The Road to Wellville

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “Poult,” the Doctor cried over his shoulder, breath steaming, the petite white shoes pumping at the pedals, “we’ll need to accomplish several things on the way to the San this morning, so get your pencil ready—and you, too, Bloese.” And there he was, the blinding white dynamo, cutting a caper on his bike at the age of fifty-five and counting, the front wheel rising from the pavement as he dodged back at his jogging secretaries to give them a moment to prepare pencil and paper. Up the icy curb and down again, a figure eight, and he was back out in front of them, the words flying into the wind at a Kelloggian clip.

  “First things first—about the notice for the San in the new issue of Good Health, and, by the way, I’ve made some corrections on the colon piece and it will have to be typed up the minute we get in—well, about the notice. I’m looking for a catchy phrase, nothing vulgar like that charlatan conjures up for his Toasties and Post-stickers and the rest—remember, gentlemen, this is not an advertisement, not at all, but a notice, and a notice by its nature has the dignity these hucksters wouldn’t recognize if it bit them … at any rate, I’ve come up with this phrase, to run under the Battle Creek Sanitarium heading”—the bicycle careening, there’s a dog, narrow miss, the Doctor glancing back over his shoulder at his blowing secretary and the wiry little man beside him, both scribbling furiously and thumping along the icy streets like refugees scrambling for the last train—”and it’s a fine and effective phrase, plenty of dignity to it, but it feels somehow incomplete, as if”—dodging back again, the figure eight to split them—”well, I’ve got this far: ‘The Battle Creek Sanitarium: Organized Rest.’”

  Bloese didn’t seem to be breathing hard—good man, that. Dab was pathetic, wheezing like a cart horse, and the Doctor had to keep circling back for him.

  “You see what I mean?” the bicycling Doctor cried over his shoulder, weaving, weaving, “rest that isn’t a bore, or something like that—we don’t want to give the impression of a nursing home, not at all, that’s the last thing we want … on the contrary, we want to emphasize the excitement of the Battle Creek”—there’s a wagon, up on the left, look out now—”Sanitarium. Oh, and by the way, Poult—Poult?”

  The Doctor let out an exasperated sigh. Dab was lagging now, half a block back, damned inefficient man; the Doctor swung sharply to his right and doubled back. “This Lightbody thing,” he called out, running straight at Dab and swerving at the last minute, a bit of fun here, and why not? “—the man’s been dropped from today’s surgery. Any reason?”

  Dab’s ponderous legs carried him in a blind stagger up the bone-chilling street. He looked dazed. His breath was ragged. “No—no reason especially,” he wheezed. “It’s just that—that we—with the employees’ meeting and all—we—”

  The Doctor zoomed by him on the left. “All right, fine. But reschedule him. And advise Dr. Linniman. The man’s a certified disaster—the sooner we get to him, the better.”

  Bloese came up on the right side then, moving along effortlessly, a born miler making for the tape. “Without ennui,” he said, his voice cast low in deference and respect. At first the Doctor didn’t quite catch on to what he was. saying, but then it hit him: he’d completed the slogan. And beautifully. Of course, that was it: “The Battle Creek Sanitarium: Organized Rest Without Ennui.” Perfect!

  “Yes,” the Doctor shouted, “that’s it, Bloese, excellent!” And then he was doubling back again for Dab. “Have you got that, Poult? Yes? Good. And now, if we could begin dictation—I’ll need to have a new version of the Battle Creek Sanitarium Platform for the Battle Creek Sanitarium book I’ve proposed—are you with me here, Poult? Good. All right. Then start: ‘Number the First: Fundamental and Curative Principles. Nature alone can cure. The Power that creates is the Power that can heal. Physicians, nurses, medicines do not cure; they can merely direct and help the healing process. Patients, not diseases, are to be cured—by removing the Causes of disease instead of the symptoms only. Number the Second: A Natural Dietary—”

  When he was dictating, the Doctor was generally oblivious to the world around him. He was concentrating, peeling back the layers of his brain like a mental onion, digging for the deep stuff, the Kellogg essence, and the phenomenal world receded of necessity into the background. And so the woman with the perambulator had to be quick on her toes, and Bloese became an object, a tool moving at the required speed, and Dab—poor Dab—a duller tool, lagging behind. It took a good long moment—the course of a block, at least—before Dr. Kellogg began to understand that Bloese was trying to communicate something to him, something urgent and critical for all its inarticulacy. Man of decision, general to his troops, the Doctor doughtily applied the brakes.

