The Moffat Museum (2 page)

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.

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.