The Road to Wellville

by T. C. Boyle

  Lying there in the chasm of the night, staring into nothing, the Doctor could see the San, his precious San, as it was on the day he rushed home from a lecture tour to find it in ruins—February 19, 1902. He would never forget that day, the most heartbreaking day of his life, and he would never forgive himself for having been absent at the critical moment. Fire had raced through the place the previous morning, taking the life of one patient and reducing the Sanitarium and all its equipment, its Experimental Kitchens and its vibrating stools, its heated tubs and physiologic chairs, to ashes. He could see the skeletal remains of the chimneys poking up out of the wreckage as if to mock him with their solidity, the fine white ash three feet deep and glowing with a satanic intensity, everything he’d built and struggled for and believed in eradicated in a single stroke. And he could see George’s face as it was then, the clotted venom of the eyes, the slug of a mouth, the smirk, the grimace, the undisguised satisfaction that reddened the tips of his ears and made his head bob on the wilted stem of his neck.

  The boy had loved that fire, loved what it had done to the Doctor and his idea of himself. Dr. Kellogg could remember George standing there on the verge of the blackened pit, his shoulders slumped, a private hateful smile on his lips, while the other children gasped and cried out and held each other as if they were about to fall off the edge of the world.

  They never discovered the origin of that fire. Though it stank with suspicion. Reeked. Oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed. The Doctor never thought of George at the time—and even now, after all that had transpired, he still didn’t think the boy had had an active hand in it. He might have abetted it mentally, might have prayed for the conflagration and inwardly cheered as the top floor collapsed round the elevator shaft, but he wasn’t yet devious enough to have conceived of the blaze itself. No, the finger pointed to Sister White and her Adventist vigilantes.

  The prophetess and co-founder, with her husband, of the Sanitarium’s predecessor, the Western Health Reform Institute, Sister Ellen White had in those years become the voice of the Adventist church, her frequent and remarkably specific visions shaping its policies as neatly as a last shaped the shoe to fit it. For the better part of a decade she’d been struggling with the Doctor over control of the San, but he’d always kept one step ahead of her. When she dunned him for contributions to the church’s far-flung concerns—its shoddily managed and unprofitable sanitaria in places like Spokane, Peoria and Moline, its overseas missions and the print shops that spewed out its superabundant literature—the Doctor had the San declared nonsectarian and benevolent, ostensibly for tax purposes, and inserted a clause in its charter requiring that all its income be disbursed within the boundaries of the state of Michigan.

  The move might have mollified the tax collector, but it didn’t please Ellen White. She had a vision, conveyed to all the faithful from the pulpit, suggesting that God Himself wasn’t pleased, either. The Sanitarium had become godless, she asserted, condoning “evolutionary” thinking and putting the greenback dollar above its mission of Christian charity. God’s wrath had been aroused. What Sister White saw, twisting and slashing at the firmament over Battle Creek, was the coruscating sword of that wrath—a sword of fire.

  It was a prophetic vision. In July of ‘98, a fire raked the Doctor’s Sanitarium Health Food Company, and the following year a blaze of suspicious origin gutted the Sanitas Food Company plant, another of the Doctor’s concerns. Then there was the Sanitarium fire, and while he was rebuilding (the Elders hadn’t dreamed of the extent of his connections or the depth of his friends’ pockets), he had to contend with a steady stream of warnings, prophecies and rumblings of further divine intervention, all channeled through Sister White’s perfervid imagination. But this time he built of stone, though the San’s stables, vacuumed cows and all, were mysteriously consumed by fire less than a year after the present structure went up. Never for a moment did John Harvey Kellogg doubt who was responsible.

  Till now.

  But no, and he shook his head unconsciously against the pillow, he didn’t really think George capable of that, not at fourteen. No: it was Ellen White. It had to be. She was the worst kind of rabble-rousing, evangelical charlatan, appealing to the most gullible and ignorant elements, and her followers, simple rural folk for the most part, would go to any lengths to see the word of God made concrete. Still, George had been a problem that year, no doubt about it—more of a problem than usual, his adolescence clinging to him as awkwardly as a shirt two sizes too small.

