The Road to Wellville

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  She came for him at eleven o’clock and found him brooding at the window. They made small talk about the groundhog and whether he’d make the event, and then she took his temperature, auscultated him, attached the sphygmomanometer and noted the result on her chart. She gave him a potion to relax him—it felt curiously like the Sears’ White Star Liquor Cure, a warmth that spread from his belly to his limbs, his fingers, the tip of his tongue—and then she helped him onto a gurney and Ralph, brawny dependable Ralph, wheeled him to the elevator and thence to surgery.

  At a quarter to twelve he was lying in a private anteroom to the surgery, Nurse Graves at his side, waiting for Eleanor. Eleanor had her own morning routine to attend to, so she couldn’t be with him through his long wait, but she’d promised to duck out early from her posture therapy session to be with him in his final moments. Irene’s voice, soft as a breeze warmed by the sun, floated over him; she held his hand and caught him up on the doings of her brothers and sisters as a way of distracting him—little Philo had fallen through the ice on the pond and the hair froze to his head; Evangeline had blackened two nails on the butter churn; the dogs had trapped a fox in the barn. Will felt lazy, disembodied. Odd moments of his life drifted in and out of his head, and he saw himself as a whiplash of a boy, sound in mind and body, gorging himself on fried chicken on Decoration Day, bicycling through a grove of white birch, fishing under the bridge, stepping out the door on a morning transformed by snow. But then his stomach clenched again. He was going under the knife: that was the reality. The knife. He pictured Mrs. Tindermarsh, that monument of flesh, the sagging belly and drooping breasts, exposed and naked beneath Dr. Kellogg’s probing scalpel, the scalpel that sliced, cut, burrowed. “Take me out of here,” he croaked, and his own voice startled him. “Irene, take me back to my room, take me away—I don’t—I can’t—”

  Nurse Graves hushed him. She talked, sang, hummed away his fears. The “Brahms Lullaby”? Yes, Brahms. She talked on and on, and as he lay there, his privates swaddled in a sterile towel, she soaped his abdomen and began to shave the little thicket of coiled hairs that flourished there out of sight of the sun. He was vaguely aware of Eleanor bustling into the room, her face hanging over his like a lamp, angry words between his wife and his nurse—What do you think you’re doing to my husband?—and then Eleanor was gone, the gurney was in motion, the doors parted, and Dr. Kellogg was there, his hygienic beard tucked away beneath a surgical mask.

  It was bright. Intolerably bright. He tried to turn his head away, but Ralph was there to hold him down. They fastened his ankles, wrists and elbows, people in masks, their eye’s gleaming, soulless, and he was the sacrificial victim, laid out on an ancient slab. Then the mask came to his own face, black rubber, the smell of the ether, sick and sweet, so much richer than air … the Doctor’s voice speaking to him out of the void, crooning, cajoling, comforting, Don’t struggle now, Mr. Lightbody, it’ll all be over soon, over soon, over soon … and you’ll be well again … relax now, relax…

  How could he resist that injuction? He relaxed. Felt himself drifting….

  But then all of a sudden the Doctor’s billy-goat beard sprang free of its restraints, bristling and naked, a leer transmogrified the sober face, the hairy hocks of the satyr kicked away the gown, and there was the Doctor’s primitive tool, huge and red and swollen, a weapon in his hands, thrusting, thrusting….

  And then the scene faded, and all was dark.

  Out on the south lawn, warmed by braziers of charcoal and steaming mugs of Sanitas Koko and Kaffir tea, a crowd of some three hundred patients, attendants and townspeople assembled lightheartedly for the main event of the day. There was an air of festivity about the gathering, fostered by the Sanitarium Marching Band, poised to play “Hail to the Chief” the moment the rodent showed its whiskered face and made its momentous choice, and by the smell of roasted chestnuts and broiled Protose that drifted over the scene. Children crowded the groundhog’s demesne, their voices airy and bright, the thrill of recess jerking at their limbs and pulling cries of juvenile glee from their throats. They shouted and danced and tore after one another in elaborate games of tag and hide-and-seek. The adults looked on benignly, their own voices no less restrained, and they drank and ate and joked among themselves as if winter really were at an end.

