The Road to Wellville

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “Bart’s mother,” Bender returned, indicating Bookbinder with a nod. “It’s her place.”

  She’s afflicted, poor woman,” Bookbinder put in. “The last stroke took the use of her left side and we’ve had to go and hire a Swede to look after her.”

  But Charlie wasn’t listening. He was thinking of Mrs. Hookstratten—his “Auntie Amelia”—and the faith she reposed in him. Not to mention its tangible expression in cash and check. At Bender’s urging, he’d written her a series of letters describing the immaculate new Per-Fo factory headquarters and he’d enumerated an entirely fictitious list of prominent investors. He’d waxed eloquent about the clean and thrifty Midwestern work force, men and women alike, and the newly designed Per-Fo boxes, and the real and enduring mission of Per-Fo itself, which was, of course, to provide the good people of America with a predigested, peptonized, celery-impregnated miracle of a ready-to-eat vegetarian breakfast food—in short, to save the American stomach. His letters ran to twenty and thirty pages, and he found, at least for the hour or so in which he was engaged in their composition, that the fiction grew actual in his mind so that he saw the factory floor in its idealized version, saw the desk in his office behind the smoked-glass door, knew and admired and encouraged the workers—particularly the girls, who wore tight skirts and deferred to him as he inspected the line, murmuring “Good afternoon, Mr. Ossining,” one after another, and one after another turning away with a blush.

  The letters had been effective. They’d got an additional twenty-five hundred dollars from the Hookstratten treasury. Twenty-five hundred dollars that Bender had turned toward the production of one thousand dummy cartons, and which had brought them, with a wagonload of used retorts, mixing tubs and rollers and a big new Sears wood-fired oven-range, to this dungeon on the outskirts of the Biggest Little City in the U.S.A. The cartons, designed by Bender himself, were quite the thing, actually—he had to hand it to Bender there. Red, white and blue, with a representation of two cherubic children and their prim and yet somehow randy-looking mother sitting round a kitchen table in the absence of the breadwinner of the house, it bore the title KELLOGG’S PER-FO, THE PERFECT FOOD across the top. There was a line beneath it about the celery and the rest of it, then the illustration, centered, and at the bottom of the box, in red block letters, a legend paraphrased from no less an authority than C. W. Post himself: MAKES ACTIVE BLOOD. (It was Postum that made red blood, and they couldn’t trespass there, though Bender loved the ring of it.) The whole business was repeated on the reverse, but the picture was smaller and a paragraph of health-conscious gibberish had been added to appeal to the Eleanor Lightbodys and Amelia Hookstrattens of the world.

  “The floor’s filthy,” Charlie said, “nothing but dust. No matter what we mix up down here it’s going to taste like dirt.”

  Bender had descended a step and was peering into the cheerless cold vault of the cellar. “We’ll get a rug,” he said. “Half a dozen of them. And the oven’ll heat the place, isn’t that right, Bart?”

  C. W. Post’s ex-foreman grunted his assent. “I’ve seen concerns start up as humble as this,” he said, speaking through his nose and. shifting a pair of undersized, startled-looking eyes around the room. “The Doctor’s first factory, for one. And his brother started out in a shack two years ago, and look at him now.”

  “Of course,” Bender added in a considered tone, “we’ll have to rely on candle power for the nonce—there’s no electric coming out this far yet—but remember, Charlie, all we need at this juncture is a sample, enough to fill those thousand boxes, and we’re off to the races from there.”

  George, who’d found himself a seat on the edge of a staved-in crate in the corner, gave a snort of contempt. “The dog races, maybe.”

  Bender ignored him. “Charlie? What do you think?”

  What did he think? He thought it was dismal, poor as piss, thought it was a sham and a crime and it broke his heart. But it was a beginning. And it was better than chasing Bender all over town, better than brooding in his icebox of a room at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s or drinking himself into George’s habitual state at the Onion. He shrugged. “It’ll do,” he said finally. “But just for now. Just till we’ve come up with something to fill those boxes and get started. Then I want a real factory—and I don’t care who knows it.”

