The Road to Wellville

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  From the beginning, he’d been sullen and withdrawn, the sort of boy who would as soon bite off the tip of his finger as crack a smile. He wouldn’t—or couldn’t—speak; he tore pages from his books, defaced his desk in the schoolroom, dismantled the gymnasium equipment and fought grimly and incessantly with the other children. Undersized, always dirty despite the vigilance with which the Doctor pursued personal sanitation, his eyes clouded with hurt and anger, he was a small tornado of disorder and grief.

  Dr. Kellogg decided on a course of what in later years would become known as behavior modification. He began with the problem of George’s slovenliness. Each day the boy would come in from outdoors and drop his jacket on the floor in the back hallway, while all the other children, even little Rebecca Biehn, aged four, would hang theirs on the hooks provided for that purpose in their rooms. A small thing. But one, the Doctor felt, that lay at the foundation of all the rest.

  When George came in from school the following afternoon—it was a month to the day since the Doctor had taken him in—John Harvey Kellogg was, waiting for him. Never mind that the Doctor had pressing business at the Sanitarium, never mind that he’d rescheduled a slate of operations and a staff meeting and put off answering his voluminous correspondence: the boy’s education—this boy’s education—was about to commence. Two of the San’s girls led the younger children through the back hallway and up the stairs to their quarters, and the children followed docilely—and responsibly—behind. There was no shoving; no elevation of voices; no skipping, scampering, trotting, leaping or running. And no jackets were removed until the children Were upstairs and the hooks to receive them in reach—that was the rule. George, as usual, brought up the rear.

  If the children were surprised to see the Doctor seated there on a bench in the corner at such an unwonted hour of the day, they didn’t show it. A few of the younger ones—little Rebecca, in particular—gave him a shy glance, but they knew better than to be too demonstrative in the presence of their patriarch and provider. The Doctor didn’t like noise. They all understood that.

  George had his head down. He always had his head down, as if the ground itself were more fascinating than the great wide world about him, and this disturbed the Doctor, not only because it was a reflection of the boy’s attitude but because it made for such unacceptable posture. Head down, George didn’t see his adoptive parent sitting there in the shadows, and, sure enough, as carelessly as if he were a dressed-up ape in the forest, he shrugged out of his jacket and let it fall to the floor behind him.

  “George,” the Doctor called out in a voice of authority. “George Kellogg.”

  The boy had his foot on the bottom stair. The other children, under the guidance of their nurses, with whom Dr. Kellogg had conferred earlier, went straight up the stairs and into their rooms. George paused, contemplated his elevated foot for a long moment and then slowly tilted his head and lifted his eyes to the Doctor’s.

  “That’s it,” the Doctor said, trying to soften his expression. The boy was responding to the English language, after all, and what’s more, the Doctor reminded himself, he’d been through God knew what manner of filth and depravity. Gesturing with both hands, the Doctor beckoned the boy to him. “Come over here, George,” he coaxed, “come on. I won’t bite you.”

  The boy’s eyes fell again to the floor. He hung his head, shuffled his feet, slouched like a whipped dog—all of that, yes, but he did come, and he did seem to understand.

  The Doctor wasn’t very demonstrative physically—a quirk of his, one he didn’t even recognize. It was just that deep down he didn’t really see the need for much physical contact between human beings, beyond the business handshake or the husbandly peck at the wifely cheek, of course. Contact was unavoidable, he knew that, but it was also the means by which disease was spread. The upshot was that when George had crossed the room and stood there before him, the Doctor was reluctant to take him in his arms and explain to him his transgression. Instead, he rose from his seat, fussed with his hands a moment and looked down at the crown of the small boy’s head. “George,” he began, “I do wish you would speak to me, to Mrs. Kellogg, to your nurses and your brothers and sisters. I know you understand the spoken language, and you’ll learn to write it as well, and I know that you appreciate—or will come to appreciate—the rules of this household.” Pause. “Now, you’ve been told countless times about your jacket.”

  George made no move to agree with this proposition. He stood there, staring at his feet, as motionless, and for all the world as insentient, as a post.

