Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched The World

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.