  Bender just nodded and smiled. His plan, as Charlie understood it, was to use the sample boxes as advertising tools in a select few Midwestern cities—along with hoardings, newspaper announcements and the like. Brash as ever, he assured Charlie that he’d use those sample boxes as bait to reel in the fish with a host of advance orders—fifty percent down, cash or check, on writing the order. And that money would put them into full production—in a regular four-walled factory—and generate a whole lot more to spend on advertising. What he didn’t tell Charlie was that he expected Will Kellogg to step in and buy them out long before they reached that point.

  Charlie buttoned up his coat and pulled on his gloves. “Okay, George,” he said with a sigh, “I guess we better get the wagon unloaded.”

  Two days later, they were in business.

  True to his word, Bender had provided carpeting—half a dozen foul-smelling rugs of painted canvas and a few oily and discolored straw mats that reeked of mildew. The smell could have been improved on, but at least the things covered the floor and kept the dust down. Bookbinder had erected a tent outside in the frozen yard to house the three wagon-loads of choice dent corn Bender had managed to divert from Will Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flake Company in a move worthy of any of Sherlock Holmes’s adversaries for pure deviousness. Charlie, who’d led a pretty soft life the past few years, in and out of taverns and pool halls, apprenticing at the hustler’s trade, spent the first day splitting wood for the oven. He stood there in the barren yard, all his digits gone dead with the cold, lifting the axe and bringing it down, over and over again, while Bartholomew Bookbinder put a hole in the basement wall for the stovepipe and his invalid mother sat at the second-story window gazing out serenely on the commotion as if it were as usual to the progress of her days as a trip to the outhouse. George was supposed to be helping with the wood, but he was present in body only. Bookbinder had to throw a blanket over him to keep him from freezing to death.

  By the morning of the second day the stove was hot as a griddle and began to roast all sorts of foul and noxious odors out of the rugs, walls, ceiling and joists. It was the smell of history, rank and immemorial. Charlie choked on it. He was experiencing the pain of the athlete on the first day of training, the soreness of the galley slave freshly shackled to his oars. His back was like raw dough, without substance or fiber, his shoulders, elbows and forearms shot through with quibbling aches and argumentative cricks, pangs and spasms. He’d spent the night curled up next to George on the rug beside the stove—there was no sense in trudging all the way across town to Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s—and he ate whatever Bookbinder was able to scare up. Which wasn’t much. Salt pork and flapjacks, with a weak tepid unsugared tea to wash it down, dinner and breakfast both. It wasn’t exactly the sort of life—or bill of fare—he’d pictured for the President-in-Chief of the Per-Fo Company, Inc., but he was stirred in spite of himself. Now, finally, and at long last, he was going to be initiated into the mysteries of the flaking process.

  Per-Fo, as it turned out, was going to be a product nearly indistinguishable from any of the other flaked cereals on the market. Its uniqueness would derive from its special flavorings and the impression its blizzard of advertisements made on the public, but in all other respects it would be no different from Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes or C. W. Post’s newly introduced Post Toasties. Its manufacturers (Charlie, Bender and Bookbinder, who in return for his expertise had been handsomely rewarded from Mrs. Hookstratten’s reserves and promised a stake in the company) would adhere to the conventional flaking process pioneered by Dr. Kellogg thirteen years earlier, when he produced his first wheat flake, and perfected by that same culinary wiz
ard in his 1902 recipe for toasted corn flakes.

  First, the corn kernels had to be milled to separate the horny outer shell and oleaginous germ from the starch-laden grits (too much germ and the flakes would go rancid on the shelves, as had been the fate of the now-defunct Korn Krisp product). The kernels were steamed until they cracked open, after which hull and germ were removed and the grits further steamed in rotary cookers—at which point flavorings were added—salt, sugar and malt most commonly. The grits were then dried and cooked again and allowed to stand and mellow in order to develop flavor and the ability to flake properly (this last step a serendipitous discovery of Dr. Kellogg, who, after forcing batch after batch through the process without success, was called away and inadvertently let a tub of grits turn moldy; the moldy grits flaked up beautifully). After tempering, the twice-cooked grits were rolled into flakes under the crushing pressures generated by a series of water-cooled rollers, and finally they were toasted. That was it. The whole process, beginning to end. All Per-Fo had to do to capture its share of the market was incorporate a little celery flavoring and vary the proportion of malt extract to achieve a slightly different taste (very slightly—no reason to fool with success).

