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

  Late July is the best time of year in Spencer. The corn is ten feet high, golden and green. It’s so high, the farmers are required by state law to cut it to half height every mile, where the roads meet at right angles. Rural Iowa has too many intersections and not enough stop signs. The short corn helps, because at least you can see cars coming, and it doesn’t hurt the farmers. Corn ears grow in the center of the stalk, not the top.

  It’s easy to neglect your job in an Iowa summer. The bright green, the warm sun, the endless fields. You leave the windows open, just to catch the scent. You spend your lunch hour down by the river, your weekends fishing near Thunder Bridge. It’s hard, sometimes, to stay inside.

  “Is this heaven?” I want to say every year.

  “No,” is the imaginary reply. “It’s Iowa.”

  By August of 1989, the remodeling effort was over. Attendance was up. The staff was happy. Dewey had not only been accepted by the community, but was drawing people in and inspiring them. The Clay County Fair, the biggest event of the year, was just around the corner in September. I even had a month off from my master’s classes. Everything was going perfectly—except for Dewey. My contented baby boy, our library hero, was a changed cat: distracted, jumpy, and most of all, trouble.

  The problem was the three weeks Dewey had spent at my house during the remodeling, staring through my window screens at the world outside. He couldn’t see the corn from my house, but he could hear the birds. He could feel the breeze. He could smell whatever cats smell when they direct their nose to the great outdoors. Now he missed those screens. There were windows in the library, but they didn’t open. You could smell the new carpet but not the outdoors. You could hear trucks, but you couldn’t make out the birds. How can you show me something so wonderful, he seemed to whine, then take it away?

  Between the two sets of front doors at the Spencer Public Library was a tiny glass lobby that helped keep out the cold in the winter, since at least one set of doors was usually closed. For two years Dewey hated that lobby; when he returned from his three weeks at my house, he adored it. From the lobby, he could hear the birds. When the outer doors were open, he could smell fresh air. For a few hours in the afternoon, there was even a patch of sunlight. He pretended that was all he wanted, to sit in that patch of sunlight and listen to the birds. But we knew better. If he spent enough time in the lobby, Dewey would become curious about going through that second set of doors and into the outside world.

  “Dewey, get back in here!” the front desk clerk would yell every time he followed a patron out the first set of doors. The poor cat had no chance. The circulation desk faced into the lobby, and the desk clerk always spotted him immediately. So Dewey stopped listening, especially if the clerk was Joy DeWall. Joy was the newest and youngest member of the staff and the only one who wasn’t married. She lived with her parents in a duplex where the lease didn’t allow pets, so she had a soft spot in her heart for Dewey. Dewey knew that, and he wouldn’t listen to a word she said. So Joy started coming back to get me. I was the Mom voice. Dewey always listened to me, although in this case he was so intent on disobeying I was forced to back up my threat.

  “Dewey, do you want me to get the squirt bottle?”

  He just stared at me.

  I brought the squirt bottle out from behind my back. With the other arm, I held open the door to the library. Dewey slunk back inside.

  Ten minutes later I heard: “Vicki, Dewey’s in the lobby again.”

  That was it. Three times in one day. It was time to put my foot down. I stormed out of my office, screwed up my best Mom voice, threw open the lobby door, and demanded, “You get in here right now, young man.”

  A man in his early twenties almost jumped out of his skin. Before the last word was out of my mouth, he had rushed into the library, grabbed a magazine, and buried his head in it all the way up to the fine print. Talk about embarrassing. I was holding the door open in stunned silence, unable to believe I hadn’t seen this kid right in front of my face, when Dewey came trotting past like nothing out of the ordinary had happened. I could almost see him smiling.