  Bloese halted beside him. He wasn’t even winded, his hair was unmussed, he seemed unaffected by the cold. But there was something in his eyes that gave the Doctor pause, a look of desperation, wildness, fear. “Well, Bloese, what is it, man?” he demanded.

  “It’s Dab, sir.” The secretary jerked his head in the direction from which they’d come. “He seems to have fallen.”

  It became clear in that instant. The Doctor’s keen eyes took in the scene at a glance: the massive form of Dab, collapsed like a heap of rags in the street, the young woman with the perambulator bent over him, the trees reaching nakedly for the funeral stone of the sky. He was quick, Dr. Kellogg, nimble and quick—back down the street in a trice. But all his quickness aside, he was too late to do a thing for his fallen amanuensis.

  The woman’s face, Bloese’s, Dab’s. A carriage stopped. People had begun to emerge from their houses, crack their doors, stand on their porches and gaze out on the scene in fascination and dread. The little Doctor lifted his head from the secretary’s chest, dropped the wrist he’d gathered between thumb and forefinger. Dab’s features were locked in the vise-grip of death, mouth open, tongue prominent, eyes fixed in blind contemplation of the lowering sky. John Harvey Kellogg pushed himself up from the street, brusquely rubbing his palms together to remove any particulate matter that might have adhered to them. “Massive coronary arrest,” he pronounced, and his eyes went hard suddenly, “—there’s nothing we can do.” There was a sound of shuffling feet, muted cries and whispers.

  “Poor Dab, poor Poult,” he went on after a moment, addressing the crowd gathering round them, and his voice rose as he began to appreciate the significance of the blow, the moment, the historical framework of the secretary’s life and its meaning in the greater context. “Here lies a man, a good man, and a fine secretary, a man brought low in the prime of his life.” He lifted his head then, made eye contact with each and every member of the stunned and white-faced crowd. “But for all that”—he shook his head sadly—“a man who ignored the dictates of the physiologic life.”

  There was a silence. No one said a word. The young mother tried to suppress a cry of general and specific grief. Finally the Doctor turned to Bloese. “I’m sorry, Bloese,” he said, “and what was your given name again?”

  “Aloysius, sir.”

  “Aloysius,” he repeated, his voice somber, as if he were meditating on the deep significance of the name. “Aloysius”—and he reached out a hand to clap him on the shoulder—”you’ve got a long day ahead of you.”

  He was not heartless, the good Doctor and Chief of the Battle Creek Sanitarium—far from it. An hour later, in his office, the eyeshade pulled down low, Dab’s body laid out on a slab in the mortuary, he shed a quiet tear. He blamed himself, he did. How many times had he told himself he had to get the man on a proper regimen, simplify his life, fill him to the core of his essential self with the life-giving elixir of physiologic well-being? And yet he was angry, too. Damn that Dab. He was a slob, that was all. A slob. A face of eating, a disgrace. Patients, not diseases, are to be cured.

  He was revolving the disaster in his mind—half the town had witnessed it, after all—when the phone rang. Without thinking, he picked it up.

  “John?”

  There it was, the voice of his own
blood, country-inflected, porkpie-cap-wearing, horse-trading, skinflinting and backstabbing, the voice that had spoken to him from the bunk bed on a farm morning, the voice that had taken his orders with a yes and a sure and an I’ll-do-it-if-it-kills-me, the voice of his brother, Will.

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “I know there’s no love lost between us, John, so I’ll get right to the point. It’s this new breakfast food—”

  The Doctor cut him off. “Breakfast food, my foot,” he cried, “you’ve got what you want—my name, my hard work, my invention and the knife you twisted in my back, so don’t you call here telling me about breakfast food.”

