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

  Jean Hollis Clark, my assistant director, left for a new job. Eventually she was replaced by Kay Larson, whom I had known for years. Kay was laid-back and practical, a strong Iowa farm woman. She had been a chemical engineer and worked on oil rigs in the Gulf before marrying a farmer and moving back to Iowa. There were no engineering jobs in the area, so she did slaughter work for a time before landing a position at the tiny library in Petersen, about thirty miles south of Spencer. Maybe I should say the position, since the Petersen Library was a one-person show.

  I hired Kay because she was good with computers, and we needed someone who could keep up with new technology. I also knew she was a cat person. In fact, twenty cats lived in her barn, as well as two in her house. “Typical tomcat,” she’d say with Iowa practicality whenever Dewey copped a little attitude or refused to engage in a patron’s two-armed hug. She thought Dewey was smart and beautiful, but she didn’t think he was anything that special.

  But Dewey never lacked for friends. Tony, our painter, scratched the Dewkster whenever he came to see his wife, Sharon, who was expecting their third child. It was an unplanned pregnancy, but it made them both happy. Sharon called from the hospital the day of the birth. She was crying. “Emmy has Down syndrome,” she said. She had never suspected anything was wrong, and the surprise was shattering. Sharon took a few months off from the library, and by the time she came back she was head over heels in love with Emmy.

  Dewey’s old friend Doris Armstrong still brought him little gifts and surprises, and she loved to dangle his beloved red Christmas yarn while he jumped with delight. She was as gregarious and charming as ever, but shortly after the library remodel she began to have severe attacks of vertigo. The doctors couldn’t determine the cause, so they guessed panic attacks. Then her hands began to tremble, and eventually she could barely put the covers on books. She no longer trusted herself to pet Dewey, but he didn’t mind. The more she trembled, the more he brushed his back against her arm and lounged on her desk to keep her company.

  Then one morning Dewey ran into my office crying. This was unusual, but he was leading me toward his food bowl so I thought he wanted a snack. Instead, I found Doris lying on the floor of the staff room. She was having such a severe vertigo attack she couldn’t stand up. For days, she could barely eat she was so dizzy. The next time I found her on the floor, she not only had vertigo, but was sure she was having a heart attack. A few months later, Doris found a tiny black kitten. She brought the kitten to the library and, with trembling hands, held it out for me to hold. I could feel its heart racing and its lungs gasping for air. The kitten was weak, frightened, and sick.

  “What should I do?” she asked me. I didn’t know.

  The next day Doris came into the library crying. She had taken the kitten home with her, and it had died during the night. Sometimes a cat is more than an animal, and sometimes the loss you mourn is not just the obvious one. Dewey sat with Doris the whole day, and she even managed to lay her hands on him and pet him, but his presence didn’t soothe her. Not long after, Doris retired from the library and moved away to be near her family in Minnesota.

  And yet, despite the changes, Dewey’s life stayed essentially the same. Children grew up, but there were always new ones turning four. Staffers moved on, but even on our skimpy budget we managed new hires. Dewey may never again have had a friend like Crystal, but he still met the special education class at the door every week. He even developed relationships with patrons like Mark Carey, who owned the electronics store on the corner. Dewey knew Mark wasn’t a cat lover, and he took fiendish delight in suddenly jumping on the table and scaring the bejeebers out of him. Mark took delight in kicking Dewey out of whatever chair he was lounging in, even if there was nobody else in the library.

  One morning I noticed a businessman in a suit sitting at a table, reading the Wall Street Journal. It looked like he had stopped in to kill time before a meeting, so I wasn’t expecting to see a fluffy orange tail sticking out at his side. I looked closer and saw that Dewey had plopped down on one page of his newspaper. Busy. Businessman. On his way to a meeting. “Oh, Dewey,” I thought, “you’re pushing it now.” Then I realized the man was holding the newspaper with his right hand while petting Dewey with his left. One of them was purring; the other was smiling. That’s when I knew Dewey and the town had fallen into a comfort zone, that the general outline of our lives had been set, at least for the next few years.