  Eleanor was there, standing between Lionel Badger and Frank Linniman. J. Henry Osborne, the Bicycle King, stood off by himself, a mug of cocoa in his hand. Ida Muntz, in a wheelchair, flanked Adela Beach Phillips, the archery champion, and Admiral and Mrs. Nieblock, near the rear of the crowd, were reduced to stitches over the antics of Horace B. Fletcher, who was turning somersaults on the lawn and wearing the expression of a groundhog in heat. The clock struck twelve.

  At precisely that moment—and no one knew how the Doctor had managed to arrange it—there was a stirring at the hard frozen lip of the burrow. The laughter died, conversation ceased, a hush fell over the crowd. And there: wasn’t that a handful of dirt pitched high in the air? It was. And now a second clod and a third flew from the burrow. The crowd closed in. All eyes strained to see.

  The thing appeared then—simply appeared—emerging from the burrow without ceremony. It was sleek, bottom-heavy, its nose slit, whiskers bright. Was this a groundhog? Was this what they looked like? The crowd held its breath as the rodent scratched at its ear with a vigorous hind paw and gazed up into the sky—and at that moment, as if it had been ordained, the clouds broke and a single narrow tube of light fell across the animal’s glistening hide and threw its shadow on the dead yellow grass. That was all it took. The rodent fixed the crowd with eyes like hard black pellets, flung its head over its paws as if it had been electrified and vanished down the hole.

  The clouds closed over the sky like a fist.

  Chapter 1

  Questions,

  Questions,

  Questions

  Spring came late to Battle Creek that year. Two and a half feet of snow fell during the first week of April, riming the catkins of the pussy willows, stupefying the spring peepers in their slippers of mud and providing Bjork Bjorksson with a windfall of baffled skunk, porcupine, beaver and opossum that blundered into his traps. Cows and goats were caught in pasture, sleighs hastily pulled out of storage; two farm wagons and a brand-new Model T Ford automobile collided on the slick Washington Street bridge. On the eighteenth, after a thaw that falsely encouraged the crocuses and snowbells, there was a hard freeze followed by an ice storm that turned the trees to crystal sculptures and the streets to one big interconnected hockey rink. The birds were late, too. The San’s feeders were mobbed with sparrows and jays and the starlings that had just begun to colonize the area, but there was no sign of robin, bobolink or oriole. It was May before the skunk cabbage began to push up through the ooze of the swamps, before the rhubarb reddened the back corner of the garden and the spring peepers finally emerged and began abrading the edges of the night with their lovesick vibrato.

  Like everyone else in Battle Creek, with the possible exception of Bjork Bjorksson and the odd tobogganist, John Harvey Kellogg was disappointed. He was ready to move on, to fight back ennui with picnic lunches, fishing expeditions, bathing alfresco and the crowning of the Queen of the May. He’d dyed his beard black and donned a stovepipe hat for Abe Lincoln’s birthday, appeared in toga and garland for the Ides of March, set loose a hundred white rabbits at Easter. All in good fun, sure, the entertainments of the season. But for a man who believed in the curative powers of light, the lingering frost was a sore trial. He had all the flowers he wanted, cultivated in the artificial environment of the San’s hothouses, and he had his Palm Garden and electric-light boxes, but his Florida tan had long since faded and he’d begun to feel the enervation of the Laplander or the Eskimo, so long deprived of the real thing, Helios, the warm and nurturing sun of the vernal equinox.

