Dewey: the Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World Page 21

“He needs an X-ray.”

  Ten minutes later, Dr. Beall was back with the results. There was a large tumor in Dewey’s stomach, and it was pushing on his kidneys and intestines. That’s why he had been peeing more, and it probably accounted for his peeing outside the litter box.

  “It wasn’t there in September,” Dr. Beall said, “which means it’s probably an aggressive cancer. But we’d have to do invasive tests to find out for sure.”

  We stood silently, looking at Dewey. I never suspected the tumor. Never. I knew everything about Dewey, all his thoughts and feelings, but he had kept this one thing hidden from me.

  “Is he in pain?”

  “Yes, I suspect he is. The mass is growing very fast, so it will only get worse.”

  “Is there anything you can give him for the pain?”

  “No, not really.”

  I was holding Dewey in my arms, cradling him like a baby. He hadn’t let me carry him that way in sixteen years. Now he wasn’t even fighting it. He was just looking at me.

  “Do you think he’s in constant pain?”

  “I can’t imagine that he’s not.”

  The conversation was crushing me, flattening me out, making me feel drawn, deflated, tired. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Somehow I had believed Dewey was going to live forever.

  I called the library staff and told them Dewey wasn’t coming home. Kay was out of town. Joy was off duty. They reached her at Sears, but too late. Several others came down to say their good-byes. Instead of going to Dewey, though, Sharon walked right up and hugged me. Thank you, Sharon, I needed that. Then I hugged Donna and thanked her for loving Dewey so much. Donna was the last to say her good-byes.

  Someone said, “I don’t know if I want to be here when they put him to sleep.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “I’d rather be alone with him.”

  Dr. Beall took Dewey into the back room to insert the IV, then brought him back in a fresh blanket and put him in my arms. I talked to Dewey for a few minutes. I told him how much I loved him, how much he meant to me, how much I didn’t want him to suffer. I explained what was happening and why. I rewrapped his blanket to make sure he was comfortable. What more could I offer him than comfort? I cradled him in my arms and rocked back and forth from foot to foot, a habit started when he was a kitten. Dr. Beall gave him the first shot, followed closely by the second.

  He said, “I’ll check for a heartbeat.”

  I said, “You don’t need to. I can see it in his eyes.”

  Dewey was gone.

  Chapter 27

  Loving Dewey

  I was in Florida for eight days. I didn’t read the newspaper. I didn’t watch television. I didn’t take any phone calls. It was the best possible time to be away because Dewey’s death was hard. Very hard. I broke down on the flight from Omaha and cried all the way to Houston. In Florida, I thought often of Dewey, alone, quietly, but also surrounded by the family that had always sustained me.

  I had no idea how far word of Dewey’s death had spread. The next morning, while I sat crying on an airplane to Houston, the local radio station devoted their morning show to memories of Dewey. The Sioux City Journal ran a lengthy story and obituary. I don’t know if that was the source, but the AP wire picked up the story and sent it around the world. Within hours, news of Dewey’s death appeared on the CBS afternoon newsbreak and on MSNBC. The library started getting calls. If I had been in the library, I would have been stuck answering questions from reporters for days, but nobody else on staff felt comfortable speaking to the media. The library secretary, Kim, gave a brief statement, which ended up in what I now think of as Dewey’s public obituary, but that was all. It was enough. Over the next few days, that obituary ran in more than 270 newspapers.

  The response from individuals touched by Dewey was equally overwhelming. People in town received calls from friends and relatives all over the country who read about Dewey’s death in the local newspaper or heard it on a local radio show. One local couple was out of the country and learned the news from a friend in San Francisco, who read about his passing in the San Francisco Chronicle. Admirers set up a vigil in the library. Local businesses sent flowers and gifts. Sharon and Tony’s daughter, Emmy, gave me a picture she had drawn of Dewey. It was two green circles in the middle of the page with lines sticking out in all directions. It was beautiful, and Emmy beamed as I taped it to my office door. That picture was the perfect way for both of us to remember him.

