Dewey: the Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World Read online

  Copyright © 2008 by Vicki Myron

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of publisher.

  Grand Central Publishing

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  Grateful acknowledgment is given to W. P. Kinsella for permission to quote in Chapter 14 from Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982).

  First eBook Edition: September 2008

  Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-446-54220-3

  Front jacket photo of Dewey by Rick Krebsbach

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: The Coldest Morning

  Chapter 2: A Perfect Addition

  Chapter 3: Dewey Readmore Books

  Chapter 4: A Day in the Library

  Chapter 5: Catnip and Rubber Bands

  Chapter 6: Moneta

  Chapter 7: Grand Avenue

  Chapter 8: A Cat’s Best Friends

  Chapter 9: Dewey and Jodi

  Chapter 10: A Long Way from Home

  Chapter 11: Hide-and-Seek

  Chapter 12: Christmas

  Chapter 13: A Great Library

  Chapter 14: Dewey’s Great Escape

  Chapter 15: Spencer’s Favorite Cat

  Chapter 16: Iowa’s Famous Library Cat

  Chapter 17: Dewey in the Modern World

  Chapter 18: Puss in Books

  Chapter 19: The World’s Worst Eater

  Chapter 20: Dewey’s New Friends

  Chapter 21: What Makes Us Special?

  Chapter 22: Dewey Goes to Japan

  Chapter 23: Memories of Mom

  Chapter 24: Dewey’s Diet

  Chapter 25: The Meeting

  Chapter 26: Dewey’s Love

  Chapter 27: Loving Dewey

  Epilogue: Last Thoughts from Iowa

  Acknowledgments

  To Gran, Mom, and Jodi — three amazing women who loved

  Dewey almost as much as I do

  Introduction

  Welcome to Iowa

  There is a thousand-mile table of land in the middle of the United States, between the Mississippi River on the east and the deserts on the west. Out here, there are rolling hills, but no mountains. There are rivers and creeks, but few large lakes. The wind has worn down the rock outcroppings, turning them first to dust, then dirt, then soil, and finally to fine black farmland. Out here, the roads are straight, stretching to the horizon in long, unbroken lines. There are no corners, only occasional, almost imperceptible bends. This land was surveyed and plotted for farms; the bends are corrections in the survey line. Exactly every mile, every road is intersected by another almost perfectly straight road. Inside is a square mile of farmland. Take a million of those square miles, lace them together, and you have one of the most important agricultural regions in the world. The Great Plains. The Bread Basket. The Heartland. Or, as many people think of it, the place you fly over on your way to somewhere else. Let them have the oceans and mountains, their beaches and their ski resorts. I’ll take Iowa.

  In northwest Iowa, in winter, the sky swallows the farmhouses. On a cold day, the dark clouds that blow in across the plains seem to churn the land under like a plow. In the spring, the world is flat and empty, full of brown dirt and hacked-off cornstalks waiting to be plowed under, the sky and land perfectly balanced like a plate on a stick. But if you come in the late summer, you would swear the ground is about to push up and tip the sky right out of the picture. The corn is nine feet high, bright green leaves topped with brilliant gold tassels. Most of the time you are buried in it, lost in the walls of corn, but top a small rise in the road, just a few feet of elevation, and you can see endless fields of gold atop green, silken threads sparkling in the sun. Those silks are the sex organs of the corn, trapping pollen, flying golden yellow for a month and then slowly drying up and browning out under the stiff summer heat.

  That’s what I love about northwest Iowa: it is always changing. Not in the way the suburbs change as one chain restaurant replaces another or the way cities change as buildings crowd each other ever higher, but in the way the country changes, slowly back and forth in a gentle motion that is always sliding forward, but never very fast. There aren’t many roadside businesses out here. No crafts stores. No farmers’ markets. The farmhouses, which are fewer every year, hug the road. The towns pop up suddenly, bearing signs announcing THE JEWELIN THE CROWNOF IOWA or THE GOLD BUCKLEON THE CORN BELT, and disappear just as quickly. Two minutes, and they’re gone. A grain elevator or a processing plant, maybe a downtown strip with a convenience store, a place to eat. Every ten miles or so, there’s a roadside cemetery, small plain markers behind low stone walls. These are pioneer plots that grew into extended family plots and eventually into town cemeteries. Nobody wants to be buried far from home, and nobody wants to waste much land. Use what you have. Make it simple. Keep it local.

  Then, just when you’re sliding away, when you’re drifting into complacency like a corn row down the back side of a rise, the road widens and you pass a strip of stores: Matt Furniture, the Iron Horse Hotel, the Prime Rib restaurant, but also a Wal-Mart, a McDonald’s, a Motel 6. Turn north at the stoplight, the first turn in fifty miles no matter which direction you’ve been driving, not to mention the first stoplight, and within a minute you’ve left the chains behind and you’re driving the beautiful low bridge over the Little Sioux River right into the heart of Spencer, Iowa, a town that hasn’t changed much since 1931.