  Will was calm, always calm, born calm. “John” he said, “it’s our name I’m talking about. They’re calling it Kellogg’s Per-Fo. You know of it?”

  Kellogg’s Per-Fo? What was this nonsense? What was he talking about? And then suddenly, cutting through the field of the Doctor’s peevishness like a black knight with his halberd raised, was the image of George.

  “John? You there?”

  The Doctor’s reply was a whisper, static on the line.

  “It’s your boy George—he’s behind it and he’s got legal use of the name, just like me, and I was born with it, whether you want to admit it or not—”

  On the defensive now—George, Dab, McMickens, it was all too much, “Yes? And so? I wash my hands of the boy. Washed them. Years ago.”

  The level voice came right back at him, no irritation, no lift, just plain good sense. “It’s an embarrassment, John. To my business, sure, but I expect you don’t give a hoot about that—”

  “Damn right, Will. You’ve never been righter.”

  “—but I expect you’ll begin to reflect on what this is going to look like vis-à-vis your precious Sanitarium. This Per-Fo is nothing but a scheme, John. All they want is for us to buy them out and quiet them up. I’ve got my lawyers on it now—”

  “Your lawyers. Sure. The same shysters you used to squeeze the toasted-flake concession away from the Sanitas brand, are they the ones? Bloodsuckers, vampire bats and I don’t know what-all—your lawyers. Ha!”

  “I didn’t call to wrangle, John. Our differences will be settled in a court of law—”

  “You’ll rue the day—”

  “But this is an embarrassment to us both and, what’s more, an injury to my business and yours. Now, he’s your son, no matter what you say, and word will get out that the son of the Almighty Doctor on the Hill is a flimflam man, and how do you think that’s going to sit with your precious bowel-plugged patients?”

  The conversation ended there. Dr. Kellogg slammed down the earpiece in a rage. Faces swam before his eyes—his brother’s, Dab’s in its final agony, George’s, always George’s. He pushed back the eyeshade and lowered his head to the desk.

  A good percentage of the staff was waiting for him in the Grand Parlor as he came through the door, Bloese at his side, and there wasn’t a one he didn’t recognize, not a one to whom he hadn’t shown special kindness or given his personal attention. Nurses, bellhops, cooks, janitors, electricians, pot scrubbers, bottle washers and peanut-butter decanters, they were all there, two hundred and more, while the others, those who were loyal to him, to the institution and its philanthropic mission, kept away. He saw McMickens at the head of the queue as he made his way to the podium—a pasty-faced, flat-headed, dollop-nosed Irishman with coils of black ursine hair on the backs of his hands. What was it about these Irish, he thought irritably, never satisfied with their lot, always crying out for more like piglets at the teat? The man was a sorehead, a menace, and when the furor died down, the Doctor would quickly see to his dismissal.

  The room fell silent as Dr. Kellogg stood at the podium and bowed his head. “My friends,” he began, and he’d yet to look up, “my employees and fellow vegetarians. I have tragic news, news that will sadden every heart in this room.” He looked up now, suddenly, and his eyes were clouded with tears. “One of your rank, one of the men most dear and indispensable to the workings of this great, unique and charitable endeavor in which we all, even the humblest and most recent hiree, are engaged together, has fallen. Yes, friends, my confrere and secretary, that great and good man, Poultney Dab, is dead.”

  Someone gasped. There was a murmur of voices, a confused muttering, suppressed coughs, followed by a stricken silence.

  “It happened this morning, just this morning, and in the line of duty, too. Poultney Dab worked for this grand enterprise right up to the end, taking dictation even as he was taken from us and delivered to a far happier and a better place. His death was unexpected, but, then, what man’s isn’t? Or what woman’s? Or child’s, even? The Lord God, in His wisdom, has made us the imperfect vessels we are, subject to the whims and wants of the organism, sinners all, liable to fall.”

  There wasn’t a murmur in the room. All eyes were riveted on the platform. The Doctor paused to remove his glasses and dab at his eyes with a handkerchief.

  “Yes,” the Doctor continued, his voice growing in dimension, lordly and dramatic, “Poultney Dab is fallen. Sacrificed. Dead before his time. And which one of us will be next?”

