Rufus M. Read Free Page B

for the Red Cross. She was not knitting a washcloth, though. Rufus was.
    Rufus was the only one of the four Moffats who was knitting a washcloth for the soldiers. Up in Jane's room at school they were knitting gray and khaki scarves and helmets. Even sweaters. And Jane was trying to learn how to purl. Not Rufus. You do not have to purl a washcloth. Just straight knit it.

    Rufus's whole room was knitting washcloths. The teacher gave everybody a ball of string and showed them how to cast on. She usually explained all things twice to the class, once to the right-handers and once to Rufus, the only left-hander.
    For some time Rufus had not been sure whether he was left-handed or right-handed. That was because his teachers had not been able to make up their minds, not till the teacher he had now, his Room Three teacher. It is true his Room One teacher considered him a left-handed boy and never tried to change him. But his Room Two teacher felt it was her bounden duty at least to try to break Rufus of the habit of writing with his left hand, even though he did so much better with it than the right.
    As a consequence, Rufus's writing the year he was in Room Two was very bad. Gold stars were awarded to those children who wrote well, and according to the approved Houston method. Rufus did not write well. Nevertheless his Room Two teacher gave him gold stars because she thought the great effort involved in writing with his right hand merited the reward. Lest the class think that she was rewarding him for that dreadful right-handed writing of his, however, she always wrote in blue crayon along the top of his paper, "Rufus did this with his
right
hand." It was as though she would give a gold star to some right-handed person who wrote with his left. But she hoped that by the end of the year Rufus would be a good right-handed writer.
    The teacher he had now, his Room Three teacher, decided that Rufus was definitely left-handed and he and the world in general might as well get used to this fact. Rufus was very happy to have the matter settled, because his left hand had always seemed the right hand to him, the right one, that is, for writing, eating, combing his hair, for pitching balls, playing marbles, and even mumblety-peg, too.
    At home Rufus had always been accepted as the only left-handed member of the family, and nobody had tried to switch him from left to right. He sat at the end of the table opposite Mama at dinner time. Since a left-handed eater's elbow is apt to bump into a right-handed eater's elbow, Rufus sat at the end of the table and bumped into no one.
    And in school when the writing lesson was to begin and the children of Room Three were told to tilt their papers a little to the left, Rufus was told to tilt his a little to the right. The teacher hoped this would produce the same results all around. For a time this paper tilting was confusing to Rufus. He had a tendency to tip the paper practically upside down, encircle it with his left arm and write. After a while he learned to hold it at the proper angle and to cover it rapidly with those round spirals the teacher liked the class to make.
    These spirals were not easy to make, left-handed or right-handed. Sylvie was the best spiral maker of the four Moffats. Her spirals began a certain size and ended the same size, like one of her curls. Not Rufus's. His spirals grew larger and larger so that at the end of the line they covered twice as much space as at the beginning and looked like bedsprings. But spirals were nothing compared to washcloths, and Rufus paid very close attention while the teacher showed how to cast on the stitches.
    All the children cast the same number of stitches onto their needles, but this did not mean that all the washcloths were going to be the same size. Not at all. Some were big and some were small, although they all started out with the same number of stitches cast on.
    Rufus's washcloth was one of the kind that grew wider and wider as it grew