Dewey's Nine Lives

It wasn’t until Dewey’s passing that Yvonne started talking. A little. For nineteen years, I had kept up a steady stream of Dewey chats with many of the library regulars. After his death, he seemed like all we could discuss. It wasn’t until the end of the initial rush, though, when the cold slog of February settled over us and the realization that Dewey was gone had dug deep into our bones, that Yvonne approached me, quietly and nervously, and talked about Dewey. She told me how much she had looked forward to seeing him. How much he had understood her. How gentle and brave he was. She told me, more than once, about the day Dewey slept on her lap for an hour, and how special that made her feel.

“That’s nice,” I told her. “Thank you.”

I appreciated her thoughtfulness, especially since I knew how hard it was for her to initiate conversation. But I was busy, and I never asked her anything more. Why should I? Dewey sat on everyone’s lap. Of course it was special.

After a few short conversations, Yvonne stopped talking. She faded back into the background, and her special moment with Dewey became just another brushstroke on the giant portrait of his life. It wasn’t until two years later, after I heard how thrilled she was that her name appeared in Dewey, that I sat down with her. By then, I had collected so many sweet but simple stories from regular library users about Dewey—stories that amounted to little more than “I can’t explain it, he just made me happy”—that I doubted there was much to this one.

But Yvonne’s story was different. There was something about her moment with Dewey that reminded me why I have always loved libraries. And small towns. And cats. Yvonne was so closed off, I must admit, that I didn’t learn much about her. I thought I had, at the time, but when I read this story, I realized that she remained, and always will remain, something of a mystery.

What I learned instead is how different lives can be, even when they are lived alongside each other. And how easy it is to get lost, even in a straightforward little town like Spencer, Iowa. I learned how hard it is to know someone, and how little that matters if your heart is open to their needs. We don’t have to understand; we just have to care.

That is something, once again, I learned from Dewey. That was his Magic. In the end, I guess, this is another story about him.

Yvonne grew up in Sutherland, Iowa, a town of about eight hundred people, thirty miles southwest of Spencer. Her father was what you might call a tinkerer. He worked a small rented farm near County Road M12, served in a series of low-level county government positions, and owned an old water truck that he filled from a well on their property and drove around to local feedlots. I’ve known a lot of men like him: quiet and a bit shambling, often unnoticed but always there, a good guy searching for the leg up that never arrives. Eventually, after he was voted out of office, the family drifted out of the farm lease and into a house in town. Her father took up factory work. Yvonne, five years old and the youngest of five children, took to caring for the cats that roamed their new property.

I remember those rural childhood days myself: the long, slow seasons, the hours spent playing with my brothers in the yard while my parents worked to make the farm produce. I still remember, as if it was yesterday, the afternoon my dad brought home Snowball, the first animal I ever loved. It was a hot early summer day, and I stood in the yard watching him coming closer and closer out of the knee-high corn. Dad was sweating so badly under his hat, it almost looked like tears, and as I followed his slipstream into the house, I could see he had something in his hands, even though I didn’t know what it was.

“It must have been born in the field,” he told my mother, “because there were a bunch of them hidden down there. The mother and other babies were killed by the plow. This one,” he said, holding up the kitten, which was covered in blood, “had its back legs cut off.”