  “I’m not going to punish you, George,” the Doctor went on. “I know you’re new here and I know too that you’ve gone through a great deal, but I am going to give you an exercise—let’s call it an exercise in recalling one’s duties and responsibilities.”

  George was lifeless, mute, unattached to the world and its currents of animation.

  “Come with me,” the Doctor said, and he slipped on his gloves before taking the boy’s hand, instructing him to pick up the jacket and leading him up the stairs and into the dormitory to stand before the naked hook that was to receive it. “And now, George,” he said, “I want you to spend the next twenty-four hours, aside from taking your rest tonight, of course, and your meals tomorrow, in just one task. I want you to put on your jacket, come in the door, go through the back hallway and up the stairs to this room; I then want you to remove your jacket, hang it on the hook, and begin the process all over again. George, I want you to do nothing but take off, hang up and put that jacket back on again, if you do it a thousand times. Do you understand me?”

  The boy, head bowed, said nothing.

  The Doctor glanced up sharply at Hannah Martin, one of the children’s nurses, who now appeared at the head of the stairs. “Hannah, you’ll be in charge of supervising George. He will enter the house, close the door, march up the stairs, remove his jacket and hang it on its hook, and he will continue doing so until bedtime tonight, and then he will recommence the process when he wakes in the morning. And he will continue with the exercise until this time tomorrow.” The Doctor consulted his pocket watch. “Four P.M.” He looked up. “Am I understood?”

  Hannah nodded.

  The following evening, when the Doctor arrived home for dinner, a hundred things crowding his mind, he was surprised to see the stooped and shrunken form of George shuffling along the back hallway in his jacket. He paused to watch as the boy slowly mounted the stairs, each step a nearly insurmountable obstacle, and then he followed him as he reached the top, made his way down the upper hallway, turned into the dormitory, and, like an automaton, removed his jacket, hung it on the hook, allowed it to rest there a moment, and then slipped it back on again. It was past seven in the evening. The other children had had their supper, and Hannah was supervising the younger ones in their nightly calisthenics in the gymnasium, while the older children were busy with their chores and lessons. But for the Doctor and George, the dormitory was deserted.

  When the boy had shrugged back into his jacket and turned to retrace his steps, the Doctor spoke. “George,” he said, “you can stop now. I meant only for you to go until four. I think you’ve learned your lesson. Now hang up your jacket and run along with the other children and get your exercise.”

  But George didn’t hang up his jacket. He didn’t run along either. He simply shuffled out of the room, studying his feet, proceeded down the stairs, out the door and then back in again, mounting the stairs to remove his jacket and hang it on the hook for a moment before shrugging back into it and repeating the process all over again.

  Twice more the Doctor spoke to the boy, but George ignored him. John Harvey Kellogg might have been a hole in the wall, a lamp, a coat tree, a wraith wound in its invisible cerements. The boy’s feet hit the stairs, shuffled along the planks. All right, the Doctor thought. All right. If he wants to be stubborn about it, let him. After all, the Doctor had better things to do—sit down to supper, for one thing, and then it was b
ack to the San to take care of the work he’d put off the previous afternoon. The boy would tire. It was inevitable.

  But George didn’t tire. He kept at it, day after day, night after night—he neither ate nor slept that anyone could see, and no plea, no remonstrance could turn him from his obsessive task. In the door, up the stairs, down the hallway to the naked hook, and then back again. The friction of the boy’s feet began to wear a path in the floorboards, his shoes split, the jacket came loose at the seams. A week passed. Two. No one had seen him take nourishment, use the bathroom, sleep. In the door, up the stairs, down the hallway to the naked hook. The doctor awoke in the night and far off, through the tomblike silence of that vast and shadowy house, he heard the shuffling tread of miniature feet: sh-shh, sh-shh, sh-shh. It maddened him. It irritated him. It cost him sleep. Finally, in his exasperation, after George had been at it for two and a half weeks and the whole house had been thrown into an uproar, the Doctor jerked back the bedcovers one night and stormed out the door, marched past his wife’s room, turned right down the front stairway and entered the children’s quarters at the rear of the house.