  By midafternoon of the second day, Charlie found himself in charge of a pair of hog-scalding tubs full of cooling grits that Bookbinder was “impregnating” with malt extract, salt from a shaker and a secret bile-green fluid derived from boiling down a bunch of celery to its essence, leaves and all, while at the same time he was expected to help George and a hired man hand-turn a set of laundry wringers to produce the flakes. Three big iron kettles steamed the next batch on the stove, while the preceding batch toasted on a tray in the oven. The basement was chaotic, George hauling in wood and stoking the fire, Charlie darting between stove and cooling tub, Bookbinder shouting out his nasal orders like a general under siege. A slick mash of cooked corn accreted underfoot, the rumble of roller and milling tray defined the internal weather, steam shrouded the air till the basement was indistinguishable from a Turkish bath. And the finished product—greenish flakes, burned at the edges or not, depending on the vigilance of the baker, i.e., Charlie—mounted in a series of peach baskets set against the far wall.

  The pace was so frantic, Charlie didn’t have time to think about what he was doing—he was just glad to be doing something. And when Bookbinder ordered him out to split more wood, he obeyed without question, and when the cart pulled up with the flattened pasteboard boxes, he went right at unloading them without a moment’s hesitation. So it went for the better part of the next two days and nights.

  It was around nightfall on the fourth day that Bender turned up to sample the finished product. Of course, Charlie had tried the odd flake from this batch or that, and Bookbinder had varied the formula periodically in search of the best-tasting and crispest flake, but no one had as yet sat down with a bowl, a spoon and a pitcher of milk to pass judgment. The batches had been numbered and labeled, and there were now twenty-seven overbrimming peach baskets stacked up against the stone wall, the contents of each differing in some essential way. Some contained flakes that held too much oil and were already turning; others were so crisp they’d achieved the color and texture of soot scraped from the walls of a fireplace. Still others had been peptonized (predigested through the action of Bookbinder’s special pepsin mixture, which was designed to make the product easier on the American stomach), and one batch festered like pus and smelled so bad they had to store it outside beneath a denuded elm at the far end of the yard. The carpets were thick with a congealed mush, and there was a steady drip of condensation from the joists of the floor above.

  “Well, well, progress, progress!” Bender cried, doffing his hat and bowing his way into their dungeon. He was beaming, and he went into a spiel about how he’d already taken advance orders for five hundred cartons—just on the design of the package alone. His face changed when a big brownish drip of bilge water drooled from the ceiling to stain his white silk scarf, but he murmured something about “difficult conditions” and refreshed his smile. Then he clapped his hands together in their pearl-gray kid gloves and roared, “Hell, boys, let’s knock off and go upstairs for a taste test.”

  Upstairs they went. Bender led the way, outdoors into the cold starhung night, up the back steps and into old Mrs. Bookbinder’s lanternlit kitchen with its dry sink and Puritan-brand icebox. George chugged at a bottle of something and slammed his shoulder into the door frame on the way in; the hired man—Hayes was his name, just Hayes—was next, followed by Charlie and, finally, Bookbinder. The kitchen table was a big oaken affair covered with a greasy oilcloth. Old Mrs. Bookbinder, twisted like a root, sat grinning on a stool in the corner. “I’ll be yer judge,” she cried in a voice that was three-quarters whistle, like a parrot’s, and showed them a set of gray and toothless gums. “If I kin chew it, you know you’re on to somethin’.”

  The table was set for six: six stoneware bowls, six tin spoons, six napkins of graying cloth. They sat without ceremony, exhausted, dazed, glad to be away from that close and unnatural space that lay somewhere below them like one of the nine circles of hell. Bender had arranged samples from the four most promising bins in serving bowls, which stood now on the sideboard. The first was labeled Batch #13C, Pep., Cel. Imp., 2 oz. salt, 6 ext. malt. Its contents, Charlie saw as Bookbinder solemnly scooped up a bowl for each of them, resembled shavings of green wood with fluted edges. Bender made a joke about saying grace, George snarled something unintelligible, the milk went round, the spoons were dipped.

