The Road to Wellville (76 page)

It was then that the Doctor became aware of a steady soft ratcheting sound, a sound he’d been hearing at low frequency for the past minute or so without being aware of it, a biological sound, the sound of air
grating back and forth, in and out, across a rigid larynx. And what was it? He knew that sound, didn’t he? He glanced round him warily. And then, from a doorway down the corridor, a shadow emerged. Sleek, lupine, low to the ground: Fauna, the pure white vegetarian wolf. Or parti-colored wolf, more gray than white since Murphy had no need to powder her except for performances—but where was Murphy? And how had she gotten loose? The question answered itself in the next instant as the shambling, loose-limbed, slope-headed form of Lillian the chimp slid out into the hallway beside the wolf: George. He was in there. In the animal lab. He’d freed them.

“Lillian!” the Doctor barked in his voice of command, “bad girl, back to your cage!” and he advanced on the animals, his arms spread wide to herd them. The chimp jerked up her head at the sound of his voice, but then she set her knuckles down on the floor and bared her teeth. “
Eeeee-eeeee!
” she shrieked in defiance, and the sound of it, raw and insolent, took the wolf’s growling up a notch.

“Down, Fauna!” commanded the Doctor, and he swept up the hall, spectacles flashing, intent on one thing only—the open door and the agent of all his calamity and woe that lurked somewhere behind it. But Fauna didn’t cower. The growl tightened in her throat until it was as if she were garroting herself, and she tensed her muscles to spring. “Down!” the Doctor roared and he threw his arms up over his head—no mere animal was going to intimidate him—and charged into them.

Still, and for all that, it came as a great disappointment to him when Fauna took hold of his right leg, just behind the knee, with a grip as savage and sudden as death—what had he ever done to hurt her?—and Lillian the chimp simultaneously fell on his throat with a pair of leathery long-fingered hands that could have crushed both of John L. Sullivan’s fists as easily as they might have cracked open a nut. It was a bad moment. One of the very most disheartening moments of the good Doctor’s life. What had he done to deserve this, he wondered, pitching to the floor beneath the combined weight of chimp and wolf, how could George hate him so immitagably and unconditionally, and these animals—didn’t they appreciate him? He rolled instinctively, felt the incisors part and then dig in again, registered the cold wet feel of the
Italian tiles against his back as the shit-stinking jacket, shirt and undershirt were torn from him as if they were made of sacking, and for the first time in his physiologic life, he felt his faith flag.

Maybe, he thought, huddling under the onslaught of the pounding leathery fists and twisting his leg almost casually beneath the grip of the probing teeth, just maybe I’ve been wrong, maybe my entire life has been a sham. He saw the whole arena sweep before him then, the Elders and Sister White, the forty-two waifs, the countless faces of his countless patients and the open bleeding mouths of the wounds he’d made in them; he saw George, Charlie Ossining, the Lightbodys. Maybe I’ve been too single-minded, he thought, too sure of myself, too much my own guiding light and beacon, and that thought hurt him more than any fists or teeth or renegade son ever could. It hurt him so much he almost gave up. A voice rose up from within him and it said,
And so it goes: let them tear my flesh, let them strangle the breath from my lungs, let me die
.

But then, at the very nadir of that dark abandoned moment, that moment of despair and sickness unto death, he recalled a salient and telling point: he was no ordinary man. He was a man with a mission, a man with the strength of hundreds, thousands even—he was John Harvey Kellogg. The knowledge gave him new strength and he jerked his worried leg from the wolf’s grip, and the wolf, in the heat of the moment, closed its jaws on the chimp’s delicate, buffed-ebony toes. That was all it took. Lillian let out a screech of anathema and fell on the wolf as if she’d been set afire, one sinewy vinelike arm already jammed down its throat, the other locked across its eyes, and the two beasts rolled off down the corridor in a thrashing cataclysm of yips, shrieks, squeals and caterwaulings.

The Doctor shook himself and bounced promptly to his feet, the rags of his suit and undergarments stripped away to his waist and trailing behind him as if he were an enormous half-peeled banana, his right pant leg perforated and soaked with blood. He winced when he put his weight on the wolf-gnawed leg, and he found himself stiffly hobbling across the hallway to bend’ for the twin orbs of light that were his spectacles. Wiping them on one of the linen scraps that fringed his
waist like a hula dancer’s skirt and then forcing the bent wire frame back into shape over his ears, he straightened himself up and surveyed the field of battle, more determined than ever to track down the agent of this anarchy and make him pay the price of it.

Overhead: shouts, cries, the thump and pulse of vigorous movement. Down the hall: the two beasts, still going at it, surging and flapping against the walls like a pair of animated hearth rugs. Behind him: the excremental reek of the ravaged lab and a tile floor streaked with the unreadable message of its violated specimens. And directly ahead? The door to the animal laboratory stood open wide—and George must be in there still, smashing aquaria, freeing experimental rats, toads and lizards, lost in some obscene childhood reverie of annihilating his playmates’ toys. Well, let him, the Doctor muttered under his breath, and he approached the doorway on silent feet.

