The Moffat Museum (22 page)

Joey tried to keep his mind on his work. He opened his Latin book. Some kids might have just plain quit studying the minute they knew they were not going back to school after tomorrow ... say, "Whoopie!"

Not Joey! He wanted to get a good mark on his last report card from Union School.

He said to Jane, "Will you ask me the new words in the vocabulary?"

Jane did this. "You got them right," she said.

"I like Latin," said Joey.

"Me, too," said Rufus from the morris chair where he was sitting, legs flung over the arm. "So did Sylvie. Runs in the family.
Amo, amas, amat
..." He laughed, then turned back to the book he was reading,
The Boy Scouts on Mount Katahdin.
A good book. He was considering being a Boy Scout boy someday like Sam Doody used to be ... go up on high places such as Mount Katahdin or other mountains, like the fellows in this book.

"
Veni, vidi, vici,
" he said, and pressed on with the climbing of Mount Katahdin. "I came, I saw, I conquered," he murmured.

Joey laughed and went on with his other homework, geometry. "Remember, Jane ... you, too, Rufus ... that when you get to be studying geometry, you say 'pa-
rab
-ola'! Not 'para-
bo
-la,' the way you do."

"Para-
bo
-la sounds better to me," said Rufus. "Like something to ride on down at Savin Rock."

"You'll get used to it," said Joey. "Took me a while. Well, bye! I think I'll go out for a little ride."

"Didn't even ask me to come along," said Rufus. "I wish I could go to work with him. I can run errands faster than anybody, almost as fast as Joey!"

Jane said, "I've been thinkin'. Joey has to go to work. Not many ladies come anymore to have Mama make dresses. They make their own now. Hems never hang straight! They look awful coming up the aisle in church. Brides still come, but how many brides are there a year in Cranbury? Not enough to pay for everything..."

"Right," said Rufus. "Well, I'm going out back ... sit in the sleigh, make a plan. Plans pop into my head sometimes when I sit in the sleigh."

Jane went out onto the front porch. She sat down in the green wicker rocker. Maybe a plan would pop into her head! She watched the stars beginning to come out here and there.
Ts!
she thought.
If only this were Monday evening! Joey would have gone to work ... his first day there in a new adventure ... would have been an errand boy for one complete day and come home.
One look at his face as he came riding up would tell whether he had liked it or not. If she asked him that question, and he might say, "Swell!" she would know if it were true or not.

"Oh, let it be true," she prayed. "Let 'Swell!' be true!"

The next morning, Friday, they all left for school as usual. Jane pushed her way through the secret swinging door in the green fence and whistled for Nancy. Off they went, arms around each other.

Jane said. "Nancy! You know what? Today is Joey's last day of school. Yesterday, because he is sixteen, he got his working papers."

"Gosh!" said Nancy.

"He's going to work in the Yellow Building running errands, here or there. He begins his job on Monday."

"Gee!" said Nancy.

Jane could see that Nancy was as impressed as any of the Moffats. She probably thought this was as important as Sylvie's getting married. Nancy squeezed Jane's arm tightly to show she understood that Jane was worried about Joey.

After school Nancy picked up four beautiful red apples that had fallen from one of the trees in her mother's orchard. One for her, one for Jane, one for Rufus and one for Joey. She and Jane sat down on the Moffats' back stoop and waited for the boys; but they didn't come. So they ate their apples, and left the boys' apples on the stoop and went back out through the secret door again to look for some kids to play hide-and-go-seek with, or some game.

Hardly had the gate swung to when Joey did come home. He sat down, piled the paper jackets of his books beside him, picked up one of the apples, took a bite, and began to think about school ... his last day there. He had an empty feeling, as empty as the book jackets without their books inside them. He reviewed practically every minute of the day in his mind.

Miss Muller! He thought especially about Miss Muller, his homeroom teacher. She was his favorite teacher, and he knew, he just knew, that she liked him, even though she never said anything. Joey was a quiet boy. Only a little while ago, when the other pupils had left, she asked him to take the brown paper jackets off his books and store the books in the cupboard. He had done this. So here now were the jackets. He touched them lightly, remembered how she had crossed his name off the lists of pupils who had had copies of those books.