  There was no response.

  “We say that his death was unexpected, yes, but that’s just a way of comforting ourselves, a litany, as it were. I say this to you: Poultney Dab’s death was expected, apparent to us all, were we not blind, visible in the flare of his cheeks, the glaze of his eyes, the sallowness of his skin and the corpulence of his frame … for wasn’t he one of the unlucky ones, one of the unregenerate, one of the millions of men, women and children in this country—yea, the world—who know not what they do to their own bodies, those priceless temples, tokens of God’s faith in us? You all know the evils of improper diet, you all know the failings of the meat eater, the drunkard, the coffee fiend, and you all know how unforgiving Nature can and will be—I say this to you, my friends and employees, my co-workers, my fellow missionaries: he was a victim of autointoxication.”

  A single lamp burned at the far end of the room. The cold wind rattled the windowpanes and the clouds drove at the building as if it were an ark at sea. The Doctor raised his arms to the light, came up off the platform on his toes and shot his eyes at every face in the room.

  “Yes!” he cried finally. “Autointoxication! And he a member of this staff, privy to the last word in enlightenment and reform. What of the others? What of the legions of the ignorant, laboring in darkness, their lives doomed to be cut short, brutally and without warning, in their season of fruitfulness? What of them?”

  Again, he hung his head. When he raised it once more, the tears glistened on his cheeks. “And you speak”—here his voice cracked pitiably—”you speak of money. Of lucre. Of gain. You gather here, beneath the portals of this fortress of health reform, this bastion of truth, and you ask me to give you—you, who have your health and the wisdom and discipline to maintain it into the golden years of your productive and harmonious lives—to give you mere money.” He threw up his hands. “Believe me, I would if I could. I know how little we’re able to pay even the most experienced of you. I know the ascetic life of the first-year nurse, given nothing but the roof over her head, her uniform and the means of knowledge. But is such a life so untenable? Can any man put a price on knowledge—the knowledge that will save your lives and the lives of thousands upon thousands of others less fortunate than yourselves? You are missionaries—I am a missionary—and the whole of humankind is our mission. Can you put a price on that? Can you?”

  The Doctor’s voice rang out through the room. Fully half the audience was in tears, handkerchiefs waving like flags of surrender. A second-year nurse in the front row raised her face to him, her eyes soft, cheeks wet, a reverential glow illuminating her plain features. The Doctor cleared his throat and bathed the audience with his most compassionate gaze.

  “I take nothing myself,” he said, his voice pitched low. “Not a cent. Nothing. You all know that. My time here—and you all know just how m
uch of my time and energy I devote to this institution—is given freely, willingly, gladly, in the service of mankind. This is my life … and I trust, I fervently hope, it will be yours.

  “I will not ask you to pray for your fallen comrade; Poultney Dab would not have had it so. If I knew his heart, and there’s not a man or woman amongst us today who can better lay claim to that knowledge, he would have exhorted you to carry his name into battle like a regiment following its guidon; don’t shed your tears for Poultney Dab, my friends, but sing out his name. Use it as a prick, a lance, the shining symbol of our holy united endeavor….” And then the little man in white began to sing, his voice naked and grief-stricken, alone in the first bar but swelling, swelling with the full complement of all the kindred spirits in the room before he’d drawn a second breath:

  Onward, Christian Soldiers,

  Marching as to war,

  With the cross of Jesus,

  Going on before….

  And with that, he left the podium, his right arm raised high and beating time, the hymn ringing to the rafters, as he made his way through the sea of broken faces and grasping hands for the door.

  Night fell over the San. It was the night of the death of Poultney Dab, and Dr. Kellogg and his new secretary, A. F. Bloese, were working late. The Doctor had triumphed, as usual, but at what cost? His stomach was sour, his joints ached, his eyes were tired. There were just too many troubles, too many things pressing on him, too many hands reaching into his pockets. Despite the rigors of the physiologic life and the fortitude of mind and body it inspired, he was depressed. Tired. Overworked. And it was the deep black icebound nadir of the year.