  Gary Roma, director of the documentary about library cats, wrote me a long letter. It said, in part: “I don’t know if I ever told you, but of all the many library cats I’ve met across the country, Dewey Readmore Books was my favorite. His beauty, charm, and playfulness were unique.”

  Tomoko from Japanese Public Television wrote to tell us Dewey’s death had been announced in Japan, and that many were sad to hear he was gone.

  Marti Attoun, who wrote the article for American Profile, wrote to say the Dewey story was still her favorite. It had been years, and Marti was now a contributing editor. It seemed so unlikely, given the hundreds of stories she had written, that Marti would remember a cat, much less still think of him fondly. But that was Dewey. He touched people so deeply.

  By the time I returned to my office, there were letters and cards stacked four feet high on my desk. I had more than six hundred e-mails about Dewey waiting in my inbox. Many were from people who met him only once but never forgot him. Hundreds of others were from people who never met him. In the month after his death, I received more than a thousand e-mails about Dewey from all around the world. We heard from a soldier in Iraq who had been touched by Dewey’s death despite what he saw there every day—or perhaps because of it. We received a letter from a couple in Connecticut whose son was turning eleven; his birthday wish was to release a balloon to heaven in Dewey’s honor. We received numerous gifts and donations. A librarian at the Naval History Museum, for instance, donated four books in his memory. She had followed Dewey’s story in library publications and read his obituary in the Washington Post. Our Web site, www.spencerlibrary.com, went from 25,000 hits a month to 189,922 in December, and the traffic didn’t let up for most of the next year.

  Many people in town wanted us to hold a memorial service. I didn’t want a memorial service, nobody on staff did, but we had to do something. So on a cold Saturday in the middle of December, Dewey’s admirers gathered at the library to remember one last time, at least officially, the friend who had had such an impact on their lives. The staff tried to keep it light—I told the story of the bat, Audrey told the story of the lights, Joy remembered the cart rides, Sharon told how Dewey stole the meat out of her sandwich—but despite our best efforts, tears were shed. Two women cried the whole time.

  Crews from local television stations were filming the event. It was a nice thought, but the cameras seemed out of place. These were private thoughts among friends; we didn’t want to share our words with the world. We also realized, as we stood there together, that words couldn’t describe our feelings for Dewey. There was no easy way to say how special he was. We were here; the cameras were here; the world stood still around us. That said more than any words. Finally a local schoolteacher said, “People say what’s the big deal, he was just a cat. But that’s where they’re wrong. Dewey was so much more.” Everyone knew exactly what she meant.

  My moments with Dewey were more intimate. The staff had cleaned out his bowls and donated his food while I was away, but I had to give away his toys. I had to clean out his shelf: the Vaseline for his hairballs, the brush, the red skein of yarn he had played with all his life. I had to park my car and walk to the library every morning without Dewey waving at me from the front door. When the staff returned to the library after visiting Dewey for the last time, the space heater he had lain in front of every day wasn’t working. Dewey had been lying in front of it that very morning, and it had been working fine. It was as if his death had taken away its reason to heat. Can a malfunctioning pie
ce of equipment break your heart? It was six weeks before I could even think about having that heater repaired.

  I had Dewey cremated with one of his favorite toys, Marty Mouse, so he wouldn’t be alone. The crematorium offered a mahogany box and bronze plaque, no charge, but it didn’t seem right to display him. Dewey came back to his library in a plain plastic container inside a blue velvet bag. I put the container on a shelf in my office and went back to work.

  A week after his memorial service, I came out of my office a half hour before the library opened, long before any patrons arrived, and told Kay, “It’s time.”

  It was December, another brutally cold Iowa morning. Just like the first morning, and so many in between. It was close to the shortest day of the year, and the sun wasn’t yet up. The sky was still deep blue, almost purple, and there was no traffic on the roads. The only sound was the cold wind that had come all the way from the Canadian plains, whipping down the streets and out over the barren cornfields.

