Rufus M. (16 page)

Joey went into the kitchen again for a drink of water. He found a glass and smelled it, as he always did before drinking. Once he had taken a drink of water out of a glass that had had kerosene oil spilled in it. He wasn't taking any more chances of drinking water out of glasses that smelled like kerosene. He drank a couple of glasses of water and looked at the clock. Half past seven. He put a little coal in the kitchen range, shook the ashes down, and poked a good draft in the red coals. Then he looked around to see if there were any apples. There weren't. There were only onions in a brown bag. Joey took out one onion and looked at it. Soon Mama would not have to buy any more onions. They'd have his onions. Then Joey had an idea. He stuck the onion in his pocket and ran out of the house.

"Hey, Rufe ... Jane!" he yelled. "Come 'ere!"

Rufus and Jane came racing home. "What's the matter?"

"Hey," said Joe. "Look at my onion!" He waved the full-grown onion at them.

Jane and Rufus stopped short. What was this, a while onion already? They stared, stunned, not quite believing. If a whole onion had grown, then where were their beans and corn?

"Criminenty!" shouted Rufus with a whoop. "I bet my beans are up!" and he tore around back with Jane and Joe after him.

"That's not a real onion," Jane accused Joe.

"'Tis so," said Joe.

"Didn't come out of your garden, I bet," said Jane.

"Where'd it come from then?" countered Joe.

"It's too big." Jane felt she might believe a small onion but not this big one. Still, how could she be sure? She joined Rufus, who had flung himself down on his stomach again, looking for a crack in the earth at least, where a bean might be emerging.

"Grow, beans," he begged.

The backyard was much darker than the front now, for it was hemmed in by apple trees, fences, and the barn. Now they really could not see anymore. With a sigh Rufus stood up. "My beans ain't up," he said sadly.

They went into the house with Rufus thoroughly believing in Joey's onion, though Jane still felt somewhat skeptical. Joey lit the lamps and they all sat around the kitchen table waiting for Mama and Sylvie. Joey took the newspaper, spread it out on the red-checked tablecloth, and started to read the war news. Jane got out her paper and her paints and began to make some paper dolls.

Rufus just sat at the table and thought about his beans. "I'll have to get beanpoles," he said.

"Yeah," said Joey, "we'll make 'em tomorrow."

"Maybe it was because we didn't plant any beanpoles with the beans that my beans didn't grow like your onion," said Rufus.

Joey felt sorry for Rufus. He decided he had carried his joke far enough. "Aw," he said, "I was foolin' about the onion."

When Rufus understood the joke, he thought it was a pretty good one. However, he was not absolutely certain it was a joke and he still felt his beans should be up by now. It seemed a long, long time since he had stuck those beans in the dirt. He laid his head on his arm, listened to the crackling of Joey's newspaper, and smelled the ink of the print.

Beans! He thought of them climbing beanpoles to the sky, or at least as far as the beans in "Jack-the-Giant-Killer." Beans to keep the Moffats supplied the whole year. Beans for an army. That's the kind of Victory Garden Rufus had planted and he wanted to see the results.

Rufus grew sleepier and sleepier. The newspaper crackled with a comfortable sound. He wished he could go out and take one last look at his beans. But it was pitch-black now. Catherine-the-cat sat disconsolately in the windowsill, looking out. She knew Mama was away and she did not like this.

Jane cut out paper dolls for a time and then she, too, laid her head on her arm and watched the lamp flicker every time Joey turned a page. Whenever she heard a train, she said, "Maybe they're on that."

"Maybe," said Joe.

Then Rufus really fell asleep. Joey thought of carrying him upstairs to bed. Then he decided not to. He liked Rufus's company even though he was asleep. Jane didn't really fall all the way asleep. But she only half heard Joey shovel coal on the stove and shake down the ashes, and she only half heard drops of rain spattering on the window, and Joey murmur, "Now it's rainin'. Wish they'd come now." And Jane thought of all the little corn valleys filling up with water and hoped she and Nancy had planted right....

The next thing Jane and Rufus knew, Mama and Sylvie had walked up on the porch, come into the house, and there they were, standing beside the kitchen stove, warming their hands and drying themselves. Jane and Rufus woke right up and Mama made some hot cocoa out of evaporated milk. And while she was making the cocoa she was talking.

"...And Tonty is much better and wasn't it nice of her to send us tickets to come and see her? They came by special delivery."

Special delivery,
thought Rufus. "I got a card once in Room Three. Not special delivery though..."

Joey and Jane and Rufus were so excited about seeing Mama and Sylvie home from their travels they forgot about their gardens. Yes, even Rufus forgot about his beans and went to bed.

But the minute Rufus woke up in the morning he remembered. "My beans!" he cried, and rushed out the door before he had eaten his oatmeal. Although the ground was still damp, he flopped down on his stomach and examined his bean plot. The raindrops had stepped all over the garden, leaving tiny holes on planted places and paths alike.
It's lucky we stuck the names of the seeds on those sticks or we wouldn't know where's onions and where's carrots,
thought Rufus.

As for him, he knew exactly where his beans were because his plot was at one end of the garden. He put his finger in the wet earth and felt around gently. Where was that bean? Ah, here it was. He lifted it out tenderly and studied it. The bean still looked the way it had yesterday. No, it was possibly a little more shriveled, he thought. But that was the only difference.

