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.”
Most farmers would have left the badly injured animal to die, letting nature have its way, but when my dad saw the kitten was still alive, he picked it up and rushed home. My mother, as much an animal lover as my father, took over from there, nursed it for a month with milk from a bottle. She gave it warm blankets at night, and let it stay in her sweltering kitchen by day. I watched over her shoulder as she cared for it, amazed by the kitten’s recovery. By midsummer, Snowball’s stumps had healed. A lot of people think cats are lazy, but the effort Snowball made! The determination! In no time, it seemed, she developed the ability to balance on her front two legs, with her back end held straight up. Then she learned to hop, with her rear end swinging in the air like a highfalutin lady, and her tail pointed toward the sky. I loved it. That summer, Snowball and I played together every day. I ran around the farmyard, laughing and shouting, and she hopped after me, her back end waving. In the fall, at the end of each school day, I jumped off the bus, threw down my book bag, and raced into the farmyard, yelling for her. She didn’t live long, and when she died I was inconsolable for a while, but I will never forget the way Snowball danced around that yard, in slow motion, like she was doing the jitterbug hop. Her determination, and the lesson from my parents to respect and cherish every living thing, were the lasting legacies of my summer with Snowball.
How different was five-year-old Yvonne’s experience? I don’t know. I don’t know if she played with her older siblings, or if she was left alone in the yard. I don’t know if she chose the company of cats out of loneliness or out of a natural love. I do know her parents, like a lot of farm people, didn’t think much of cats and didn’t help her care for the ones that kept appearing in their yard. “The cats were always dying or disappearing,” Yvonne told me. “It broke my heart. But my parents would never buy them food, no matter how often I asked. They said they couldn’t afford it.”
My clearest childhood memory is of my father, with that injured cat in his hands, talking with my mother. Yvonne’s clearest memory is of a photograph. She was six. Her mother wanted a picture of her kids with their favorite cats. Yvonne couldn’t find her favorite, a black-and-white kitten known as Black-and-White. Her mother told her to quit looking already and stand with her brother and sister, who were both holding up wiggling cats to the camera.
“Come on, now, smile,” her mom commanded.
“I can’t find my kitten.”
“It doesn’t matter. Just smile.”
Afterward, Yvonne stared off into the neighboring fields, biting her lip. There are flat empty spaces in Iowa, even in the towns, where you can watch the world stretch away from you. You can see forever out there if you keep looking, but eventually Yvonne turned away, walked over to her mother, and asked if she would take a picture of her with one of the other cats.
“No,” her mom said. “I’m out of film.”
“I wanted to cry,” Yvonne told me, “but I didn’t. I knew they would make fun of me.”
Ten years later, when Yvonne was sixteen, her father got a job at the Witco factory, and the family moved to Spencer. I remember venturing into Spencer when I was a teenager living in the nearby town of Hartley. It was terrifying. The girls at Spencer High School seemed so worldy, so willing to dress fashionably and talk to boys and linger on street corners, as if they were one step away from being Pink Ladies in
Grease
. I remember thinking they were physically bigger than us country kids, that they could crush us if they wanted. That was Spencer to me, yet I had every advantage. My grandmother lived in town, so I knew the streets and shops; I went to Hartley High School, one of the larger schools in the surrounding area; I was an outgoing, popular girl who almost never felt out of place or overwhelmed. So I can imagine what it must have been like for Yvonne, a shy girl who had never spent time in Spencer, never succeeded in school, and never been comfortable with social situations, even in Sutherland. I understood what she meant when she told me her year and a half at Spencer High School was torture.
Her parents gave her one thing to ease the loneliness: a cat. Just before the move to Spencer, Yvonne’s aunt May’s cat gave birth to a litter of half-Siamese kittens. As soon as Yvonne saw them, she fell in love. Somehow, she convinced her parents to let her adopt one of the half-Siamese kittens. When they arrived for the adoption, the rambunctious brood was sprinting around the yard, rumbling and tumbling and throwing dirt in one another’s faces. Yvonne was overwhelmed. She stared at them and wondered,
How am I ever going to pick my cat?
Then one kitten, who must have been hiding, crept over and looked up at her with big shy eyes, as if whispering, in the quietest and sweetest voice imaginable: “Hi.”
“Okay, I’ll take you,” Yvonne whispered back.
She named the kitten Tobi. She was browner and rounder than a typical Siamese but had the luxurious softness and gorgeous blue eyes so typical of the breed. And soft wasn’t just a description of her fur. Tobi was a soft cat. Soft spoken. Soft in manner. She wasn’t courageous, either. She ran when anyone entered a room; she ran when she heard a door open anywhere in the house; she sprinted to the safety of Yvonne’s bed when she heard footsteps on the stairs. She went outside only once, running right past Yvonne as she stood in the doorway. Yvonne stepped out onto the concrete stoop and saw Tobi disappearing around the corner of her parent’s Spencer house. She ran the other way around the house and met her in the backyard. Tobi came tearing toward her and leapt straight into her arms, a look of terror on her soft little face.
“Oh, don’t do that again, kitty,” Yvonne begged. “Please don’t do that again.” It was impossible to tell who was more scared.
“Tobi was a cuddler.” That was the way Yvonne described her. “She always wanted to be on top of me. She slept in my bed every night.”
“I bet that made you feel good,” I replied.