For a while Miss Muller hadn't said much except "Now, we'll do this, now that..." But when he had finished helping her, she said, "Joey Moffat! I'm going to miss you. I live on George Street. Come and visit me sometime, tell me about what you'll be doing."

Joey nodded and he smiled. "Thank you, Miss Muller. Well, bye!" They shook hands, and he left.

He went into other rooms and turned in his books in each. All the teachers were so nice! History ... Latin ... Geometry ... All the teachers wished him well. All shook hands. They must like him, he thought, in surprise.

Then he came home.

Well now! What a good apple this was! He was nearing the core and spat out a brown seed. A sparrow picked it up. But his mind kept going back to school. That girl, Mary Foley! He had never spoken to Mary Foley. He looked at his shoes when they passed each other in the hall. It dawned on him he might never see her again. In the classroom, what a view he had of her! From where he sat, perfect! His seat was by the window. Her seat was seat one, row one, on the opposite side, by the door. She was errand girl for the teacher.
We're in the same sort of work,
thought Joey wryly. Errand girl ... errand boy.

But a better arrangement could not have been laid out. He could see her from every point of view ... a side view of her when she was studying, the back of her head when she looked toward the door, her whole pretty face when she stood before the class and recited ... recited perfectly, never made a mistake.
Make a mistake, have to do it over!
he urged her silently so he could watch her up there in front longer, in her middy blouse and red tie and accordion-pleated plaid skirt! Oh, what a picture she made with the sun streaking across the front of the room and shining on her light hair!

So pretty!

Since he had never spoken to her, not even a "Hello," how then could he say, "Good-bye? I'm not coming back!"

Joey threw the core of his apple into the red raspberry bushes. Then, let's see. It was really a funny feeling, a sort of lost feeling, not to have something to do ... studying, something...

Just then Rufus came tearing around the house on his scooter. He had a canvas knapsack on his shoulder.

"Guess what!" he said to Joey. "I got the job. You go to work? I go to work. That's fair."

"Yeah?" said Joey. "What job?"

"Delivering the
Saturday Evening Post.
Hughie Pudge got me the job. You know Hughie Pudge? He can't do it anymore ... used to be his job. But now he has to take piano. He says the guy at the
Cranbury Chronicle,
well, this man—"

"Name of Mr. Gilligan. I remember
him
all right!" said Joey.

"Yes, same one. Well, he's in charge of seeing that the
Saturday Evening Post
gets delivered as well as his own
Cranbury Chronicle.
He'll have a stack ready for me to put in this sack of mine. And
my
beat—they call the route a
beat
—is handy. From Elm Street to Main Street and from Savin Avenue to First!"

"Wow!" said Joey, impressed. He handed Rufus his apple.

Rufus ignored it; he had more to tell. "Want to know how it happened? I just happened to bump into Hughie. He asked me if I wanted the job.

"First I asked Hughie, 'You need working papers for this job from the people at the Town Hall?'

'"Sure you need working papers,' he said. 'But not from the Town Hall. I have your working papers. It's a contrack. Rain or shine, I have to deliver the
Saturday Evening Post.
Give this contrack,' Hughie said, 'to Mr. Gilligan. Tell him I'm willing you my route because I have to take piano. I already told him about you. Says he knows you ... knows Rufus Moffat.'

"So," said Rufus, "I went over to the
Cranbury Chronicle,
and Mr. Gilligan said, 'How old are you, Rufus?'

'"Same age as Hughie,' I said. And I handed him Hughie's contrack willing me the route. I told him Hughie and me were in Grade One together in Wood School and have stayed together all the way through school. We are now in Grade Four.

'"Okay, Rufus,' he said. 'The job is yours. Here's your canvas sack with
Saturday Evening Post
engraved on it!' And he gave me a list of the people that get the magazine. You know who's on my list? Just some of them? Judge Bell, the Pyes, the Stokeses ... gosh! The list is a little messed up. Jelly on it. I didn't put it there. Hughie must have."