Every day thereafter, several times during the day, Rufus flopped down close to the earth and watched for his beans. What he hoped was that he would be right there, watching, when the first bean popped out of the ground.

Mama said to him, "A watched pot never boils."

"These ain't pots," said Rufus. "These are beans."

And he kept watching. The one bean in particular that he was watching he had taken out of the earth several times now. Today he felt around for it as usual. Now he found it and pulled it out.

"Zowie!" he exclaimed. "What's this?" The bean had a little sprout growing from it, like a little piece of string. Rufus became very happy. "My bean's growin'," he said proudly to Jane.

"Put it back! Put it back!" she screamed. "It's growin'," and she dug feverishly for a corn kernel to see if it, too, was growing.

Rufus put his bean back in the soil. He secretly dug up one bean after another to see whether they all had little strings attached to them. Most of them did. He ran to school feeling very encouraged about his Victory Garden. Jane sighed. Her corn! Not a sprout was visible on it, and the kernels had taken on a rather brown old look. Had she planted them right? Valleys or hills? Where was the man named Hogan? If hills were right, perhaps she should take the corn out of the valleys and put them in the mounds. Then she heard Nancy whistle and she dashed through the gate in the fence and joined her best friend.

This was a very warm day and it grew warmer and warmer as the afternoon wore on. In school the windows were flung wide open. The doors were kept open, too, and you could hear children in the different classrooms reciting. Sometimes a teacher raised her voice scoldingly. Goodness! It was actually hot! The children began to count how many weeks before vacation. Too many, they thought desperately. It really was terribly hot. It felt like the middle of summer and it was only the beginning of May. Yesterday the buds on the trees could hardly be seen. Today the leaves were out, tiny and green.

None of the children wore their coats home. They slung them over their shoulders and trudged along. Not Rufus. He never trudged. He always ran, even on hot days like this, and particularly ever since he had planted his beans.

He was the first one of the Moffats home and he ran right over to his bean patch. Before he got there he knew it! He knew it! His beans were up! There were crooked cracks in the earth and a split pale green leaf wherever he had planted a bean.

"Mama," he yelled exultantly, "come 'ere! My beans! My beans are growin'. They're up! They're up!"

That's the way it was. Of all the seeds, Rufus's beans were the first to sprout. The man who was supposed to say "Plant this way and that way" never did get around to the Moffats' house. In time Jane decided she must have planted her corn the wrong way. Joey's onions and carrots came up in even, green rows. Sylvie had planted lettuce and it grew nicely. Janey's corn finally did come up but it never grew very high. It did look pretty, but the Moffats never got so much as one ear of corn to eat from it. "Hills, not valleys, is the way to plant corn," she informed Nancy Stokes.

But Rufus's beans! They grew, all right. They climbed the poles. Lots of daddy longlegs came to live among the vines. And not only did the Moffats have green beans for dinner all summer, they let one row of beans dry on the vines and by winter had a sackful of dried beans.

And they never said, "We're going to have beans for supper," or, "Pass the beans, please." They always said, "We're going to have Rufus's beans for supper," or, "Pass me some Rufus beans, please." That's what they always said.

On the Fourth of July Rufus was sitting on the bottom step of the porch burning a piece of punk, the only thing he had left of his fireworks. Not that punk is really fireworks, but at least it burned. It was better than nothing and, besides, it kept mosquitoes away. Joey had fired off his last giant firecracker and Jane had watched her last snake wind out of its little capsule. Everybody was glad that Sylvie liked night fireworks the best and had spent all her money on pinwheels and Roman candles. Otherwise the Fourth of July would be over and it was only nine o'clock in the morning.

Usually Rufus did not want the nighttime to come because night meant bedtime. But today he wished it would hurry up, so they could shoot the Roman candles and the skyrockets. He burned his punk and he looked longingly at the night works. They were in a shoe box in a corner of the porch all ready to be set off. Beside the pink and green and blue skyrockets and Roman candles there was a box of sparklers, practically full. The children had burned one last night just to see how it looked.

Rufus watched his punk and the wisp of smoke winding away from it. It smelled good but punk is rather tiresome. It doesn't flare up into anything big and bright. It just smolders. Still Rufus burned his punk waiting for the nighttime.

Rufus did not like to wait for nighttime or for anything else. Sometimes, when he went walking with Mama in the evening, she'd stop to talk with some lady around the corner. Rufus would stand first on one foot and then on the other. He would tug on Mama's skirt every now and then, a gentle reminder that he was still there, that he was tired, that he wanted to go home, and finally that he didn't like to stand there while she was talking. But talk, talk, Mama and the lady talked and talked.

Now he burned his punk and he waited. "Come, nighttime," he urged impatiently.

Jane came skipping around the house.

"What time is it?" Rufus asked her.

"About nine o'clock," she said.

"What time does it get dark at night?"

"About nine."

Rufus groaned.

"How'm I gonna wait?" he asked.

Mama came out of the house and sat down in the little green rocker to sew. She moved into the shade cast by the hop vines and said, "Gracious, today is going to be a scorcher."

"Do we have to wait till it's pitch-black for the night works?" Rufus asked.

"Of course," said Mama, fanning herself with a palm-leaf fan. She studied Rufus's despondent little back for a while. Then she said:

"Why don't you and Jane and Joey go over to Sandy Beach for the day? You could take some sandwiches."