  Maybe that’s why I was so surprised when I arrived at the library one morning to find Dewey pacing. He was never agitated like that; even my presence didn’t calm him. When I opened the door, he ran a few steps, then stopped, waiting for me to follow.

  “Do you need to go to the bathroom, Dewey? You know you don’t have to wait for me.”

  It wasn’t the bathroom, and he didn’t have any interest in breakfast, either. He kept pacing back and forth, crying for me. Dewey never cried unless he was in pain, but I knew Dewey. He wasn’t in pain.

  I tried fixing his food. Nope. I checked to see if he had poop stuck in his fur. Poop in his fur drove him absolutely nuts. I checked his nose to see if he had a temperature, and his ears to see if he had an infection. Nothing.

  “Let’s make the rounds, Dew.”

  Like all felines, Dewey had hair balls. Whenever it happened, our fanatically neat cat was mortified. But he had never acted this strangely, so I braced myself for the mother of all hair balls. I worked my way through fiction and nonfiction, checking every corner. But I didn’t find anything.

  Dewey was waiting for me in the children’s library. The poor cat was in knots. But I didn’t find anything there, either.

  “I’m sorry, Dewey. I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”

  When the staff arrived, I told them to keep an eye on Dewey. I was extremely busy, and I couldn’t spend all morning playing charades with a cat. If Dewey was still acting strange in a few hours, I decided to take him to see Dr. Esterly. I knew he would love that.

  Two minutes after the library opened, Jackie Shugars came back to my office. “You’re not going to believe this, Vicki, but Dewey just peed on the cards.”

  I jumped up. “It can’t be!”

  The library automation wasn’t yet complete. To check out a book, we still stamped two cards. One went home with you in the book; the other went into a big bin with hundreds of other cards. When you returned the book, we pulled that card and put the book back on the shelf. Actually there were two bins, one on each side of the front desk. Sure enough, Dewey had peed in the front right corner of one of them.

  I wasn’t mad at Dewey. I was worried about him. He’d been in the library for years; he’d never acted out. This was completely out of character. But I didn’t have long to think the situation through before one of our regular patrons came up and whispered in my ear, “You better get down here, Vicki. There’s a bat in the children’s department.”

  Sure enough, there was the bat, hanging by his heels behind a ceiling beam. And there was Dewey at my heels.

  I tried to tell you. I tried to tell you. Now look what you’ve done. You’ve let a patron find it. We could have taken care of this before anyone arrived. Now there are children in the library. I thought you were protecting them.

  Have you ever been lectured by a cat? It’s not a pleasant experience. Especially when the cat is right. And especially when a bat is involved. I hate bats. I couldn’t stand the thought of having one in the library, and I couldn’t imagine being trapped all night with that thing flying all over the place. Poor Dewey.

  “Don’t worry, Dewey. Bats sleep during the day. He won’t hurt anybody.”

  Dewey didn’t look convinced, but I couldn’t worry about that now. I didn’t want to scare the patrons, especially the children, so I quietly called the city hall janitor and told him, “Get down to the library right away. And bring your ladder.”

  He climbed up for a look. “It’s a bat, all right.”

  “Shhh. Keep your voice
down.”

  He climbed down. “You got a vacuum cleaner?”

  I shivered. “Don’t use the vacuum cleaner.”

  “How about Tupperware? Something with a lid.”

  I just stared at him. This was disgusting.

  Someone said, “We’ve got an empty coffee can. It’s got a lid.”

  The ordeal was over in a matter of seconds. Thank goodness. Now I had to sort out the mess in the cards.

  “This is my fault,” I told Jackie, who was still manning the circulation desk.

  “I know.” Jackie has a droll sense of humor.

  “Dewey was trying to warn us. I’ll clean this up.”

  “I figured you would.”

  I pulled out about twenty cards. Underneath them was a big pile of bat guano. Dewey hadn’t just been trying to get my attention; he’d been using his scent glands to cover the stench of the intruder.

  “Oh, Dewey, you must think I’m so stupid.”