“Yeah, it did,” she said. Then she sat looking at me, waiting for my next question.
After high school, Yvonne joined her father at the Witco plant. The factory produced handheld hydraulic tools, known as grease guns, that squirt grease into small spaces inside car engines and other machines. After her struggles at Spencer High School, the line was a relief. The work was fast-paced and physically demanding, but Yvonne was young and strong. She could fasten bolts as quickly as anyone on the line, and it didn’t require talking to her colleagues.
“It wasn’t the best job in the world,” she told me, as if uncomfortable with her obvious pride in a task well done. “But it was work.” And there is nothing better, as I well know, than meaningful work.
Yvonne didn’t have much of a social life outside the factory, but whenever she finished a shift, she could count on one thing: Tobi would be waiting. The kitten liked high places, away from kicking feet and swinging arms, and she often watched for Yvonne from the top of the bookcase. Other times, Tobi was staring from the top of the stairs when Yvonne opened the front door. If the house was empty, Tobi followed her around: to the kitchen, to the den. But when someone came home, they both headed to Yvonne’s room and closed the door. Tobi, Yvonne soon realized, spent most of the day in her bed, under her covers, waiting for the only person she felt comfortable with to return. And while the idea never consciously crossed her mind, that was exactly what Yvonne wanted: a friend who would always be there for her.
In her twenties, Yvonne moved out of her parents’ house and into a fourplex apartment house with her older sister. Tobi loved the quiet. Yvonne loved being on her own. She thrived on the assembly line, affixing small bolts to grease guns. For years, Spencer’s grid of numbered streets had intimidated her, and everyone she passed seemed like a stranger. But slowly she developed an appreciation of the patterns, and she began to recognize the faces around her. She shopped in the stores along Grand Avenue or at the new mall on the south side of town. She bought clothes at the Fashion Bug and Tobi’s favorite food, Tender Vittles, at a little locally owned pet store. One Halloween, she bought a scary mask. She put it on and tromped heavily up the stairs. She came through the door to the bedroom with a low moan—“ahhhhhhh”—and Tobi’s beautiful blue Siamese eyes popped right out of her head. She started to rear back, her fur fluffing out in fear, and Yvonne felt so bad that she tore the mask right off.
“Ah, Tobi,” she said. “It’s only me.”
Tobi stared for a few more seconds, then turned and looked away, as if to say,
I knew that.
The next day, Yvonne decided to scare Tobi again. She put on the mask and stomped through the bedroom door. Tobi took one look and turned away in disgust, as if to say,
Please. I know it’s you.
Yvonne laughed—“You’re a smart one, aren’t you, Tobi?”—and gave her a hug. Life was simple, but life was good. Yvonne Barry had found her comfort zone; she had found a companion; and she was happy. Her life was lived in repeated details, small moments in time. At Christmas, Yvonne built a little tunnel out of presents, and Tobi sat in that tunnel for days. “I thought she was unique. Oh, Tobi loves the Christmas tree. But then I found out a lot of other cats did that, too.”
In the evening, in her bedroom, she spun Tobi in a swivel chair, the little cat lunging at her hand every time she passed by. Even decades later, Yvonne smiled at the memory. Tobi loved that swivel chair. And if Tobi loved it, then Yvonne loved it.
When the local economy turned sour in the mid-1980s, and Yvonne lost several of her weekly shifts, she moved back in with her parents. I don’t know how Yvonne really felt about this, because she wouldn’t say, but I don’t think it was much of a change. “My rent was too high” was all she told me. “I asked my parents if I could come back, and they said okay.
“Sometimes, my dad wiggled his finger under his newspaper,” she continued. “Tobi would jump for it, and dad would laugh. We called it the old newspaper game. But mostly, you know, with my parents, Tobi just sat on the back of the chair, staring out the window while dad read the paper.”
I don’t know what to make of a story like that. Was there more laughter and fun in that house than I imagined? Did Tobi break through a quiet man’s shell? Or was the old newspaper game a brief moment of levity in an otherwise quiet and dusty world? I want to hear the laughter, but I can’t help but imagine the hours and days and weeks—even months, if I understood Yvonne’s inflections correctly—between rounds of the old newspaper game. I can’t help but imagine an older man sitting silently in his chair, a newspaper shielding him from view; a little cat looking away to stare out the window; and a young woman watching them, half hidden in the doorway. Yvonne’s siblings had moved out, and I can’t believe much more than emptiness filled the long hours in the quiet house. Her mother read romance novels in her bedroom. Her father watched baseball on television. Yvonne and Tobi slunk upstairs, as quiet as mice, to play spin-the-cat-on-the-chair.
But then, only a couple blocks away, there was Dewey.
A library is more than a storeroom for books. In fact, most of the smart librarians I know believe one of its primary functions doesn’t involve books at all. That function is openness and availability. In a world where many people feel displaced by society, a library is a free place to go. How many times have you heard an impoverished child, now successfully grown up, say a library saved his life? Yes, the knowledge stored in the books, and now on the computers, expanded his universe beyond the narrow slice of world he inhabited. But the library also provided something else: space. If there was fighting at home, the child could escape into silence. If he felt neglected, he could find human interaction. It’s not even necessary, in a library, to talk to anyone. That’s a wonderful thing about the way people are wired. Often, it’s enough to simply be in the presence of one another, even if we never say a word.