  He wouldn’t eat, for one thing. Just took it into his head that he wasn’t going to eat anymore, and that was that. No reason, no explanation. He woke up one morning that fall, sat down at the table with the other children and refused to touch his food. This was the sort of thing the children’s nurses were expected to deal with, and it might never have come to the Doctor’s attention but for an unusual circumstance. Ordinarily, he and Ella took their meals in their own quarters, the Doctor’s irregular schedule preventing him from dining with the children, which he was disinclined to do in any case, finding their habits—the twice-handled food, the furtive wipe of lip on sleeve, the unconscious dribble and the tendency of sauces to collect about the corners of the mouth—unsettling to his own digestion. But around this time—the fall of ‘01, that is, some months before the fire—the Doctor had been experimenting with several new food products, and had taken to strolling through the children’s dining room at mealtimes to observe their reactions to them.

  He was then in his couscous-kohlrabi phase, attempting to blend the semolina and the high-fiber vegetable into a mash that could, like the breakfast foods he’d pioneered, be twice-baked, desiccated and dextrinized, for easy digestion and prolonged shelf life. They’d tried it, reconstituted, as a porridge, but the kohlrabi infused the resulting mixture with an odd greenish tint and a taste of the earth that even the most pliant of the children had had difficulty with. For subsequent meals it was baked into wafers, stirred into a clear broth of reduced vegetables, ground up and sprinkled like bran on a lettuce salad, and congealed in an eggplant-chayote ratatouille. On this particular evening, at the Doctor’s suggestion, the cook had rolled it into a Protose loaf to serve as an entrée, accompanied by a yogurt-piccalilli sauce.

  When the Doctor entered the room, the children looked up as one and sang out, “Good evening, Father,” before a gesture from him let them know they might return to their plates. He took a seat in the corner, unfolded a newspaper and made a show of studying it in order to put them at their ease. In reality, his spectacles twinkling in the light of the chandelier as he cocked his head ever so slightly this way or that, he was studying them, attuned to every least curl of the lip, every grimace and smile. He watched the hovering forks, the dutifully Fletcherizing jaws, the dip and rise of the Adam’s apples. The older children—the Rodriguez boys, Lucy DuPlage and Nathaniel Himes—studiously maintained the approved dining posture and a commendable silence as they finished up their portions and waited patiently for the soup course—Saniterrapin—and the stewed gooseberries with Graham mush they would receive for dessert. The younger ones had some difficulty with their utensils and general deportment, as was to be expected, but their nurses were there to guide them, and, in general, they seemed pleased enough with the new dish.

  George, alone among them, refused to eat. He merely sat rigid at his place, staring down at the table as if in a trance. When Hannah Martin, his nurse since he’d come to them at the age of six and perhaps the person closest to him in the world, bent to ask him what was the matter, he refused to answer. The Doctor, observing from behind his newspaper, felt a tic of annoyance start up in his left cheek: George, it was always George.

  The boy’s face was a hard little kernel of fury as Hannah Martin leaned over him, murmuring blandishments and words of encouragement. George wouldn’t respond. He sat there like a dead thing, the balls of his fists clenched tight in his lap. After this had gone on for several minutes, the Doctor folded his newspaper in irrita
tion and spoke up. “George?” he called out in his voice of authority, and the children looked up at him with their blameless faces, forks suspended over their plates. “What seems to be the matter?”

  No reaction.

  “George Kellogg,” the Doctor intoned, resisting the urge to rise to his feet, “I’m speaking to you, George—now, what seems to be the problem?”

  Hannah Martin straightened up and gave the Doctor a stricken look. “I, uh, I don’t think he feels well, sir….”

  Dr. Kellogg silently cursed the boy for his unrelenting, puerile, pig-headed obstinacy. He was a negative thinker, born to it, and there was no changing him. But that was just where the danger lay: the attitude was subversive, contagious. Let him get away with an infraction, however minor, and the others would slip, too, and before long license would rule. The Doctor focused on the boy’s simian ears, the wedge-shaped head with its fringe of irregularly cut hair (he’d apparently taken a scissors to it himself, defacing the perfectly good haircut he received twice a month from the Sanitarium barber), and couldn’t suppress a flare of hatred. How had this human wreckage come into his life? How could the Fates be so cruel? Still seated, he directed his response to the nurse. “If he doesn’t feel well, perhaps I should examine him? Or perhaps he simply needs a purgative.”