  Downtown Spencer is picture postcard small-town America: rows of storefronts in connecting two-and-three-story buildings where people pull their cars to the curb, get out, and walk. White Drug, Eddie Quinn’s Men’s Clothing, and Steffen Furniture have been in business for decades. The Hen House sells decorating items to farmwives and the occasional tourist on her way to the Iowa lake country twenty miles north. There’s a hobby shop specializing in model airplanes, a card shop, and a store that rents oxygen tanks and wheelchairs. The Vacuum Cleaner Store. Arts on Grand. The old movie theater is still in business, although it shows only second-run movies since a seven-screen cineplex opened south of the bridge.

  The downtown ends at The Hotel, eight blocks from the bridge. The Hotel. That’s the actual name. It was known as the Tagney in the late 1920s when it was the area’s best accommodation, bus depot, train station, and only sit-down restaurant. By the end of the Great Depression, it had become a flophouse and, according to legend, the town bordello. The five-story building, plain redbrick and built to last, was eventually abandoned, then rehabilitated in the 1970s, but by then the real action had moved five blocks down Grand Avenue to Sister’s Main Street Café, a no-frills diner with Formica tables, drip coffee, and smoky booths. Three groups of men congregate every morning at Sister’s: the old guys, the older guys, and the really old guys. Together, they have run Spencer for the past sixty years.

  Around the corner from Sister’s Café, across a small parking lot and just half a block off Grand Avenue, is a low gray concrete building: the Spencer Public Library. My name is Vicki Myron, and I’ve been working in that library for twenty-five years, the last twenty as director. I’ve overseen the arriv
al of the first computer and the addition of the reading room. I’ve watched children grow up and leave, only to walk back through the doors ten years later with their own children. The Spencer Public Library may not look like much, at least not at first, but it is the centerpiece, the middle ground, the heart of this heartland story. Everything I’m going to tell you about Spencer—and about the surrounding farms, the nearby lakes, the Catholic church in Hartley, the Moneta School, the box factory, and the wonderful old white Ferris wheel up at Arnold’s Park—all flows back eventually to this small gray building and to the cat who lived here for more than nineteen years.

  How much of an impact can an animal have? How many lives can one cat touch? How is it possible for an abandoned kitten to transform a small library into a meeting place and tourist attraction, inspire a classic American town, bind together an entire region, and eventually become famous around the world? You can’t even begin to answer those questions until you hear the story of Dewey Readmore Books, the beloved library cat of Spencer, Iowa.

  Chapter 1

  The Coldest Morning

  January 18, 1988, was a bitterly cold Iowa Monday. The night before, the temperature had reached minus fifteen degrees, and that didn’t take into account the wind, which cut under your coat and squeezed your bones. It was a killing freeze, the kind that made it almost painful to breathe. The problem with flat land, as all of Iowa knows, is that there’s nothing to stop the weather. It blows out of Canada, across the Dakotas, and straight into town. The first bridge in Spencer across the Little Sioux, built in the late 1800s, had to be taken down because the river became so jammed with ice everyone worried the pylons would collapse. When the town water tower burned down in 1893—the straw packing used to keep the riser pipe from freezing caught fire, and all the nearby fire hydrants were frozen solid—a two-foot-thick, ten-foot-wide circle of ice slid out the top of the tank, crushed the community recreation center, and shattered all over Grand Avenue. That’s winter in Spencer for you.

  I have never been a morning person, especially on a dark and cloudy January day, but I have always been dedicated. There were a few cars on the road at seven thirty, when I drove the ten blocks to work, but as usual mine was the first car in the parking lot. Across the street, the Spencer Public Library was dead—no lights, no movement, no sound until I flipped a switch and brought it to life. The heater switched on automatically during the night, but the library was still a freezer first thing in the morning. Whose idea was it to build a concrete and glass building in northern Iowa? I needed my coffee.

  I went immediately to the library staff room—nothing more than a kitchenette with a microwave and a sink, a refrigerator too messy for most people’s taste, a few chairs, and a phone for personal calls—hung up my coat, and started the coffee. Then I scanned the Saturday newspaper. Most local issues could affect, or could be affected by, the library. The local newspaper, the Spencer Daily Reporter, didn’t publish on Sunday or Monday, so Monday was catch-up morning for the Saturday edition.

  “Good morning, Vicki,” said Jean Hollis Clark, the assistant library director, taking off her scarf and mittens. “It’s a mean one out there.”

  “Good morning, Jean,” I said, putting aside the paper.

  In the center of the staff room, against the back wall, was a large metal box with a hinged lid. The box was two feet high and four feet square, about the size of a two-person kitchen table if you sawed the legs in half. A metal chute rose out of the top of the box, then disappeared into the wall. At the other end, in the alley behind the building, was a metal slot: the library’s after-hours book return.

  You find all kinds of things in a library drop box—garbage, rocks, snowballs, soda cans. Librarians don’t talk about it, because it gives people ideas, but all libraries deal with it. Video stores probably have the same problem. Stick a slot in a wall and you’re asking for trouble, especially if, as it did at the Spencer Public Library, the slot opened onto a back alley across the street from the town’s middle school. Several times we had been startled in the middle of the afternoon by a loud pop from the drop box. Inside, we’d find a firecracker.

