Rufus M.

by Eleanor Estes

  It had been good for something all right. Jane had turned it upright and transformed it into a two-storied little art gallery. She made tiny easels out of matchsticks and flour-and-water paste. Then she painted little pictures to put on each one of them. Best of all, long ago Mama had given her two little oriental rugs that had come with the boxes of Velvet tobacco Papa used to smoke in his pipes. Jane put one on each floor. They still smelled of tobacco. The boys liked the little gallery.

  “Smell!” she said to them. “Smell of tobacco?”

  They smelled. “Right!” they said.

  Jane went outside, stood a few feet away from the museum and studied it from every angle, bending this way and that, the way an artist studies his painting. She said, “Pretend it isn’t our museum, that it is someone else’s or some famous one in some big city! Or . . . pretend you’re on a guided tour like, for instance, the one led by Mr. Pennypepper, the superintendent of schools, that he has once a year. Why! It will be this very Saturday! Well . . . pretend that the thought pops into his head on this week’s tour: ‘Well now, what do you know? There’s a museum here. Let’s investigate!’”

  “Criminenty!” said Rufus. The way Jane spoke, you’d think that what she was imagining was real! He tore to the street. “Not coming yet!” he reported.

  Jane laughed. “I said I was just pretending. Anyway, how did it strike you . . . The Moffat Museum . . . from out there?”

  “I don’t need to pretend I’m somebody else, or have to gallivant to the street to know what’s wrong with this museum,” said Joey. “It needs science! Astronomy! A meteor! One of the first things you see when you go inside a great museum in New York is a beautiful meteor . . . only they call it meteorite. And guess where we can find one of those!”

  “In the Brick Lot on New Dollar Street!” Rufus and Jane said together. “Two of them side by side!”

  “I’m going to keep on calling them meteors,” Rufus said. “We always called them meteors. Why change?”

  “Right,” said Joey.

  “They’ll be awfully heavy, and they’re big!” said Jane.

  “I’ll get my old express wagon and string it up behind my other better one,” Rufus said.

  “Yeah,” said Joey, laughing. “A freight train of wagons with a mighty meteor stretching from front of wagon one to back of wagon two.”

  “And we won’t be greedy,” said Jane. “Just take one. Other kids like to sit on them. I know the Pyes do. So we’ll leave one behind for them to sit on and think and wonder . . .”

  “We’ll put our meteor outside, opposite the sleigh, on the other side of the museum,” said Joey. He was very excited at the thought of this meteor.

  His eagerness was catching. “Yes!” said Jane. “People coming here, after having seen the sights inside, can sit on it, rest, eat an apple. But remember, they’ll be allowed to eat only outside, on the meteor section of the museum.”

  “. . . and not be allowed to stick chewing gum on this meteor that fell on New Dollar Street circa . . . hmm,” said Rufus. “And not chip their initials into it! Not paint hearts and arrows on it . . . nothing!”

  “Maybe,” mused Jane, “some people, some older people, will come at night. Maybe big people with telescopes, look for shooting stars, and let us take a turn at looking. Nice people would let us,” she said.

  The expedition was ready now to set forth, the two wagons knotted together with more of the old clothesline.

  They went down Ashbellows Place to Elm Street, where they turned right and were soon nearing New Dollar Street, their old beloved street, where the Yellow House was in which they used to live. They were very happy.

  Then, when they were very close to the corner of New Dollar Street, a terrific sound like an explosion stopped them in their tracks. Jane covered her ears and looked up at the sky. Not thunder! The sky was as blue as the dress she had on. Not a cloud!

  “Wowie!” said Rufus. “A giant firecracker, and it’s not even the Fourth of July!”

  “Or,” said Jane, recovering from her fright, “could it be that another meteor has fallen on New Dollar Street!”

  “Too much of a coincidents!” said Rufus, and the three of them, cautious but curious, continued to the corner of New Dollar Street. There, however, a roadblock had been placed, and they could not enter. Then another terrific blast rent the air. Boom! Boom! Boom!

  “I told you it might be another meteor,” said Jane. “They would not fall to the earth silently.”