  Hannah Martin said nothing. George sat rigid. Collectively, the children held their breath.

  Finally, with a sigh, the Doctor pushed himself up, set down the paper and walked the length of the table till he stood directly behind the boy. “Well, George,” he said, laying his hand on the boy’s shoulder as Hannah Martin lost her color and the children hovered on the edge of the moment, “what will it be? Calomel? Castor oil? Or are we going to stop this nonsense and eat up our food?”

  George seemed to shrink into himself, the Doctor’s touch eating through his skin like acid, all eyes fixed on him, the house fallen into a trough of absolute unbroken silence. Slowly, degree by slow degree, the pointed little chin rose till it reached the shoulder, and the black pits of the eyes confronted the Doctor’s. “Food?” George spat. “You call this food?”

  The Doctor was dumbstruck. He had to restrain his hand from lashing out, curling round that stunted little face with all the sudden outraged power of muscle, tendon and bone.

  But George wasn’t done yet, not by a long shot. “Meat and potatoes, that’s what we want,” he cried, the unformed voice gone suddenly shrill, and he turned his back on the Doctor as if he were negligible, throwing a fierce, giddy, triumphant look into the faces of his adoptive brothers and sisters. “Meat and potatoes!” he cried, taking up his fork and beating time on his plate, “meat and potatoes, meat and potatoes!”

  The others looked on, stunned, their faces gone white, but for one child, a new boy from West Virginia, no more than five or six years old, towheaded and open-faced. He picked up his fork as if in a game and began to beat rhythm along with George, his tiny angelic voice crying out for “meat and potatoes, meat and potatoes.”

  No one would have faulted the Doctor for putting a quick and savage end to it, but he was not a violent man—would not be a violent man, would not be ruled by the bestial passions—and he held back. Hammered in brass, locked in place, his eyeglasses harsh with light, he stood there immovable till the towheaded boy grew sensible of him and choked off the chant in midphrase, till Hannah Martin reached for George’s arm and the other children wilted under his gaze. Then, George’s brazen taunt ringing in his ears as Hannah Martin fought to contain it, the Doctor turned on his heels, threw back his head and marched out of the room.

  George. And that was George. For a full month and more he took absolutely nothing, so far as anyone could see—and the Doctor made certain he was watched day and night. He was made to sit at table with the other children and he was served precisely as they were. He wouldn’t touch a thing. No matter what it was or how it was served. He sat numbly over his plate as egg dishes, vegetable foods, dairy, predigested grains and savory sauces passed in front of him, meal after meal, day after day. Never a robust child, he rapidly dwindled in the joints and the long muscles, and the flesh tightened round his skull. In her moments of lucidity, Ella pleaded with the boy, and every time Hannah Martin laid eyes on him, tears started up in her eyes. The Doctor was concerned, and guilt moved in the deeps of him like a stone rolled by the currents across the floor of a vast sea, but he wouldn’t give in, wouldn’t dream of it. George would either eat what he was given or die of inanition. And that was that.

  The night closed around him in its faint calibrations, and finally, though it was past four and creeping toward dawn, Dr. Kellogg gave in to it. He felt himself slipping away, and George’s face became his wife’s, his dead father’s, a nameless patient’s, and he was almost there, almost asleep, when a sudden dull booming noise reverberated through the house like the drumroll of calamity. Bolt upright in bed, as awake as he’d ever been, he listened for it again—was it thunder, was that it? The rain fell with a steady sibilance, the sound of it like distant frying, like a thousand Yankee chefs bent over pans of salt pork and flapjacks with their stomachs of iron, and he strained to hear the fainter sound, the harsh rasping friction of the struck match blooming in the darkness.