  A week later, Dewey didn’t come for his morning meal, and I couldn’t find him anywhere. Nothing unusual there; Dewey had plenty of places to hide. There was a cubbyhole behind the display case by the front door that I swear was the size of a box of crayons—the old sixty-four pack with the sharpener built in. There was the brown lounge chair in the children’s area, although his tail usually stuck out of that one. One afternoon Joy was shelving the bottom row of books in the Westerns section when, to her amazement, Dewey popped out. In a library, books fit on both sides of a shelf. Between the two rows is four inches of space. Between the books was Dewey’s ultimate hiding place: quick, handy, and secure. The only way to find him was to lift books at random and look behind them. That doesn’t sound so difficult until you consider that the Spencer Public Library contained more than four hundred shelves of books. Between those books was an enormous labyrinth, a long, narrow world all Dewey’s own.

  Fortunately he almost always stuck to his favorite place in the bottom rows of Westerns. Not this time. He wasn’t under the brown lounger, either, or in his cubbyhole. I didn’t notice him peeking down from the lights. I opened the doors to the bathrooms to see if he had been locked inside. Not this morning.

  “Has anyone seen Dewey?”

  No. No. No. No.

  “Who locked up last night?”

  “I did,” Joy said, “and he was definitely here.” I knew Joy would never have forgotten to look for Dewey. She was the only staffer, besides me, who would stay late with him to play hide-and-seek.

  “Good. He must be in the building. Looks like he’s found a new hiding place.”

  But when I returned from lunch, Dewey was still missing. And he hadn’t touched his food. That’s when I began to worry.

  “Where’s Dewey?” a patron asked.

  We had already heard that question twenty times, and it was only early afternoon. I told the staff, “Tell them Dewey’s not feeling well. No need to alarm anyone.” He’d show up. I knew it.

  That night, I drove around for half an hour instead of heading straight home. I wasn’t expecting to see a fluffy orange cat prowling the neighborhood, but you never know. The thought going through my mind was, “What if he’s hurt? What if he needs me, and I can’t find him? I’m letting him down.” I knew he wasn’t dead. He was so healthy. And I knew he hadn’t run away. But the thought kept creeping up. . . .

  He wasn’t waiting for me at the front door the next day. I stepped inside and the place felt dead. A cold dread walked up my spine, even though it was ninety degrees outside. I knew something was wrong.

  I told the staff, “Look everywhere.”

  We checked every corner. We opened every cabinet and drawer. We pulled books off the shelves, hoping to find him in his crawl space. We shone a flashlight behind the wall shelves. Some of them had pulled an inch or two away from the wall; Dewey could have been making his rounds, fallen in, and gotten stuck. Clumsiness wasn’t like him, but in an emergency you check every possibility.

  The night janitor! The thought hit me like a rock, and I picked up the phone. “Hi, Virgil, it’s Vicki at the library. Did you see Dewey last night?”

  “Who?”

  “Dewey. The cat.”

  “Nope. Didn’t see him.”

  “Is there anything he could have gotten into that made him sick? Cleaning solution maybe?”

  He hesitated. “Don’t think so.”

  I didn’t want to ask, but I had to. “Do you ever leave any doors open?”

  He really hesitated this time. “I prop open the back door when I take the garbage to the Dumpster.”

  “How long?”

  “Maybe five minutes.”

  “Did you prop it open two nights ago?”

  “I prop it every night.”

  My heart sank. That was it. Dewey would never just run out an open door, but if he had a few weeks t
o think about it, peek around the corner, sniff the air . . .

  “Do you think he ran out?” Virgil asked.

  “Yes, Virgil, I do.”

  I told the staff the news. Any information was good for our spirits. We set up shifts so that two people could cover the library while the rest looked for Dewey. The regular patrons could tell something was wrong. “Where’s Dewey?” went from an innocent inquiry to an expression of concern. We continued to tell most patrons nothing was wrong, but we took the regulars aside and told them Dewey was missing. Soon a dozen people were walking the sidewalks. “Look at all these people. Look at all this love. We’ll find him now,” I told myself again and again.

  I was wrong.

  I spent my lunch hour walking the streets, looking for my baby boy. He was so sheltered in the library. He wasn’t a fighter. He was a finicky eater. How was he going to survive?

  On the kindness of strangers, of course. Dewey trusted people. He wouldn’t hesitate to ask for help.