  On this particular night, a Monday early in May, he was preparing to address his constituency on the subject of the hidden evils of meat. No o
ne had actually asked him to address the subject, nor had anyone deposited the requisite query in the question box during the previous week, but he didn’t let that deter him. He’d found over the years that the patients’ questions tended to be painfully specific—What do I do about a bunion on the great toe short of changing to a larger shoe size? Miss M.S.; Is a growth on one’s neck, just below the right ear, in any way connected to a torpid liver? Mr. R.P.P., Esq.; Can strabismus in a child be corrected by the application of herbal compresses? Mrs. L.L.—and while he took pleasure in answering them and turning the discussion toward the larger picture, he felt no obligation to do so. If no one had submitted a question about the pork muscleworm or the Taenia saginata, the common tapeworm, and these happened to be uppermost in his mind, as they now were, well, then, he would speak to those parasites and their very real horrors. The question box was hardly meant to be democratic, after all—he, the physician, was there to tell his patients what they most needed to know. What they wanted to know was another thing altogether; sometimes it dovetailed neatly with his own requirements and sometimes it didn’t. Tonight was one of the latter occasions. But he did have a demonstration planned for them, oh, yes indeed, one they would never forget.

  Bloese called for him in his office at five minutes to eight and the Doctor made his way down the corridor, across the lobby and into the south wing, nodding, smiling and calling out greetings to his patients and staff every step of the way. There was a burst of applause as he entered the Grand Parlor, a burst that rapidly grew in breadth and depth until it rose to the level of ovation as the full complement of the audience became aware of his presence. Modest and neat in one of his summer suits—white, of course, and why not push the season?—he held up his foreshortened arms and called for quiet.

  “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests all,” he cried, pausing to clasp his hands together and gaze out on them with a look of saintly benevolence—they were his flock and no harm would come to them. Not for them the hardening of the arteries, the palpitations of the heart, the tumor, the ulcer, the jactitating hand and the faltering step. They were the elect, the chosen, the righteous, and they glowed in his presence.

  “Well,” he exclaimed, chopping it off abruptly. “In the great spirit of La Vie Simple, let’s pitch right into tonight’s subject, shall we?” A clearing of the throat, an adjustment of the white-rimmed spectacles. “Yes. We have a question”—unfolding a slip of paper—”from, uh, Mr. W.B.J., regarding the dangers of flesh foods. I quote: ‘We have learned that the consumption of animal foods is dangerous in the highest degree; besides being unnatural and against all the laws of God and man, it gives rise to autointoxication and the many illnesses—often fatal if untreated—associated with it. Are there other hidden dangers resulting from flesh consumption, and, if so, what are they?”’ The Doctor looked up from the slip of paper. “An excellent question, Mr. W.B.J.—I congratulate you.

  “Well, now, aside from the shocking and deplorable conditions in the abattoirs of this country, which I believe I addressed from this podium two weeks ago—was it two or three weeks, Frank?” The Doctor paused, a look of benign consternation on his face, to put the question to Frank Linniman, who sat erect, with his legs neatly crossed, in the front row.

  “Two weeks, Doctor,” came the reply.

  “Yes. Well. For those of you who weren’t with us then, let me say that you might consult The Jungle, Mr. Upton Sinclair’s excellent novel on the subject—and he was our guest here just this past fall, incidentally; a great privilege to have had him—and, of course, my own book on this issue, Shall We Slay to Eat?, published and disseminated by our presses here the year previous to Mr. Sinclair’s laudable volume, and which is, by the way, available to you all, and at a very small cost, the whole of which helps to sustain this institution and its vital work….

  “Be that as it may, I needn’t tonight regale you—or should I say horrify you—with tales of animal waste, feces, blood, urine and even vomit being pressed into sausage casings or tins of potted meat, or the practice of grinding up the flesh of tubercular animals—infectious tubercles and all, I might add, a sort of flavoring, as it were—to disguise the foul quality of the meat…. I can see at a glance the depth of revulsion you feel at the mere mention of these facts, which are a matter of record, and what civilized person wouldn’t recoil from such a horror? Just try to imagine for a moment, won’t you, the helpless terror-struck cries of the calves, lambs, piglets, chickens, ducklings and turkeys led to slaughter, the blood of their cousins, their sisters, brothers, the blood of their own progenitors reeking in their nostrils….”