  The corridor was dim, palely lit by the moonlight spilling through the windows. He paused. Listened. He could hear his heart pounding in his ears—but nothing else. Nothing. Not a sound. And then, like a knife thrust, came the shriek of the door on its hinges, and there before him, ceaselessly shuffling, was the ghost of a tiny figure, locked in its compulsive labor: in the door, up the stairs, down the hallway to the naked hook. “George!” the Doctor bellowed. “Damn you, George—I say stop it. Stop this now!”

  His words had no effect. He stood in the boy’s way, blocking his path, but it was nothing to George. The tiny feet shuffled through two supernumerary steps, and the obstruction was behind him. It came to the Doctor then that if he stood there all night long, if he stood there until spring arrived and the trees burst into bloom and the bluebirds nested and a thousand abdomens went unplumbed by his surgical tools and healing fingers, George would continue to step round him, wordlessly, endlessly, as if the Doctor were nothing more than a statue carved of stone. And it was that thought, the thought of the boy’s blindness and stupidity and stubborn ingratitude, that put the good Doctor over the line.

  He was in his early forties then, and for all his short stature, he was among the healthiest and most physically fit men alive. In a single bound he was at the head of the stairs, and then he had the boy in his hands, the feel of flesh on flesh, and he was wringing the sticklike arms as if they were sopping towels. Grunting with the effort, he tore the jacket from the boy’s shoulders, tore it to pieces, and then, in the pale light of the moon in the still and shadowy hall, he slapped that unyielding little wedge of a face till his hand was raw. When he was done, when he’d spent himself, he turned his back on the boy and went to bed. For the first time in a week, he slept, slept like an innocent.

  In the morning, George, in his new jacket, was at school with the other children. According to Hannah, he’d slept in his bed, which he’d made up as soon as he awoke, and then he’d bathed, brushed his teeth, used the toilet and eaten his meals as he was expected to. There was no more shuffling in the hallway, no more the eternal whisper of those diminutive feet in their worn and diminutive shoes, no more the bowed head and the reproachful face. Dr. Kellogg felt a pang of regret when he thought of the violence to which he’d been driven—had Hannah noticed any marks on the child?—but he shrugged it off. He was a busy man. Busy? He was a juggler with a hundred Indian clubs in the air at once—and he hurried off to the San to take hold again of the world.

  The day was a whirl, as hectic as any he could remember. He had an acrimonious meeting with Sister Ellen White and half a dozen of the Adventist Elders, who then still controlled the San; he worked furiously in the lab to get his vegetable-milk formula to taste like anything other than the almond-and-peanut paste it was; he saw to his patients; he repaired the electric-light cabinet-bath in the Ladies’ Gymnasium (faulty wiring); and he gave his regular Monday-night Question Box lecture on the subject of self-abuse and the atrophied testicle. When he got home, it was past midnight and the house was quiet. He was tired but exhilarated, already thinking about the coming day’s work, about the potential of the soya bean and Japanese seaweed, about the universal dynamometer, the pneumograph, the orthopedic chair and a way of bonneting windows to channel healthful winter air to the bundled and sleeping patient—all the raveling links of the infinite shining chain of inspiration that propelled his brain through day and night. He felt good, it seemed, for the first time in weeks.

  Crossing the back hallway to fetch a journal from the library—a new number of Vegetationsbilder he meant to look into—he stumbled upon something at the base of the stairs, something that wrapped itself like a hand round his shoe. It took him a moment, bending to the thing like a paleontologist reaching out for a bone in the dirt, and even then his fingers had to interpret the material for him.

  A jacket. A child’s jacket.

  Yes, and then there was the first time George spoke. Eight months he’d lived with them, eight months of eating their food, attending their school, wearing the clothes and sleeping in the bed they’d provided, and in all that time not a word had passed his lips. The Doctor examined the boy himself and called in his colleagues in consultation, and they found nothing: George’s vocal apparatus was as normal as William Jennings Bryan’s. Why he refused to speak was anyone’s guess. The Doctor chalked it up to obstinacy, pure and simple.