  We moved some rocks in the little garden out front of the library, looking for a place where the ground wasn’t completely frozen. But the whole earth was frosted, and it took a while for Kay to dig the hole. The sun was peeking over the buildings on the far side of the parking lot, throwing the first shadows, by the time I placed the remains of my friend in the ground and said simply, “You’re always with us, Dewey. This is your home.” Then Kay dropped in the first shovelful of dirt, burying Dewey’s ashes forever outside the window of the children’s library, at the foot of the beautiful statue of a mother reading a book to her child. Mom’s statue. As Kay moved the stones back over Dewey’s final resting place, I looked up and saw the rest of the library staff in the window, silently watching us.

  Epilogue

  Last Thoughts from Iowa

  Not much has changed in northwest Iowa since Dewey died. With ethanol being the next big thing, more corn is in the ground than ever before, but there aren’t more workers to grow it, just better technology and more machines. And, of course, more land.

  In Spencer, the hospital added its first plastic surgeon. Cleber Meyer, now eighty, was voted out of office and went back to his gas station. The new mayor is the husband of Kim Petersen, the library secretary, but he’s no more a reader than Cleber was. The Eaton plant on the edge of town, which makes machine parts, moved a shift to Juárez, Mexico. One hundred and twenty jobs lost. But Spencer will survive. We always do.

  The library rolls on, cat-free for the first time since Ronald Reagan was president. After Dewey’s death, we had almost a hundred offers for new cats. We had offers from as far away as Texas, transportation included. The cats were cute, and most had touching survival stories, but there was no enthusiasm to take one. The library board wisely put a two-year moratorium on cats in the library. They needed time, they said, to think through the issues. I had done all the thinking I needed. You can’t bring back the past.

  But Dewey’s memory will live on, I feel confident of that. Maybe at the library, where his portrait hangs beside the front door above a bronze plaque that tells his story, a gift from one of Dewey’s many friends. Maybe in the children who knew him, who will talk about him in decades to come with their own children and grandchildren. Maybe in this book. After all, that’s why I’m writing it. For Dewey.

  Back in 2000, when Grand Avenue made the National Registry, Spencer commissioned a public art installation to serve as both a statement about our values and an entry point to our historic downtown. Two Chicago-area ceramic tile mosaic artists, Nina Smoot-Cain and John Pitman Weber, spent a year in the area, talking with us, studying our history, and observing our way of life. More than 570 residents, from young children to grandparents, consulted with the artists. The result is a mosaic sculpture called The Gathering: Of Time, of Land, of Many Hands.

  The Gathering is composed of four decorative pillars and three pictorial walls. The south wall is called “The Story of the Land.” It is a farm scene featuring corn and pigs; a woman hanging quilts on a clothesline; and a train. The north wall is “The Story of Outdoor Recreation.” It focuses on East and West Lynch parks, our main municipal recreation areas; the fairgrounds on the northwest edge of town; and the lakes. The west wall is “The Story of Spencer.” It shows three generations gathering at grandma’s house; the town battling the fire; and a woman making a pot, a metaphor for shaping the future. Just slightly to the left of center, in the upper half of the scene, is an orange cat sitting on the open pages of a book. The image is based on artwork submitted by a child.

  The story of Spencer. Dewey is a part of it, then, now, and forever. He will live longest, I know, in the collective memory of a town that never forgets where it’s been, even as it looks ahead for where it’s going.

  I told Jodi when Dewey was fourteen, “I don’t know if I’ll want to keep working at the library after Dewey’s gone.” It was just a premonition, but now I understand what I meant. For as long as I can remember, when I pulled up every morning the library was alive: with hope, with love, with Dewey waving at me from the front door. Now it’s a dead building again. I feel the chill in my bones, even in the summer. Some mornings, I don’t want to bother. But then I turn on the lights, and the library flickers to life. The staff files in. The patrons follow: the middle-aged for books, the businessmen for magazines, the teenagers for computers, the children for stories, the elderly for support. The library is alive, and once again I have the best job on earth, at least until I get ready to leave in the evening and there’s nobody begging for one more game of hide-and-seek.

