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

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 blood, 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.