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For fourteen and a half years, the Saltgrass Carnegie Library had two staff members: me, and a gray tabby cat named Paperback.
I was paid. He worked for tuna.
I'm Florence Melvin. I've been the librarian here since 1979, which in a town of eleven hundred people out in western Kansas means I am also the person who orders the books, shovels the front steps, fixes the copier, runs story hour and knows who still has the large-print Louis L'Amour that was due in March. Paperback died this summer, on July 20, at about fifteen years old. So many people have stopped me at the post office and the grocery to tell me what he meant to them that my nephew suggested I put it all in one place where everyone could read it. He set this up for me. I typed it.
The third week of January 1985 we had a blizzard that closed the highway for two days. I kept the library open because the furnace here is better than most people's, and a few folks came in to get warm. Late on the Friday afternoon, Hannah Schubert pushed open the front door, stamping snow off her boots, and something gray shot in past her ankles and disappeared under the big radiator by the magazines. It was a young cat, maybe six months old, with ice in his whiskers and no collar. He wouldn't come out for anybody. I put half my tuna sandwich on a saucer by the radiator and went back to work, and when I looked up an hour later the saucer was clean and there was a gray cat asleep in the wire paperback rack, curled up on top of the westerns. That's where his name came from. I kept meaning to find his owner. I put a notice in the paper and on the board at the elevator. Nobody ever claimed him, and by February I had stopped hoping anyone would.
A library cat is a fine idea until somebody brings it up at a board meeting. Our library board is five people appointed by the city, and on Monday, March 11, 1985, Paperback was item four on the agenda, after the furnace bid and before the new carpet. I'll be fair to everyone. Henrietta Sealy said a library was for books, and that a cat would scratch the bindings and some people are allergic and what would the state library people say. Those were all reasonable things to say. Bert Jessop, who was board chairman then, said he'd been coming to this library since 1931 and he'd never once seen it as full on a weekday as it had been since the cat showed up. Olivia Eckman said she had already bought a litter box. The vote was three to two, and Paperback was allowed to stay on a six-month probation, with these conditions, which I still have in the minutes:
Paperback kept a schedule you could set a clock by, and over the years half the town learned it.
I have read aloud to the little ones every Wednesday morning for twenty years, and for fourteen of them I had a co-host. Paperback sat in the rocking chair beside mine, never in my lap, and looked at the children as if he were the one who had picked out the book. When I read Millions of Cats, which I did every January on the anniversary of his arrival, the children would all turn and look at him at the end, and he would yawn, and they would shriek. He did that every single year. I am not entirely convinced it was an accident. More than one shy child in this town learned to read out loud by reading to that cat. A cat doesn't correct you, and he doesn't mind if you go slow.
John Mays, who retired from the railroad, has come in to read the newspapers every weekday morning since before I was hired. He is also very allergic to cats. We worked it out between us that spring: on Monday and Thursday mornings, from ten until noon, Paperback stayed in the workroom with the door shut and a radio playing, and Mr. Mays had the newspaper table to himself. On the other days he took his allergy pill and sat by the open window. This went on for fourteen years. Paperback hated Mondays and Thursdays. Then, two or three years ago, I came out of the workroom early and caught Mr. Mays, on a Tuesday, feeding the cat little pieces of ham from his sandwich under the table. He told me not to tell anyone. I'm telling everyone now, John, because when Paperback died you sent the library a pot of yellow mums with a card that said "to my reading partner," and I think people should know that about you.
For years the children have drawn Paperback and given me the pictures, and I tape them to the front of the circulation desk until there isn't room, and then I move the old ones to the workroom wall. Right now on the desk there is Paperback wearing a crown, Paperback as an astronaut, Paperback on a flying carpet made out of a library card, Paperback with wings (that one came in the week after he died, and I had to go in the back for a minute), and one of him asleep on a stack of books that is taller than the library, labeled "PAPERBACK READING ALL THE BOOKS." I am keeping every one of them.
Last winter he started drinking a great deal of water and getting thin, and in March Dr. Downing over at the county seat told me it was his kidneys, which is very common in old cats. We tried the special food, which he despised, and Dr. Downing showed me how to give him fluids under the skin, which Paperback put up with because it happened in my lap. He had a good spring. He did his rounds, just slower, and he spent more and more of the day on the new-books shelf in the sun. On the afternoon of Tuesday, July 20, he was asleep on the new-books shelf between the new John Grisham and a book of quilt patterns, and when I went over at closing to say it was time, he was gone. He'd just gone to sleep in his favorite place on a sunny day and not woken up. I've thought about it a great deal since, and I can't think of a better way for a library cat to go. With the board's blessing (all five of them, unanimous this time), he's buried under the lilac by the back steps, where the children can see him from the window of the children's corner. The Friends are buying a small stone. The coffee can is still on the desk; the money now goes to buy cat books for the children's room, with a bookplate in each one.
Every book in this library has a little card in a pocket in the back, and every time it goes out I stamp the date. Paperback never went out, of course. He was always here. But it seemed right to give him a card of his own, and to close it properly.
Thank you to everyone who scratched his ears. If you have a memory of him, I'd love to have it for Paperback's Guest Book. And if you have a cat of your own you'd like to read about, Donna in Dayton keeps four of them over at Mr. Whiskers' Cat Emporium, "where the cats are the boss." Paperback would have agreed with that completely. |
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times since August 2, 1999.