  It was then that he remembered the look on George’s face the day he finally began to eat again, without explanation or apology, sitting down to a breakfast of taro gruel and gluten biscuits as if there were nothing to it, as if he’d eaten supper the night before and dinner before that and all the long succession of meals that dwindled into the past, so many pounds of flesh totted up on the ledger, so many bowel movements and micturitions. Flushed with excitement, biting her tongue, Hannah Martin had come to fetch the Doctor as he meditated over his notes and spooned up his own breakfast in his private quarters. She led him through the house to the children’s wing and into the dining room, and there he was, George, working his spoon and reaching for his glass just like any other child. He never lifted his eyes when the Doctor entered the room—just sat there, neckless, fleshless, his bones like sticks at the bottom of a dried-up pond, and ate. He never lifted his eyes, but his face gave him away. Wasted, drawn, the eyes ponderous in their sockets, he wore the expression of a hero, a conqueror, a man—no longer a boy—whose point has been made.

  One sleepless night couldn’t really faze a physiologic marvel like John Harvey Kellogg, but round about three in the afternoon he did feel himself slowing down just a bit, as if there were an invisible tether attached to him. He was sitting at his desk in the afterglow of a particularly gratifying kinkectomy, taking a cup of hot beet juice for strength and working up a sketch of a new apparatus for suspending patients with circulatory problems by their heels, when there was a knock at the door. He couldn’t suppress a look of annoyance, but Bloese bounded up like a hound from his desk in the corner, announcing, “That’ll be your three-fifteen consultation—Mrs. Lightbody.”

  Clamping his eyeshade firmly in place, the Doctor rose to greet her as Bloese drew back from the door. Consultation? he was thinking, wondering when he’d last examined her and who had referred her and why, and he was in no way prepared for the sight which greeted him. It was Eleanor Lightbody standing there in the doorway, no mistake about it, but she was a ghost of herself, wan and emaciated, her eyes blunted and her clothes in need of taking in at the seams. The welcoming smile faded from the Doctor’s face. Bloese dropped his eyes. How long had it been since he’d seen her, really seen her? A week? Two? A hot little pinprick of fear stabbed at the Doctor—was he going to lose another one?—but he covered himself by moving out from behind the desk to take her hand and offer her a seat.

  Eleanor sat primly, thrillingly beautiful for all her loss of weight. Dr. Kellogg’s keen diagnostic gaze never left her. Was it cancer? Marasmus? Tuberculosis? Or was it a-balky sphincter, a plugged loop in the small intestine, a case for scalpel and clamp? Yes, now he remembered—it was Frank Linniman who’d expressed concern over her condition, but the Doctor h
adn’t really given it much credence. Eleanor Lightbody was one of his prize patients, one of the healthiest and most cooperative, well along the road to recovery and with the very brightest of prognoses. He glanced at her sharply cut cheekbones, the stab of her shoulder blades and the attenuated line of her tibia beneath her skirts and couldn’t suppress a quick sharp whistle. “You’ve lost weight,” he observed.

  Her voice was muted. “Yes.”

  “Well,” and he began to pace now, a panther of health measuring out the cage of his knowledge, “we’ll have to put you on a new dietary, more taro, tapioca, nut milk and the like.”

  She gazed at him out of placid eyes. “Oh, no, Doctor,” she murmured, and even her voice was listless, “you don’t understand. I’ve been fasting.”

  “Fasting?”

  “Yes.” She produced a booklet from her purse. “I’ve been reading in Mr. Sinclair—The Fasting Cure—and thought … well, I thought I’d give it a try.”

  The Doctor shook his head. An admonitory finger rose from his fist as if by its own volition and he began to shake it at her. “Do you mean to tell me that you’ve been fasting without consulting me? But I’m speechless. You come to this institution and put yourself under my care and then you arbitrarily go off on a dietary program—a fast, no less—without so much as a by-your-leave?”

  “But Dr. Kellogg,” she protested, “it’s only for twelve days—just as an experiment. Mr. Sinclair is so convincing, I just—well, I thought I’d give it a try. After all, what better way is there to control one’s appetites than to deny them altogether?”