Rufus took a bite of his apple. "Where's Jane?" he asked.

At this moment, as though by magic, Jane pushed her way through the swinging door in the fence. She said, "Behold!" for no reason that her brothers could see. They didn't know that she had just been playing the game of Ladies Fainting and now, when she heard the news of Rufus's contract and job, she went into a pretend swoon and said, "The smelling salts, please."

Recovering, she said, "My, Rufus! That's great!"

Then Rufus climbed up on the sleigh and sat there proudly, empty canvas sack beside him, reins in hand. "In the olden times maybe they delivered the
Saturday Evening Post
by sleigh in the winter," he said, and ate his apple up there. "If I had a pony, I'd give him the apple," he said.

Jane laughed. "Waxworks boy eats apple in sleigh. Could be a picture in a book." Then she said, "I came home early because I got to thinking about the museum."

"Yeah," said Rufus. "Who's goin' to be the guard, count the people, keep an eye on the star dust, the flies, the Savin Rock trolley sign ... any artifact ... when Joey goes off to work?"

"That's why I came home," said Jane. "In the middle of the game of Fainting Ladies, Nancy Stokes was in the middle of a swoon at that moment, the same thought struck me, so I rushed home before she got the salts, even."

"A coincidents..." said Rufus.

"Yeah," said Jane. "We have to get the sleigh back inside the museum, put everything to the side ... the easel, the costumes ... The heads can stay on the wall and some other artifacts. Let's get the doors from the side of the barn and stand them up. I think the hinges are too rusty to try to make them fit. Let's make a sign that will say ... well, just say..."

Rufus said, "Jane, you thought the museum up. Now you're thinking it down. It makes sense."

"I am
not
thinking it down," said Jane indignantly. "The museum is special, and we'll always have it. We'll just make a sign, a polite sort of a sign, like this, maybe: THE MOFFAT MUSEUM CLOSED FOR THE COLLECTING OF MORE ARTIFACTS!"

It didn't take long to follow through with this plan. And it was much easier to slide the ancient sleigh back inside than it had been to drag it out. No ropes around Rufus's waist were needed. Rufus stuffed crumbly old tissue-paper patterns Mama gave them into the sleeves of his little old mackinaw and also in the old gray woolen cap. "Them's my brains," he said. Then he put his quite twisted wax face in between the cap and the scarf. "Just having sad thoughts," he commented, "going over a frozen riverbank or seeing a hungry dog loping along. Who knows?"

But they removed the humped-up-in-the-middle rag rug Catherine-the-cat had enjoyed all summer and brought it back indoors and put it on the morris chair in the dining room where it always used to be. Instead, they put in the

sleigh some old warm rags Mama was going to sell to the ragman on his next tinkling trip down Ashbellows Place, and these did nicely. So, now there he was, Rufus, the waxworks boy, an imitation of him anyway, as he had been when he made his debut during the famous visitation of the children on tour with Mr. Pennypepper.

The silvery gray wooden doors leaning now against the front of the museum had a few knotholes in them. People could peek in. Rufus did so. He laughed. "I see me!" he said. "Rufus, the waxworks boy! My, how he has shrunk! We'll say, 'Waxworks statues have a habit of shrinking in cold weather. Come summertime, they puff out again!'"

"They'll think, 'My, how much you know!'" said Jane.

"And all because I clapped the erasers that day in the schoolroom find rubbed off the name Madame Tussaud from the blackboard! I'll stand beside the peephole when people peek in. I'll say, 'Peek in, you nonbelievers! Here / am, the real Rufus. And
there
I am, a Madame Tussaud waxworks me.' I hope Letitia Murdock will come and stare..."

"M-m-m," said Jane. "But not often, I hope."

Joey made the sign and tacked it up. There it was! CLOSED FOR THE COLLECTING OF MORE ARTIFACTS!