  I dropped in on Mr. Fonley at Fonley Flowers, which had a back entrance off the alley behind the library. He hadn’t seen Dewey. Neither had Rick Krebsbach at the photo studio. I called all the veterinarians in town. We didn’t have an animal shelter, so a vet’s office was the place someone would take him. If they didn’t recognize him, that is. I told the vets, “If someone brings in a cat who looks like Dewey, it probably is Dewey. We think he’s escaped.”

  I told myself, “Everyone knows Dewey. Everyone loves Dewey. If someone finds him, they’ll bring him back to the library.”

  I didn’t want to spread the news that he was missing. Dewey had so many children who loved him, not to mention the special needs students. Oh, my goodness, what about Crystal? I didn’t want to scare them. I knew Dewey was coming back.

  When Dewey wasn’t waiting for me at the front door on the third morning, my stomach plummeted. I realized that, in my heart, I had been expecting to see him sitting there. When he wasn’t, I was devastated. That’s when it hit me: Dewey was gone. He might be dead. He probably wasn’t coming back. I knew Dewey was important, but only at that moment did I realize how big a hole he would leave. To the town of Spencer, Dewey was the library. How could we go on without him?

  When Jodi was three, I lost her at the Mankato Mall. I looked down and she was gone. I almost choked on my own heart, it jumped into my throat so fast. When I couldn’t find her, I became absolutely frantic. My baby. My baby. I couldn’t even think. All I could do was rip clothes off hangers, run the aisles faster and faster. I finally found her hiding in the middle of a circular rack of clothes, laughing. She had been there all along. But, oh, how I died when I thought she was gone.

  I felt the same way now. That’s when I realized Dewey wasn’t just the library’s cat. My grief wasn’t for the town of Spencer, or for its library, or even for its children. The grief was for me. He might live at the library, but Dewey was my cat. I loved him. That’s not just words. I didn’t just love something about him. I loved him. But my baby boy, my baby Dewey, was gone.

  The mood in the library was black. Yesterday we had hope. We believed it was only a matter of time. Now we believed he was gone. We continued to search, but we had looked everywhere. We were out of options. I sat down and thought about what I was going to tell the community. I would call the radio station, which was the information nexus of Spencer. They would immediately make an announcement. They could mention an orange cat without saying his name. The adults would understand, but maybe that would buy time with the children.

  “Vicki!”

  Then the newspaper. They would definitely run the story tomorrow. Maybe someone had taken him in.

  “Vicki!”

  Should we put up flyers? What about a reward?

  “Vicki!”

  Who was I kidding? He was gone. If he was here, we would have found . . .

  “Vicki! Guess who’s home!”

  I stuck my head out of the office and there he was, my big orange buddy, wrapped in the arms of Jean Hollis Clark. I rushed over and hugged him tight. He laid his head on my chest. Out of the circular clothes rack, right under my nose, my child had appeared!

  “Oh, baby boy, baby boy. Don’t ever do that again.”

  Dewey didn’t need me to reassure him. I could tell immediately this was no joke. Dewey was purring like he had on our first morning. He was so happy to see me, so thankful to be in my arms. He seemed happy. But I knew him so well. Underneath, in his bones, he was still shaking.

  “I found him under a car on Grand Avenue,” Jean was saying. “I was going over to White Drug, and I happened to catch a glimpse of orange out of the corner of my eye.”

  I wasn’t listening. I would hear the story many times over the next few days, but at that moment I wasn’t listening. I only had eyes and ears for Dewey.

  “He was hunched against the wheel on the far side of the car. I called to him, but he didn’t come. He looked like he wanted to run, but he was too afraid. He must have been right there all along. Can you believe that? All those people looking for him, and he was right there all along.”

  The rest of the staff was crowding around us now. I could tell they wanted to hold him, to cuddle him, but I didn’t want to let him go.

  “He needs to eat,” I told them. Someone put out a fresh can of food, and we all watched while Dewey sucked it down. I doubt the cat had eaten in days.

  Once he had done his business—food, water, litter box—I let the staff hold him. He was passed from hand to hand like a hero in a victory parade. When everyone had welcomed him home, we took him out to show the public. Most of them didn’t know anything had happened, but there were a few wet eyes. Dewey, our prodigal son, gone but now returned to us. You really do love something more when it’s been lost.

