoming people.

  They worked fast because Joey had a certain idea in his mind, and he wanted these inside “first things” put in in a hurry. He had told them about one famous museum in Washington, where, besides the first locomotive and the first airplane, there were lots of clothes worn by famous ladies of the past. He hadn’t liked this part of the museum and wanted to get on to the first steamboat.

  But Jane said some people like famous old clothes even if he didn’t. She asked Mama if they could have the little black trunk that was down in the cellar of the house. It was filled with famous old costumes from one play or another: a king, a prince, a firefly dress with little gold bells sewn around the bottom. Mama said they could exhibit it, that it was good to have it aired out. This they did and put it, open, in the back of the museum.

  “Look! Look, look!” said Jane when they reached the bottom of the trunk. “The heads of the Three Bears!” All of them had been in that play. Joey tried on his head because he had been the Papa Bear. “Gr-r-r!” he said and made Jane and Rufus laugh. Then he tacked the heads on the wall above the trunk, and they looked very funny there. People would laugh. So, after all, the “first” old clothes section was a success. Even Joey agreed.

  Jane looked around the museum then. “You know what’s the matter here?” she said. “No real art! No real paintings or statues!”

  Rufus objected. “The cardboard boy is art. He is a cardboard statue.”

  Jane laughed. “Right!” she said. “But I mean a hard statue or a painting. Real art . . . !”

  Then Rufus said, “A coincidents!”

  Sylvie was coming singing up the walk, and she was the artist of the family. Suddenly she stopped her singing between a tra and a la, and the children saw Sylvie and their neighbor Mrs. Price in earnest conversation. The children went closer and listened.

  “Here it is!” said Mrs. Price. She handed an artist’s bamboo easel over the hedge to Sylvie.
It was not a toy; it was a real big easel. Moreover, on its ledge was a canvas, empty, inviting someone to paint something on it, a cow in a pasture perhaps . . . anything.

  Sylvie was ecstatic. “Thank you! Thank you!” she exclaimed and would have rushed indoors with her gift, but had to listen to a little explaining, which Rufus and Jane and Joey were now near enough to hear also.

  Mrs. Price said, “I was in my attic, poking around. You should see my attic someday . . . if you’re not afraid of bats, that is. I spotted this easel over there in a dark corner. Wilfred, my husband, used to paint. But he hasn’t for years . . . lost the knack. So I said to myself, ‘One of those Moffats next door must paint, or would, if they had an easel in the house!’” Then Mrs. Price went into her own house.

  The children rushed to Sylvie. They grabbed her and the easel. In a few moments they told her about The Moffat Museum and about the need for art. Sylvie understood; she left the easel for the others to set up, ran indoors, and came back in about fifteen minutes with a painting of a red fox with a bushy tail.

  The children had placed the easel near the front of the museum. Now they placed the fox painting on it. It was the best place in the whole museum for the picture, because when the sun was shining, as it was now, it would shine on that big, bushy red tail. It brightened everything up and looked lovely. Then Sylvie ran away; she had so many things to do to get ready for her wedding at the end of June to the Reverend Mr. Ray Abbot!

  So now there was art in the museum. While Joey was making the sign, ART, Jane remembered another thing she had for this section. She flew upstairs to her room, but came down carefully carrying a miniature art gallery she had made out of a wooden orange crate. Rufus had brought this home from the grocery store. It had been pitched out, thrown away. People throw away the best things! he had thought. This is good for something.