  A year after Dewey’s death, my health finally caught up with me. It was time, I knew, to move on with my life. The library was different without Dewey, and I didn’t want my days to end that way: empty, quiet, occasionally lonely. When I saw the book cart go past, the one Dewey used to ride on, it broke my heart. I missed him that much, and not just once in a while, but every day. I decided to retire. It was time. More than 125 people attended my retirement party, including many from out of town I hadn’t spoken with in years. Dad read one of his poems; my grandkids sat with me to greet well-wishers; two articles ran in the Spencer Daily Reporter thanking me for twenty-five years of service. Like Dewey, I was lucky. I got to leave on my own terms.

  Find your place. Be happy with what you have. Treat everyone well. Live a good life. It isn’t about material things; it’s about love. And you can never anticipate love.

  I learned those things from Dewey, of course, but as always, those answers seem too easy. All answers, except that I loved Dewey with all my heart and he loved me in the same way, seem too easy. But let me try.

  When I was three years old, Dad owned a John Deere tractor. The tractor had a cultivator on the front, which is a long row of shovel-like blades, six on each side. The blades are raised a few inches off the dirt; you drive the handle forward to put them in the ground, where they chop into the soil, tossing fresh dirt against the corn rows. I was playing in the mud by the front wheel of that tractor one day when Mom’s brother came out after lunch, threw the clutch, and started driving. Dad saw what happened and started running, but Mom’s brother couldn’t hear him. The wheel knocked me down and shoved me into the blades. I was pushed along by the blades, passed from one to the other, until Mom’s brother turned the wheel and the inside blade tossed me through the middle chute and left me lying facedown behind the tractor. Dad scooped me up in one motion and ran me back to the porch. He looked me over in amazement, then held me in his arms for the rest of the day, rocking back and forth in our old rocking chair, crying on my shoulder and telling me, “You’re all right, you’re all right, everything is all right.”

  Eventually I looked at him and said, “I cut my finger.” I showed him the blood. I was bruised, but otherwise, that tiny cut was the only mark.

  That’s life. We all go through the tractor blades every now and then. We all get bruised, and we all get cut. Sometimes the blades cut deep. The lucky ones come through with a few scratches, a little bloo
d, but even that isn’t the most important thing. The most important thing is having someone there to scoop you up, to hold you tight, and to tell you everything is all right.

  For years, I thought I had done that for Dewey. I thought that was my story to tell. And I had done that. When Dewey was hurt, cold, and crying, I was there. I held him. I made sure everything was all right.

  But that’s only a sliver of the truth. The real truth is that for all those years, on the hard days, the good days, and all the unremembered days that make up the pages of the real book of our lives, Dewey was holding me.

  He’s still holding me now. So thank you, Dewey. Thank you. Wherever you are.

  Acknowledgments

  To my agent, Peter McGuigan, for contacting me and believing there was a story to be told about Dewey’s life. Thank you, Peter, Hannah Gordon Brown, and everyone at Foundry Literary who worked so tirelessly to make this book bigger than I ever imagined.

  To Bret Witter, who not only found my voice, but also became a friend and confidant through this process. Thank you, Bret, for making the book so well written. We were passionate about quality, and I think we achieved it.

  To Karen Kosztolnyik, Jamie Raab, and Celia Johnson at Grand Central Publishing for fighting for the book even though they saw only a forty-five-page proposal. They believed in the story before it was even written. Thank you to Matthew Ballast, Harvey-Jane Kowal, Christine Valentine, and everyone at Grand Central: there would be no book without all of you.

  To Dick Montgomery for being my lawyer and friend through all the legal “stuff,” and to his wife, Mary Jean, for all her support.

  To the current and former Spencer Library staff who supported this project, sat through interviews, believed in me, and cared for Dewey over the years, including Jean Hollis Clark, Kay Larson, Joy DeWall, Sharon Joy, Audrey Wheeler, Cynthia Behrends, Paula Brown, Donna Stanford, Tammi Herbold, Jann Arends, Mary Jo Wingrove, Doris Armstrong, Kari Palm, Sheryl Rose, and Jackie Webster.