  There was a silence. Outside, a light icy rain had begun to fall, and it tapped in an insinuating way at the windows. George was the first to give up the pretense. With an excruciating rumble of palate, sinus and esophagus, he brought up a wad of Per-Fo #13C and spat it into the palm of his hand. “Christ Jesus!” he gasped, and a spasm passed over his body, “I’m poisoned!” In the next moment he had the bottle pressed to his lips as a palliative, and each of the taste testers, old Mrs. Bookbinder foremost among them, quietly spat out his or her mouthful into napkin, bowl or palm. Noises of relief, surprise, sorrow, panic, disgust circulated round the table. Bookbinder gravely rose, collected the bowls and scraped them, one after another, into the slops bucket for the pigs. Then it was on to batch #21 A.

  The lamps glared. The rain fell. The night was long. All four sample batches were passed on with varying degrees of revulsion, and when Bookbinder descended into the basement to recover samples from the next-most-promising bins, no one gave him the slightest word of encouragement. It was five samples this time, and the spoons moved sluggishly in the depths of the bowls. In the end, the hogs got the whole lot, all twenty-seven batches of the first run of Kellogg’s Per-Fo, and the saddest thing was, even they wouldn’t eat it.

  If Charlie was disappointed, he didn’t let it get him down. This was a minor setback, a hitch in their progress, and he never doubted that Bender would work things out. Perhaps he didn’t have quite as much confidence in Bookbinder—the word was he’d been lured away from Post Foods by another concern, now bankrupt, and that he’d taken a real bundle out of it, but who could say?—yet it wasn’t the end of the world. If Bookbinder couldn’t get Per-Fo to shape up into something appealing—or even edible—well, they’d have to chalk up the loss to experience and get someone who could. It was a setback. A disappointment. But there was always a way.

  At twenty-five, Charlie Ossining was essentially an optimist. And why wouldn’t he be? The Fates had smiled on him, and he’d walked in sunshine the better part of his life. Born Charles Peter McGahee in the town of Ossining-on-Hudson to Irish-immigrant parents who occupied themselves more strenuously with the uncorking of a whiskey bottle than with the means of obtaining such trifles as bread and meat and a roof over their heads, he might have been consigned to the dung heap and suffered through the usual grim and deprived childhood. But he wasn’t. The tutelary gods, in the form of his benefactress, Mrs. Amelia Dowst Hookstratten, prevailed. His fath
er, Cullum, largely through glossal endurance and the strength of a fevered, overactive imagination, had persuaded the widow Hookstratten to take him on as gatekeeper, man-about-the-place and majordomo of her Tarrytown estate, in addition to engaging Charlie’s mother, Mary, as cook and parlormaid. Charlie was a boy of four at the time, precocious, winning, with the wide-open eyes and ready-made grin of the born confidence man (or pastor, tycoon or senator, for that matter).

  From the start, Mrs. Hookstratten had taken a consuming interest in the boy, dressing him in the fine calfskin shoes and English tweed jackets her own son (then in his midtwenties and a power on the New York Stock Exchange) had worn in his youth. The boy delighted her. He made her feel necessary again, young at heart, essential; he lent credence to her mornings and regularity to her afternoons. Most of all, he helped her to fill the void left by the death of her husband.

  She took Charlie’s schooling in hand, too—though she was as democratic as the next person, she couldn’t help feeling that the village school was the resort of the uncouth, the foreign and the ruffianly. Accordingly, Charlie spent his grammar-school years at Mrs. Partridge’s School for Young Gentlemen in Briarcliff Manor, where he learned comportment, Latin and music, as well as the three Rs, and spent his later years at St. Basil’s, in Garrison. When Mrs. Hookstratten moved to a more commodious place just south of Peterskill, she did it in order to better display her plumage, of course, rising to her station on the strength of her late husband’s investments as managed by her pencil-sharp son, but also—though she’d admit it to no one, not even herself—to be closer to Charlie; that is, if he wanted to come home for the occasional weekend. And it was for Charlie, too, that she brought Cullum and Mary with her, though Charlie’s father was by this time so far gone in his drink that he couldn’t even be relied upon to open the gate when the occasion demanded it, and Charlie’s mother had developed a host of mysterious ailments, from a ringing in her ears to palpitations of the phalanges, that rendered her all but useless as cook, maid, pot scrubber or linen changer.