  “Naw!” said Joey. He had a look of grave misgiving on his face.

  A man came along, took away the roadblock wooden horse, slung it over his shoulder, and went back down New Dollar Street.

  The children followed him slowly. Their spirits revived a little, though, for now they were going past the picket fence in front of the Yellow House. They looked at it fondly. Next would be the Brick Lot. But where was the Brick Lot? Where the meteors?

  No one said a word.

  In front of where the Brick Lot used to be, men were driving a team of oxen up from a deep hole in the ground and dumping what they had dug up into three green carts in order to take it all away. Dirt, pulverized bricks, weeds, and roots were all jumbled together. No sign of the mighty meteors!

  Stunned, Jane and Rufus and Joey walked as close as possible to the fence beside the Yellow House, careful not to slide down into the deep hole where the men and their oxen were. Now they were at the place where the meteors used to be. Nothing there now but rectangular spots where the blasts they had heard had done their work.

  Some beetles, upside down, were frantically trying to get themselves right side up and were thrashing their thin legs in desperation.

  “Poor things!” said Rufus. He, and even Jane, helped them to right themselves. Hard black beetles were one sort of insect that Jane was not afraid of. Now, right side up, they scurried away in bewilderment.

  Then Joey and Jane and Rufus hoisted themselves up onto the high wooden fence. They sat in the shade of a huge apple tree that grew in the backyard of the Yellow House and watched the proceedings in the old Brick Lot. Load after load of dirt and battered bricks were hauled up by the patient oxen, and the hole was becoming deeper and wider.

  Jane said to Joey, who was the most depressed of the three of them, “Joey, maybe those meteors are in one of the carts, and all that blasting we heard was just for ordinary old bricks. I’ll ask,” she said.

  She jumped down and cautiously went to the edge of the hole where, down below, a man and his team of oxen were working. Clinging to a tough weed, Jane shouted, “Man! Hey! Man with oxen! What happened to the meteors? Are you an ark-yologist taking our meteors to a museum?”

  “Archaeologist? Meteors? Museums? Naw! I’m just an ordinary man digging a cellar for a new house,” he said.

  He was a big man. His dark red shirt, turned rusty from the sun, clung to him, wet with perspiration.

  The oxen rolled their eyes at Jane. She backed away quickly and joined her brothers on the high fence.

  “The meteors! The meteors!” Jane persisted. She cupped her mouth with her hands. “What did you and your oxen do with those two big meteors that have always been right down there below us? See the beetles running? There! That’s where!”

  Rufus chimed in, “Yes, mister. We need those meteors for our museum. You take one. We take the other. For science! Fair?”

  “My gosh!” said the man. “Science!” He was clearly interested. You’d have thought that this was the Yukon and that he might have struck gold!

  He looked in his long curved scoop. Just dirt and broken bricks. He looked back up at the Moffats. “You mean those two big hunks of stone that were over there? We didn’t know they were meteors. We had to blow them to bits, kids. Too big for my carts and for our team to cart away. But if we’d’a’ known they were meteors, we’d never have pulverized ’em. We’d have asked the boss, Mr. J. B. Bombergh, what to do with them.”

  “They were great big pieces of a star in th
e sky that fell here long ago,” said Jane sadly.

  “We think,” added Joey.

  The big man seemed depressed. He mopped his forehead. “We never were told to either knock meteors to bits or not knock meteors to bits.” Then a hopeful look spread over his face. “Busted-to-bits meteors are star dust. Right? Better star dust than nothing, right? There’s a heap o’ that in cart number three, empty so far, except for the blown-to-bits meteors. Right?”

  The children jumped down and ran to green cart three. This cart did have mounds of pulverized stone, reddish, in it . . . all that was left to be seen now of their beloved old meteors.

  The man followed them to the cart. “This!” he said.

  In the reddish dust there were a few rather large chunks. Joey now spoke. “Wowie!” he said. “Star dust! You know that star dust might be better for our museum than the big meteor we were going to put outside at the entrance? We can put the star dust inside. Some museums may not have even a speck of star dust!”

  “Well, we will!” said Rufus. “If the man lets us!”