  The next morning, Dewey started what I referred to as his sentry phase. Each morning, he sniffed three heating vents: the one in my office, the one by the front door, and the one by the children’s library. He sniffed each one again after lunch. He knew those vents led somewhere and that therefore they were access points. He had taken it upon himself to use his powerful nose to protect us, to be our proverbial canary in the coal mine. His attitude was, If you can’t even figure out there’s a bat in the library, how are you going to take care of all these people?

  I suppose there could be something funny about such a vigilant cat. What was Dewey worried about, a terrorist attack on the Spencer Public Library? Call me sentimental, but I found it very endearing. At one point in his life, Dewey wasn’t content until he expanded his world to the street outside the library. Now that his story had gone all over the country, he wanted nothing more than to hunker down in the library and protect his friends. You would have to love a cat like that, right?

  And the world apparently did, because Dewey’s fame continued to grow. He was featured in all the cat magazines—Cats, Cat Fancy, Cats & Kittens. If the magazine had cat in the title, Dewey was probably in it. He even appeared in Your Cat, a leading publication of the British feline press. Marti Attoun, a young freelance writer, traveled to Spencer with a photographer. Her article appeared in American Profile, a weekend insert featured in more than a thousand newspapers. Then, in the summer of 1996, a documentary filmmaker from Boston turned up in out-of-the-way Spencer, Iowa, camera in tow, ready to put Dewey in his first movie.

  Gary Roma was traveling the country, from the East Coast to North Dakota, to create a documentary about library cats. He arrived expecting the kind of footage he’d shot at other libraries: cats darting apprehensively behind bookshelves, walking away, sleeping, and doing everything possible to avoid looking into the camera. Dewey was exactly the opposite. He didn’t ham it up, but he went about all his usual activities, and he performed them on command. Gary arrived early in the morning to catch Dewey waiting for me at the front door. He shot Dewey sitting by the sensor posts greeting patrons; lying in his Buddha pose; playing with his favorite toys, Marty Mouse and the red yarn; sitting on a patron’s shoulder in the Dewey Carry; and sleeping in a box.

  Gary said, “This is the best footage I’ve shot so far. If you don’t mind, I’ll come back after lunch.”

  After lunch I sat down for an interview. After a few introductory questions, Gary asked, “What is the meaning of Dewey?”

  I told him, “Dewey’s great for the library. He relieves stress. He makes it feel like home. People love him, especially children.”

  “Yes, but what’s the deeper meaning?”

  “There is no deeper meaning. Everyone enjoys spending time with Dewey. He makes us happy. He’s one of us. What more to life is there than that?”

  He kept pressing for meaning, meaning, meaning. Gary’s first film was Off the Floor & Off the Wall: A Doorstop Documentary, and I could imagine him pressing all his subjects: “What does your doorstop mean to you?”

  “It keeps the door from hitting the wall.”

  “Yes, but what about the deeper meaning?”

  “Well, I can use it to hold the door open.”

  “Go deeper.”

  “Umm, it keeps the room drafty?”

  Gary must have gotten deeper meaning out of doorstops because one review mentions linguists dissecting the etymology of the word and philosophers musing about a world without doors.

  About six months after filming, in the winter of 1997, we threw a party for the inaugural showing of Puss in Books. The library was packed. The film started with a distant shot of Dewey sitting on the floor of the Spencer library waving his tail slowly back and forth. As the camera zoomed in and followed him under a table, across some shelves, and finally to his favorite cart for a ride, you heard my voice in the background: “We arrived at work one morning, and we went back to open the book drop and empty the books out, and there inside was this tiny little kitten. He was buried under tons of books, the book drop was just full of books. People will come in, and they’ll hear the story of how we acquired Dewey, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, you poor little thing. You were thrown into that book drop on that day.’ And I’ll say, ‘Poor little thing, my foot. That was the luckiest day of that boy’s life, because he’s king around here, and he knows it.’”

  As the last words rolled out, Dewey stared right into the camera, and boy, could you tell I was right. He really was the king.

  By this time, I was used to strange calls about Dewey. The library was getting a couple requests a week for interviews, and articles about our famous cat were turning up in our mail on an almost weekly basis. Dewey’s official photograph, the one taken by Rick Krebsbach just after Jodi left Spencer, had appeared in magazines, newsletters, books, and newspapers from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Jerusalem, Israel. It even appeared in a cat calendar; Dewey was Mr. January. But even I was surprised to receive a phone call from the Iowa office of a national pet food company.

