Dewey (6 page)

“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

S
ize 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.

And there, in that little circle of light, Jipp Jipson met Marie Mayou. They danced the night away, and just about every other night for the next six months. My father kept the relationship a secret because he knew his family would never approve. The Mayous weren’t like the Jipsons. They were full-blooded French by way of Montreal, and they were fiery, passionate people. They loved hard, fought hard, drank hard, and even churched hard, with a no-nonsense midwestern Catholicism that almost scorched the earth.

The Mayous owned the town café in Royal, Iowa, about ten miles from Dad’s farm. My mother’s father was a wonderful man: gregarious, honest, kind. He was also a full-blown alcoholic. As a child, Mom would leave school to work the lunch rush, then head back to school for a few hours in the afternoon. Often her father would be passed out in one of the booths, so Mom would have to get him off to bed and out of the way of the paying customers.

It wasn’t that Marie Mayou’s family was notorious. Ten miles was a long way in 1940s Iowa. The problem was that they were Catholic. So Mom and Dad ran away to Minnesota to get married. The wound from the elopement took a few years to heal, but practical always prevails in Iowa. If a deed is done, it’s time to move on. Mom and Dad settled down on the family farm and soon had the first three of their six children, two boys (David and Mike) and a girl. I was the middle child.

The family farm. The idea has been romanticized, but for most of the history of the world family farming has been a difficult, poorly paid, backbreaking enterprise. The Jipson farm was no different. We had a cold water hand pump in the kitchen that you physically had to prime. We had a washing machine in the root cellar, but you had to heat the water on the stove upstairs. After the clothes were washed, you cranked them one by one through rollers to wring out the excess water, then hung them outside on the line. We had a shower in the corner of the root cellar. The walls were concrete, but we had tile on the floor. That was our luxury.

Air-conditioning? I didn’t know such a thing existed. Mom worked in her kitchen six hours a day over an open flame, even in hundred-degree heat. The kids slept upstairs, and it was so hot on humid summer nights we’d take our pillows downstairs and sleep on the dining room floor. Linoleum was the coolest surface in the house.

Indoor plumbing? Until I was ten years old, we used a one-hole outhouse. When the outhouse became full, you simply dug a new hole and moved the shack. Hard to believe now, looking back, but it’s true.

It was the best childhood, the very best. I wouldn’t trade it for all the money in Des Moines. Why worry about new toys and clothes? No one we knew had those. We handed down clothes. We handed down toys. There was no television, so we talked to each other. Our big trip was once a year to the municipal swimming pool in Spencer. Every morning we woke up together, and then we worked together.

When I was ten, Mom and Dad had their second set of three children—Steven, Val, and Doug. I raised those children alongside Mom. We were Jipsons. We were there for each other. It’s dark on a farm at night, and empty, and lonely, but I knew there was nothing out there in the world that could harm me—not Russians, not rockets, not thieves. I had my family. And if things got really bad, I had the cornfield. I could always run into it and disappear.

We weren’t really alone, of course. Each square mile of farmland, bordered on all sides by those perfectly straight Iowa roads, was called a section. In those days, most sections held four family-owned farms. Three and a half of the families in our section were Catholic (we were the half), and there were seventeen children among them, so we had our own baseball game. Even if only four kids showed up, we played baseball. I can’t remember thinking about any other game. I was small, but by the time I was twelve, I could hit a baseball across the ditch and into the corn. Every night we huddled around the Jipson family table and gave thanks to God that we’d gone another day without losing our baseball in the corn.

Two miles from our eastern field, at the end of the second section, was the town of Moneta, Iowa. Spencer and Moneta were only twenty miles apart, but they might as well have been different worlds. Some might call that twenty-mile stretch nondescript, but if you drive it in September, when the sky is darkening with blue storm clouds and the crops form patches in every glorious shade of brown, you’d be hard-pressed not to call it beautiful. The highlight is probably the faded wooden billboard outside the town of Everly saluting the 1966 Iowa Girl’s Basketball Champions. I remember that team. Everly beat us by a point in the regional finals, which were held in Spencer. I’d tell you about the game, but it’s already taken longer to mention the sign than it takes to pass through Everly, which has only five hundred people.

The population of Moneta never reached five hundred, but it topped that number if you included all the farmers, like my family, who thought of themselves as members of that wonderful community. In the 1930s, Moneta was the gambling capital of northwest Iowa. The restaurant on Main Street was a speakeasy, and there was a gambling hall in the back accessible through a secret door. By the time I was a child, those legends were long gone, replaced in our imaginations by the baseball field and the bees. Every community has something the children remember. Come to Spencer in sixty years and the older people will say, “We had a cat. He lived in the library. What was his name? Oh, yes, Dewey. I’ll always remember Dewey.” In Moneta, it was the bees. A local family had sixty hives, and the honey was famous in four counties, which seemed like the whole world.

The centerpiece of town, though, was the Moneta School, a ten-room, two-story redbrick building just down the road from the baseball field. Almost everyone in town had attended the Moneta School, at least for a few years. There were only eight children in my grade, but what we lacked in size we made up for in amenities. Two local women cooked homemade meals for the whole school every day. Janet and I, the only girls in our class, often got special permission to go over in the morning and frost the cinnamon rolls. If you had a problem, a teacher would walk you to the hidden circle in the grove of trees behind the school where you could talk it out one-on-one. If you wanted to be alone, or with a special someone, you went to the grove, too. That’s where I got my first kiss. The Moneta School had a party at the end of every school year with sack races, horse races, and, of course, baseball games. The whole town brought picnics. Everybody participated. In the middle of the summer, when the corn was so high it surrounded the town like a wall, there was the Moneta School reunion, which in the 1950s drew several thousand people. Everyone was proud of that school. Everyone.

Then, in 1959, the state of Iowa shuttered the Moneta School. The town had been on a long population slide, and the state could no longer justify the expense. Moneta had always been a hub for local farmers, but farming was changing. In the early 1950s, the first generation of giant harvesters and combines allowed farmers to plow and harvest larger fields. Some farmers bought new machines, then bought out their neighbors and doubled their production, then used that money to buy out more neighbors. Farm families began to disappear, moving away to local population centers like Spencer, and with them went the farmhouses, the family gardens, and the rows of trees the original settlers had planted to protect the house from the summer sun and the winter wind. These were huge trees, five feet around and a hundred years old. When larger farmers moved in, they bulldozed everything—trees, buildings, everything—piled it up, and burned it to the ground. Why keep a house nobody’s living in when you could have a field? The land went back, but not to nature. It went to corn.

The old family farmers raised livestock. They planted gardens. They grew crops in distinct, smaller fields. On the large new farms, there was only corn and its companion crop, soybeans. Every year Iowa grew more corn, but we ate less and less of the crop, at least as kernels and cobs. Most was used as animal feed. Some eventually became ethanol. The rest was separated, broken down, and processed. Have you ever wondered what xanthan gum is? It’s processed corn, like almost everything else in that long list of unidentifiable ingredients printed on the packaging of your dinner. Seventy percent of the average American diet—70 percent!—is corn.