  After the weekend, the drop box would also be full of books, so every Monday I loaded them onto one of our book carts so the clerks could process and shelve them later in the day. When I came back with the cart on this particular Monday morning, Jean was standing quietly in the middle of the room.

  “I heard a noise.”

  “What kind of noise?”

  “From the drop box. I think it’s an animal.”

  “A what?”

  “An animal. I think there’s an animal in the drop box.”

  That was when I heard it, a low rumble from under the metal cover. It didn’t sound like an animal. It sounded more like an old man struggling to clear his throat. But I doubted it was an old man. The opening at the top of the chute was only a few inches wide, so that would be quite a squeeze. It was an animal, I had little doubt of that, but what kind? I got down on my knees, reached over to the lid, and hoped for a chipmunk.

  The first thing I felt was a blast of freezing air. Someone had jammed a book into the return slot, wedging it open. It was as cold in the box as it was outside; maybe colder, since the box was lined with metal. You could have kept frozen meat in there. I was still catching my breath when I saw the kitten.

  It was huddled in the front left corner of the box, its head down, its legs tucked underneath it, trying to appear as small as possible. The books were piled haphazardly to the top of the box, partially hiding it from view. I lifted one gingerly for a better look. The kitten looked up at me, slowly and sadly. Then it lowered its head and sank down into its hole. It wasn’t trying to appear tough. It wasn’t trying to hide. I don’t even think it was scared. It was just hoping to be saved.

  I know melting can be a cliché, but I think that’s what actually happened to me at that moment: I lost every bone in my body. I am not a mushy person. I’m a single mother and a farm girl who has steered her life through hard times, but this was so, so . . . unexpected.

  I lifted the kitten out of the box. My hands nearly swallowed it. We found out later it was eight weeks old, but it looked no more than eight days old, if that. It was so thin I could see every rib. I could feel its heart beating, its lungs pumping. The poor kitten was so weak it could barely hold up its head, and it was shaking uncontrollably. It opened its mouth, but the sound, which came two seconds later, was weak and ragged.

  And cold. That’s what I remember most, because I couldn’t believe a living animal could be so cold. It felt like there was no warmth at all. So I cradled the kitten in my arms to share my heat. It didn’t fight. Instead, it snuggled into my chest, then laid its head against my heart.

  “Oh, my golly,” said Jean.

  “The poor baby,” I said, squeezing tighter.

  “It’s adorable.”

  Neither of us said anything for a while. We were just staring at the kitten. Finally Jean said, “How do you think it got in there?”

  I wasn’t thinking about last night. I was only thinking about right now. It was too early to call the veterinarian, who wouldn’t be in for an hour. But the kitten was so cold. Even in the warmth of my arms, I could feel it shaking.

  “We’ve got to do something,” I said.

  Jean grabbed a towel, and we wrapped the little fellow up until only its nose was sticking out, its huge eyes staring from the shadows in disbelief.

  “Let’s give it a warm bath,” I said. “Maybe that will stop the shivering.”

  I filled the staff room sink with warm water, testing it with my elbow as I clutched the kitten in my arms. It slid into the sink like a block of ice. Jean found some shampoo in the art closet, and I rubbed the kitten slowly and lovingly, almost petting it. As the water turned grayer and grayer, the kitten’s wild shivering turned to soft purring. I smiled. This kitten was tough. But it was so very young. When I finally lifted it out of the sink, it looked like a newborn: hug
e lidded eyes and big ears sticking out from a tiny head and an even smaller body. Wet, defenseless, and meowing quietly for its mother.

  We dried it with the blow dryer we used for drying glue at craft time. Within thirty seconds, I was holding a beautiful, long-haired orange tabby. The kitten had been so filthy, I had thought it was gray.

  By this time Doris and Kim had arrived, and there were four people in the staff room, each cooing over the kitten. Eight hands touched it, seemingly at once. The other three staffers talked over one another while I stood silently cradling the kitten like a baby and rocking back and forth from foot to foot.

  “Where did it come from?”

  “The drop box.”

  “No!”

  “Is it a boy or a girl?”

  I glanced up. They were all looking at me. “A boy,” I said.

  “He’s beautiful.”

  “How old is he?”

  “How did he get in the box?”

  I wasn’t listening. I only had eyes for the kitten.

  “It’s so cold.”

  “Bitterly cold.”

  “The coldest morning of the year.”

  A pause, then: “Someone must have put him in the box.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “Maybe they were trying to save him. From the cold.”

  “I don’t know . . . he’s so helpless.”

  “He’s so young.”

  “He’s so beautiful. Oh, he’s breaking my heart.”

  I put him down on the table. The poor kitten could barely stand. The pads on all four of his paws were frostbitten, and over the next week they would turn white and peel off. And yet the kitten managed to do something truly amazing. He steadied himself on the table and slowly looked up into each face. Then he began to hobble. As each person reached to pet him, he rubbed his tiny head against her hand and purred. Forget the horrible events in his young life. Forget the cruel person who shoved him down that library drop box. It was as if, from that moment on, he wanted to personally thank every person he ever met for saving his life.