  That afternoon I gave Dewey a bath, which he tolerated for the first time since that cold January morning so long ago. He was covered in motor oil, which took months to work out of his long fur. He had a tear in one ear and a scratch on his nose. I cleaned them gently and lovingly. Was it another cat? A loose wire? The undercarriage of a car? I rubbed his cut ear between my fingers, and Dewey didn’t even flinch. “What happened out there?” I wanted to ask him, but the two of us had already come to an understanding. We would never talk about this incident again.

  Years later, I would make it a habit to prop open a side door during library board meetings. Cathy Greiner, a board member, asked me every time, “Aren’t you worried Dewey will run out?”

  I looked down at Dewey, who was there as usual to attend the meeting, and he looked up at me. That look told me, as clearly as if he’d crossed his heart and hoped to die, that he wasn’t going to run. Why couldn’t everyone else see it?

  “He’s not going anywhere,” I told her. “He’s committed to the library.”

  And he was. For sixteen years, Dewey never went into the lobby again. He lounged by the front door, especially in the morning, but he never followed patrons out. If the doors opened and he heard trucks, he sprinted to the staff area. He didn’t want to be anywhere near a passing truck. Dewey was completely done with the outdoors.

  Chapter 15

  Spencer’s Favorite Cat

  About a month after Dewey’s escape, Jodi left Spencer. I wasn’t sure I could afford to send her to college, and she didn’t want to stay home. Jodi wanted to travel, so she took a job as a nanny in California and saved money for college. I’m sure it didn’t hurt that California was a long way from Mom.

  I brought Dewey home for her last weekend. As always, he was stuck to Jodi’s side like a flesh-hugging magnet. I think he loved nighttime with her most of all. As soon as Jodi pulled down the covers, Dewey was in her bed. Actually he beat her into bed. By the time she finished brushing her teeth, he was sitting on her pillow, ready to curl up beside her. As soon as she lay down, he was plastered against her face. He wouldn’t even let her breathe. She shoved him down into the covers, but he came back. Shove. On her face. Shove. Across her neck.


  “Stay down, Dewey.”

  He finally relented and slept by her side, locked onto her hip. She could breathe, but she couldn’t turn over. Did he know our girl was leaving, maybe for good? When he slept with me, Dewey was in and out of bed all night, exploring the house one minute and snuggling the next. With Jodi, he never left. At one point, he wandered down to attack her feet, which were under the covers, but that was as far as he went. Jodi didn’t get any sleep that night.

  The next time Dewey came to my house, Jodi was gone. He found a way to stay close to her, though, by spending the night in Jodi’s room, curled up on the floor next to her heater, no doubt dreaming of those warm summer nights spent snuggled up to Jodi’s side.

  “I know, Dewey,” I said to him. “I know.”

  A month later I took Dewey for his first official photograph. I’d like to say it was for sentimental reasons, that my world was changing and I wanted to freeze that moment, or that I realized Dewey was on the cusp of something far bigger than either of us ever imagined. But the real reason was a coupon. Rick Krebsbach, the town photographer, was offering pet photographs for ten dollars.

  Dewey was such an easygoing cat that I convinced myself getting a professional portrait made of him, in a professional portrait studio, would be easy. But Dewey hated the studio. As soon as we walked in, his head was swiveling, his eyes looking at everything. I put him in the chair, and he immediately hopped out. I picked him up and put him in the chair again. I took one step back, and Dewey was gone.

  “He’s nervous. He hasn’t been out of the library much,” I said as I watched Dewey sniff the photo backdrop.

  “That’s nothing,” Rick said.

  “Pets aren’t easy?”

  “You have no idea,” he said as we watched Dewey dig his head under a pillow. “One dog tried to eat my camera. Another dog actually ate my fake flowers. Now that I think about it, he puked on that pillow.”

  I picked Dewey up quickly, but my touch didn’t calm him. He was still looking around, more nervous than interested.