  He held up his hands in a gesture of disavowal. “But it is not my intention tonight to enumerate these blasphemies against life and health, blasphemies that continue even as we sit here, that continue despite the efforts of Mr. Sinclair and Dr. Wiley and the Federal Food and Drug Administration and all of us who seek to pursue a sanitary, progressive, pure, kind and enlightened life—no, it is my intention to answer Mr. W.B.J.’s question, to tell you, in all its stomach-turning detail, of an evil far more insidious even.” He let his eyes roam over the faces ranged round him, wave upon wave of them, running all the way back to the big oaken doors at the rear of the room and beyond—there must have been twenty or thirty people crowded into the hallway itself. “Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to tell you something of the parasites—the worms, if you will—that seethe in every morsel of flesh you might consciously or unconsciously have lifted to your lips over the course of a lifetime—prior, that is, to your conversion to biologic living.”

  It was a moment of delight for the diminutive Doctor, the moment he lived for, the moment when he had his audience right where he wanted them. There wasn’t a murmur, a yawn, a sigh: his hold on them was absolute. “All right,” he said, “let’s take the trichina worm to begin with. Trichinella spiralis, to be precise. This scourge of man and animal alike—it’s recently been discovered in animals as various as the American black bear and the African hippopotamus—owes its foul existence entirely to carnivorous practices, most particularly, among humans, to the consumption of the flesh of the pig. It is little wonder that the ancients of the Levant, Hebrew and Arab alike, banished this filthy beast from their tables…. Would that they had banished mutton and beef as well,” he added with a wistful sigh.

  “At any rate, pork which has been improperly dressed and inadequately cooked, when ingested, will free the trichina larvae from their capsules, or cysts, cysts in which they dwell for an indeterminate period—years, in many cases—in the muscular flesh of their host. Once that flesh is consumed, the larvae free themselves of their capsules and breed within the digestive system, each worm producing as many as a thousand offspring. The young worms bore through the intestinal walls and are carried in the blood to their final destination, the body’s muscular fibers. And there they will lodge, encrusted in the rock-hard cysts they fabricate, until they are in turn eaten. Which in the case of the human being is unlikely, unless one finds oneself at the mercy of a tribe of South Sea cannibals. No: these cysts are permanent. There is no cure.”

  He paused, waited. What one of them wasn’t recalling that distant strip of bacon, the chop, the loin? Half a dozen of the women actually squirmed in their seats.

  “I cannot tell you,” he went on, his voice somber now, “how much agony I’ve witnessed as a result of these parasites, all but powerless to help despite the physiologic tools the Almighty has put into my hands. Oh, the grinding shoulders and clacking knees, the infested respiratory muscles, riddled hearts! I had a patient once who came to me after years of heedless abuse—he was an Iowa farmer who had butchered a hog each and every autumn of his life. Well, this poor distressed individual couldn’t lift his arms to shoulder level, so riddled was he with trichina cysts. It was heartbreaking. He would try to raise his arms, wincing against the terrible knifing pain….” The Doctor broke off, overcome. His eyes clouded and he struggled with his voic
e. “I tell you truly, the sound of those cysts grating against bone and sinew alike will never leave me. Friends, it was like the sound of cracking walnuts. Just to lift his arms. Cracking walnuts. Can you for one minute appreciate the pain that must have racked that suffering frame?”

  Silence, suitably appalled.

  “Mercifully, my friends, he didn’t have long to suffer—he was dead at the age of forty, the heart muscle itself invaded by these treacherous parasites, these worms, worms, ladies and gentlemen.” He shook his head sadly. “And all because he had a taste for pork.”

  The Doctor went on to illustrate his point with a gimmick similar to the one he’d employed in the instance of Mrs. Tindermarsh’s beefsteak. From an icebox located strategically behind him on the platform, he produced a pork shoulder from Tuckerman’s Meat Market (“Guaranteed fresh today,” he announced breezily), still wrapped in Tuckerman’s crisp white paper and fastened with Tuckerman’s twine. He instructed Frank Linniman to take three thin-cut samples of the meat and arrange them on slides under the microscopes lined up on the table at the rear of the platform. He then called for three volunteers from the audience to examine the slides, looking for the telltale coils in the striations of the muscular tissue.