  “We’ve been watching Dewey,” they said, “and we’re impressed.” Who wouldn’t be? “He seems like an extraordinary cat. And obviously people love him.” You don’t say! “We’d like to use him in a print advertising campaign. We can’t offer money, but we will provide free cat food for life.”

  I have to admit, I was tempted. Dewey was a finicky eater, and we were indulgent parents. We were throwing out dishes full of food every day just because he didn’t like the smell, and we were donating a hundred cans of out-of-favor cat food a year. Since the Feed the Kitty campaign of loose change and soda cans didn’t cover the costs and I had vowed to never use a penny of city funds for Dewey’s care, most of that money was coming out of my pocket. I was personally subsidizing the feeding of a good portion of the cats in Spencer.

  “I’ll talk to the library board.”

  “We’ll send over samples.”

  By the time the next library board meeting rolled around, the decision had already been made. Not by me or the board, but by Dewey himself. Mr. Finicky completely rejected the free samples.

  Are you kidding me? he told me with a disdainful sniff. I can’t shill for this junk.

  “I’m sorry,” I told the manufacturer. “Dewey only eats Fancy Feast.”

  Chapter 19

  The World’s Worst Eater

  Dewey’s pickiness wasn’t just a matter of personality. He had a disease. No, really, it’s true. As far as digestive systems were concerned, that cat really got a lemon.

  Dewey always hated being petted on the stomach. Stroke his back, scratch his ears, even pull his tail and poke him in the eye, but never pet his stomach. I didn’t think much of it until Dr. Esterly tried to clean his anal glands when he was about two years old. “I just push down on the glands and squeeze them clean,” he explained. “It will take thirty seconds.”

  Sounded easy enough. I held Dewey while Dr. Esterly prepared his equipment, which consisted of a pair of gloves and a paper towel. “Nothing to it,
Dewey,” I whispered. “It will be over before you know it.”

  But as soon as Dr. Esterly pressed down, Dewey screamed. This wasn’t a mild complaint. This was a full-fledged, terrified cry that ripped out from the base of his stomach. His body bolted like it had been hit by lightning, and his legs scrambled frantically. Then he threw his mouth over my finger and bit down. Hard.

  Dr. Esterly looked at my finger. “He shouldn’t have done that.”

  I rubbed the sore. “It’s not a problem.”

  “Yes, it is a problem. A cat shouldn’t bite like that.”

  I wasn’t worried. That wasn’t Dewey. I knew Dewey; he wasn’t a biter. And I could still see the panic in the poor cat’s eyes. He wasn’t looking at anything. He was just staring. The pain had been blinding.

  After that, Dewey hated Dr. Esterly. He even hated the thought of getting in the car because it might lead to Dr. Esterly. As soon as we pulled into the veterinary office’s parking lot, he started shaking. The smell of the lobby sent him into uncontrollable tremors. He would bury his head in the crook of my arm as if to say, Protect me.

  As soon as he heard Dr. Esterly’s voice, Dewey growled. Many cats hate the veterinarian in his office but treat him as any other human in the outside world. Not Dewey. He feared Dr. Esterly unconditionally. If he heard his voice in the library, Dewey growled and sprinted to the other side of the room. If Dr. Esterly managed to sneak up on him and reached out to pet him, Dewey sprang up, looked around in panic, and bolted away. I think he recognized Dr. Esterly’s smell. That hand, to Dewey, was the hand of death. He had found his archenemy, and it happened to be one of the nicest men in town.

  A few uneventful years went by after the anal gland incident, but Dewey eventually went back to prowling for rubber bands. As a kitten, his rubber band hunting had been halfhearted, and he was easily distracted. At about five years of age, Dewey became serious. I started finding the sticky remnants on the floor almost every morning. His litter box was filled not only with rubber worms but with the occasional drop of blood. Sometimes Dewey came tearing out of the back room like someone had lit a firecracker under his rear end.