Вики Майрон - Dewey - The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched The World

“Hold on, Dewey,” I told him, putting down my pile of work. “I’m going to get a picture of this.” By the time I got back with the camera, the cat and his rubber band were gone.

“Make sure all the cabinets and drawers are completely closed,” I reminded the staff. Dewey was already notorious. He had a habit of getting closed inside cabinets and drawers and then leaping out at the next person to open them. We weren’t sure if it was a game or an accident, but Dewey clearly enjoyed it.

A few mornings later I found file cards sitting suspiciously unbound on the front desk. Dewey had never gone for tight rubber bands before; now, he was biting them off every night. As always, he was delicate even in defiance. He left perfectly neat stacks, not a card out of place. The cards went into the drawers; the drawers were shut tight.

By the fall of 1988, you could spend an entire day in the Spencer Public Library without seeing a rubber band. Oh, they were still there, but they were squirreled away where only those with an opposable thumb could get to them. It was the ultimate cleaning operation. The library looked beautiful, and we were proud of our accomplishment. Except for one problem: Dewey was still chewing rubber bands.

I put together a crack investigative team to follow all leads. It took us two days to find Dewey’s last good source: the coffee mug on Mary Walk’s desk.

“Mary,” I said, flipping a notebook like the police detective in a bad television drama, “we have reason to believe the rubber bands are coming from your mug.”

“That’s impossible. I’ve never seen Dewey around my desk.”

“Evidence suggests the suspect is intentionally avoiding your desk to throw us off the trail. We believe he only approaches the mug at night.”

“What evidence?”

I pointed to several small pieces of chewed rubber band on the floor. “He chews them up and spits them out. He eats them for breakfast. I think you know all the usual clichés.”

Mary shuddered at the thought of the garbage on the floor having passed into and out of the stomach of a cat. Still, it seemed so improbable. . . .

“The mug is six inches deep. It’s full of paper clips, staples, pen, pencils. How could he possibly pluck out rubber bands without knocking everything over?”

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And this suspect has proven, in his eight months at the library, that he has the will.”

“But there are hardly any rubber bands in there! Surely this isn’t his only source!”

“How about an experiment? You put the mug in the cabinet, we’ll see if he pukes rubber bands near your desk.”

“But this mug has my children’s pictures on it!”

“Good point. How about we just remove the rubber bands?”

Mary decided to put a lid on the mug. The next morning, the lid was lying on her desk with suspicious teeth marks along one edge. No doubt about it, the mug was the source. The rubber bands went into a drawer. Convenience was sacrificed for the greater good.

We never completely succeeded in wiping out Dewey’s rubber band fixation. He’d lose interest, only to go back on the prowl a few months or even a few years later. In the end, it was more a game than a battle, a contest of wits and guile. While we had the wits, Dewey had the guile. And the will. He was far more intent on eating rubber bands than we were on stopping him. And he had that powerful, rubber-sniffing nose.

But let’s not make too much of it all. Rubber bands were a hobby. Catnip and boxes were mere distractions. Dewey’s true love was people, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do for his adoring public. I remember standing at the circulation desk one morning talking with Doris when we noticed a toddler wobbling by. She must have recently learned to walk, because her balance was shaky and her steps uneven. It wasn’t helping that her arms were wrapped tightly across her chest, clutching Dewey in a bear hug. His rear and tail were sticking up in her face, and his head was hanging down toward the floor. Doris and I stopped talking and watched in amazement as the little girl toddled in slow motion across the library, a very big smile on her face and a very resigned cat hanging upside down from her arms.

“Amazing,” Doris said.

“I should do something about that,” I said. But I didn’t. I knew that, despite appearances, Dewey was completely in control of the situation. He knew what he was doing and, no matter what happened, he could take care of himself.

We think of a library, or any single building really, as a small place. How can you spend all day, every day, in a 13,000-square-foot room and not get bored? But to Dewey, the Spencer Public Library was a huge world full of drawers, cabinets, bookshelves, display cases, rubber bands, typewriters, copiers, tables, chairs, backpacks, purses, and a steady stream of hands to pet him, legs to rub him, and mouths to sing his praises. And laps. The library was always graciously, gorgeously full of laps.

By the fall of 1988, Dewey considered all of it his.

Chapter 6

Moneta

Size is a matter of perspective. For an insect, one stalk of corn, or even one ear of corn, can be the whole world. For Dewey, the Spencer Public Library was a labyrinth that kept him endlessly fascinated—at least until he started to wonder what was outside the front door. For most of the people in northwest Iowa, Spencer is the big city. In fact, we are the biggest city for a hundred miles in any direction. People from nine counties funnel into Spencer for entertainment and shopping. We have stores, services, live music, local theater, and, of course, the county fair. What more do you need? If there was a front door leading from Grand Avenue to the rest of the world, most people around here wouldn’t have any interest in going through it.

In junior high school, I remember being scared of girls from Spencer, not because I’d ever met any but because they were from the big city. Like most people around here, I grew up on a farm. My great-great-aunt Luna was the first schoolteacher in Clay County. She taught class out of a one-room sod house. There have never been trees out here on the prairie, so the settlers built with what they could find: grass. Roots, soil, and all. My great-grandfather Norman Jipson was the one who amassed enough land to grant a farmstead to each of his six children. No matter where I went as a kid, I was surrounded by my father’s family. Most of the Jipsons were staunch Baptists, and they didn’t wear pants. All right, the men wore pants. Religiously. The women wore dresses. I never saw a pair of slacks on any woman on my father’s side.

In time, my father inherited his land and started the hard work of running a family farm, but first he learned to dance. Dancing was off-limits to most Baptists, but Verlyn “Jipp” Jipson was fifteen years younger than his four siblings, and his parents indulged him. As a young man, Jipp would slip out and drive the truck an hour to the Roof Garden, a 1920s gilded-era resort on the edge of Lake Okoboji, for their Friday-night dances. Okoboji is a mystical name in Iowa. West Okoboji, the centerpiece of a chain of five lakes, is the only blue-water, spring-fed lake in the state, and people come from Nebraska and even Minnesota, a state with a few lakes of its own, to the hotels along its shore. In the late 1940s, the hottest spot in the area, maybe even the whole state of Iowa, was the Roof Garden. Every big-name swing band played the joint, and often the ballroom was so packed you couldn’t move. World War II was over, and the party seemed like it would go on forever. Outside, on the boardwalk, there was a roller coaster, a Ferris wheel, and enough lights, sounds, and pretty girls to make you forget that Lake Okoboji was a brilliant blue pinprick in the vast emptiness of the Great American Plains.