But as soon as people started arriving, Dewey dashed back to the refreshment table to be front and center again. Yes, the library had changed, but what he missed most after three weeks away was people. He hated being away from his friends at the library. And they had missed him, too. As they went for their cookies, they all stopped to pet Dewey. Some lifted him onto their shoulders for a tour through the newly arranged shelving units. Others just watched him, talked about him, and smiled. The library may have changed, but Dewey was still the king.
Between 1987, the year before Dewey fell into our arms, and 1989, the year of the remodel, visits to the Spencer Public Library increased from 63,000 a year to more than 100,000. Clearly something had changed. People were thinking differently about their library, appreciating it more. And not just the citizens of Spencer. That year, 19.4 percent of our visitors were from rural Clay County. Another 18 percent came from the surrounding counties. No one could argue, seeing those numbers, that the library wasn’t a regional center.
The remodeling helped, there’s no doubt about that. So did the revitalization of Grand Avenue; and the economy, which was picking up; and the energized staff; and our new outreach and entertainment programs. But most of the change, most of what brought the new people in and finally made the Spencer Public Library a meeting house, not a warehouse, was Dewey.
Chapter 14
Dewey’s Great Escape
Late July is the best time of year in Spencer. The corn is ten feet high, golden and green. It’s so high, the farmers are required by state law to cut it to half height every mile, where the roads meet at right angles. Rural Iowa has too many intersections and not enough stop signs. The short corn helps, because at least you can see cars coming, and it doesn’t hurt the farmers. Corn ears grow in the center of the stalk, not the top.
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.
Fortunately he almost always stuck to his favorite place in the bottom rows of Westerns. Not this time. He wasn’t under the brown lounger, either, or in his cubbyhole. I didn’t notice him peeking down from the lights. I opened the doors to the bathrooms to see if he had been locked inside. Not this morning.
“Has anyone seen Dewey?”
No. No. No. No.
“Who locked up last night?”
“I did,” Joy said, “and he was definitely here.” I knew Joy would never have forgotten to look for Dewey. She was the only staffer, besides me, who would stay late with him to play hide-and-seek.
“Good. He must be in the building. Looks like he’s found a new hiding place.”
But when I returned from lunch, Dewey was still missing. And he hadn’t touched his food. That’s when I began to worry.
“Where’s Dewey?” a patron asked.