  One night, as he was sitting at the piano in one of his rare moments of relaxation, playing a better-than-passable rendition of “After the Ball” for little Rebecca, the doctor felt a sudden jab in his lower back. Startled—no one interrupted John Harvey Kellogg when he was relaxing—he stiffened his fingers over the keys and turned from the waist as the last chord hung suspended in the air. George stood directly behind him, the blunt stub of a pencil clutched in his hand. The doctor stared at him in surprise, and George, though he rarely made eye contact with his adoptive father, stared back. After a moment, the Doctor asked him if he wanted anything, expecting the usual dumb show in reply. But George surprised him. He cleared his throat and let a tight little smile creep across his lips. “Yes, Father,” he said, and his voice was flawless, strong and composed, “yes, I do want something: you haven’t got a nickel for me, have you?”

  George. Hildah’s boy. They should have left him in the shack where they found him, should have left him to starve and wither till the light faded from his eyes and the gums drew back from his lips. It was a terrible thing for a man of healing to think, but there it was. George had been nothing but trouble since the Doctor had first laid eyes on him, and now here he was back yet again, and this time it wasn’t merely a nickel he wanted, either. “A hundred dollars?” the Doctor repeated.

  George’s eyes were cold. Dab swallowed audibly at the very mention of the figure. “That’s right,” George grunted. “One hundred dollars and I’ll be out of your hair.” He paused and that venomous little smile, the smile he’d employed at the piano bench all those years ago, came back to him. “I get the sense, Father Kellogg, that I’m an embarrassment to you, and think how that hurts me. Don’t you want me here to entertain your patients? I can give them a terrific show.”

  John Harvey Kellogg was not a man to give up a dollar casually. In fact, he was widely known for his frugality, one of his commanding virtues. He’d built the San into the great institution it was largely on the basis of free or minimally paid labor—in the early days, his staff was composed almost exclusively of Seventh Day Adventist volunteers, and now that he’d wrested control of the place from the church, he staffed it nearly as cheaply with students from the Sanitarium-affiliated college, who were required to work in its kitchens, baths and gymnasiums in order to matriculate. And he pinched his customers, too. In summer, for instance, he prescribed the very healthful exercise of woodcutting for his male patients, thereby assuring himself of a plentiful s
upply of fuel with which to stoke the San’s furnaces in winter. He stopped his pacing to turn to George a second time. “It’s blackmail,” he said.

  George made a face. He ran a dirty hand through his hair and the doctor made a mental note to fumigate the carpet and chair when he’d got rid of him. “Blackmail? I’m offended, Father, I really am.”

  “Twenty-five dollars,” John Harvey Kellogg said, “on condition that I never have to lay eyes on you again.”

  “One hundred dollars,” George repeated, “and I’ll think about it.”

  “Think about it?” the Doctor spat back at him, and he could feel himself slipping, just as he had on that shadowy night so many years ago. “You’ll think about it? Ha! I can have you thrown out of here this minute.”

  George began to gather himself up now. He let his eyes wander over the framed portraits that decorated the walls—Luther Burbank, John Wesley, Thomas “Old Parr” Parr, the Englishman who’d reputedly lived to the incommensurable age of a hundred and fifty-two. “A big boast, Father. And I don’t doubt that you can live up to it, what with your henchmen stationed outside the door, but, you know, I’ve been thinking how much I like Battle Creek. I really do. I’ve missed it in all my wanderings.”

  “Fifty dollars. That’s my final offer.”

  “I’ve come here to better myself, Father, like everyone else. Just imagine me, bettering myself, out there on the public street right dead smack in front of your doorway. Imagine that.”

  Self-control. The Doctor was a model of self-control, he was, and he clenched his fists and set his jaw. Never let them see your emotions, he knew that, and he knew when to cut his losses—he would win in the end, he never doubted it. George, Charlie Post, Bernarr Macfadden, Ellen White and her Adventist lynch mob: he would outlast them all. He stood there a moment, stock-still on the edge of the carpet, and then he shot his cuffs and reached up to adjust his visor. “All right, Dab,” he said with a sigh that seemed to drain his lungs, “draw a hundred dollars from the treasurer.”