  “Star dust, eh?” said the man. He scooped some up and studied it in the palm of his hand. He looked up at the sky, though, of course, it was too early for even Venus to be seen. He put some in his back pocket. If it turned out to be star dust, he wanted a bit himself to take home to his wife and children. He looked at the sky again, and he smiled.

  Jane and Joey and Rufus waited tensely. Then, with a wide smile, the man said, “Help yourselves!” he said. “Take as much as you like, the entire kit and caboodle!” Then he went back down into the big hole, where his oxen, as motionless as statues, waited.

  “What generosity!” exclaimed Jane. The three children readjusted their thoughts from mighty meteors to precious star dust. They piled a heap of this in wagon one. Rufus put one small chunk in the pocket of his khaki shorts to show and maybe give to Uncle Bennie Pye. Then they started for home.

  “Joey!” Jane said. “Think how exciting it will be for people to see a sign over the science section . . . the part that has mica . . . that will say, STAR DUST THAT FELL ON NEW DOLLAR STREET, CIRCA . . .”

  “Circa unknown . . .” said Rufus with a laugh.

  Joey laughed, too. “Yes,” he said. “Fine. Fine! Yes . . .” He paused. “But I did, still sorta do, have my mind set on a big one like you see in the Museum of Natural History.”

  Pondering all these things—was the big one better, was the star dust better—they continued on the way home. The way home led them past the printing press of the Cranbury Chronicle. They stopped here for a minute to rest and to breathe in the wonderful smell of freshly printed newspaper.

  They liked the man, Mr. Peter G. Gilligan, who ran the newspaper singlehanded . . . wrote it, printed it, did everything. Sometimes he gave them a long sheet, rolled up, of shiny white paper, the width of a column in his newspaper. They liked this paper, drew cartoons on it and funny-paper pictures. . . .

  While they were resting there, all three sitting in one or the other of the wagons, Mr. Gilligan came outdoors to cool off and have a smoke. He surveyed the star-dust express. After lighting up, puffing in, and puffing out, he got the pipe going and said, “Hello, Moffats. What are you doing with all that dirt?”

  “Dirt!” echoed Rufus. “Dirt! This is star dust! Not dirt!”

  Jane said indignantly, “This star dust is for the science section of our museum. Lead on, Joey! We have work to do!”

  “Wait!” said Mr. Gilligan, knocking and emptying his pipe against the wall. “Museum! What museum?”

  “Our museum,” said Jane. “The Moffat Museum! It is the barn in our backyard. The museum will be free and will have things in it important to us Moffats. Like this star dust . . .”

  “Hm-m-m,” said Mr. Gilligan. “S’wonder any news at all gets into the Cranbury Chronicle . . . nobody telling me anything . . .” He rushed back into his printing shop, muttering, “Just in time to get this in the early edition!”

  He was in such a hurry that he didn’t even think to give the children one single roll of the shiny paper. They heard the press go up and come down. They stood waiting for a few minutes. “No shiny paper today,” Rufus said. “Pooh!”

  Then they trudged on. When they reached home, they put the star dust in a shoe box labeled ENNA JETTICK. Joey made a sign to paste over this. His sign said: STAR DUST THAT FELL IN THE BRICK LOT ON NEW DOLLAR STREET NEXT TO THE YELLOW HOUSE.

  “You forgot circa,” said Rufus.

  Joey laughed. But he added, CIRCA UNKNOWN.

  They were tired. “Made a whole museum in half a day,” said Jane.

  “A museum is never finished,” said Joey.

  Then they all started to go into the house. They looked back at the museum, “Maybe every day . . . perhaps even tomorrow . . . something new will pop into our heads,” said Jane. “Something just right for the museum.”

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  About the Author

  ELEANOR ESTES (1906–1988) grew up in West Haven, Connecticut, which she renamed Cranbury for her classic stories about the Moffat and Pye families. A children’s librarian for many years, she launched her writing career with the publication of The Moffats in 1941. Two of her outstanding books about the Moffats—Rufus M. and The Middle Moffat—were awarded Newbery Honors, as was her short novel The Hundred Dresses. She won the Newbery Medal for Ginger Pye in 1952.