Noiseless, canny, stalking his quarry with the fierce and utter concentration of the pygmy with his blowgun or the aborigine with his boomerang, Dr. Kellogg flattened himself to the wall and assayed a peek round the door frame. The lab stood unchanged. The lights were on, that was something, but otherwise all was as it should be. There was the faint odor of rodent urine—so faint that only the Doctor, with his hypersensitive nose, could detect it, and even in his extremity he made a mental note to have Murphy change the litter throughout—and the cages stood as usual on their shelves. He heard the muted scurry and shuffle of tiny feet and naked tails, and he was listening hard, listening for the untoward footfall, the squeal of hinges, the sound of glass shattering. And then all at once there was a hand in his face, George’s hand, tearing at his spectacles, gouging at his eyes, his lips, his nose, and George spun out into the hall before him. “Well, Pater,” he jeered, raising his voice to be heard over the unholy din of Fauna and Lillian, “and how do you like the physiologic life now? Stinks of shit, I’d say.”

Though his spectacles were askew and his leg was stiffening, the Doctor made a lunge for him, but George evaded him, skipping off easily out of reach with a maddening laugh. “Catch me if you can,” he taunted, and he fled the length of the hallway, past the ragged wolf and screeching chimpanzee, and disappeared into the Experimental Kitchens, as Lillian had done before him. The Doctor followed, slowed now by his leg—it
didn’t seem to want to bend at the knee—but all the more grim and dogged for it. This was a battle to the finish.

And here, finally, the balance swung in his favor.

When he came through the door and into the darkened room, dragging his leg, he found George crumpled on the floor beneath the nut-butter vat. He was clutching his ankle and whimpering, the same hateful intransigent boy he’d discovered in the root cellar, the boy who wouldn’t hang his jacket on the peg, who tormented his siblings, set fires, refused to treat his adoptive parents with the respect—let alone gratitude—they deserved. The boy who couldn’t be touched. The boy who lived only to refute and debase everything John Harvey Kellogg stood for. He was hurt. Whimpering. Clutching his ankle.

All in an instant, the Doctor saw that it was over. George had hurtled into the room, bent on destruction, but weak, essentially and in the deepest corrupt fiber of him, weak, weak, weak—and drunk, too, addled with drink—and he’d tripped over the three-foot lever that projected from the bottom of the vat, the lever that set the big mixing blades in motion and broke down the unyielding nuggets till they gave up their essence. From the way George was holding his ankle, from the angle at which the foot seemed to skew away from the tibia, the Doctor could see that it was broken, badly broken. George was breathing in quick shallow gasps and the pain clouded his eyes. He shrank into the shadows at the base of the vat.

Dr. Kellogg never hesitated—it had gone too far, and there was no coming back, not now. Sweeping across the floor in a single violent motion, he bent and snatched the boy to his feet, ignoring his shout of agony as he fell away from the broken ankle and staggered on his one good leg into the immovable wall of the vat. The Doctor slapped him, again and again, the pinched arrogant face shrunk to nothing, the flat head rolling loose on the shoulders, and he never thought back to the night in the hallway, never doubted himself for a second. Slamming the boy’s spine into the sharp unforgiving lip of the tub, he sought to hurt him, only that, to give as good as he’d gotten, and he beat at him till his hands went numb and the rancid gutter stink of the boy gave way to the rich rising effluvia of macadamia butter.

A thousand pounds of it, half a ton, smooth and nutritious and replete,
enough to restore three-quarters of the stomachs in Battle Creek and awaiting only the jars to contain it. A sea of pure golden oil floated atop it, richly glinting in the half-light cast through the doorway, trembling and dipping with the oceanic shock of the towering little Doctor’s rage as he slammed into George again and again. And then a curious thing happened. In twisting away from the Doctor’s blows, George, bent double at the waist and savage with the pain of his ankle and the imperative of staying off it, lost his footing and pitched forward into the vat. At first only his right arm plunged in, and he flailed back out of it, his hand, wrist and forearm glistening with oil, his shirt greased to the shoulder, but the Doctor was inspired now, and never vacillating, he forced the boy back down into the fragrant sloshing unguent froth, baptizing him, purifying him, and he held the boy’s face there and fought it down with every ounce of outraged physiologic strength he could summon even as it lashed to the surface shrieking for air and fell back again into the oleaginous grip of the stuff.

The Doctor held George there until he stopped struggling. And in the end, his grasp became almost tender, and he imagined himself washing the boy in the big gleaming porcelain bathtub when he’d first come to them, digging deep with soap and washcloth, fighting down the dirt, laving and anointing the son George could never be. There was an infinite sadness at the core of it, infinite. But George was an experiment that hadn’t worked, and there was no shame in that, not to a man of science. When an experiment went bad, you had to move on to the next one and the one after that, on and on into the shimmering universe of discovery and revelation that stretched out shining all the way to the very feet of God. George was weak. An aberration. He should never have been born, never have drawn breath, never have been allowed to add to the sum total of human misery and depravity that was dragging the race stubbornly down.

Dr. Kellogg drew himself up. Gently, with intimate touch and the most exquisite physiologic grace, he pressed the boy’s limp and inanimate flesh to his own and lifted first one leg over the lip of the tub, and then the other. And then he let him go, let him drift away, face down, aglow with precious oil. It was a hard thing to do, as hard a thing
as he’d ever done in his life. But even as he stood there, bleeding quietly into the tatters of his clothes, even as George bobbed gently away from him, he knew he would draw strength from it. For he was no weakling, he was no George. He was John Harvey Kellogg, and he would live forever.

C.
W. Post, the man who brought Postum, Grape-Nuts and meretricious advertising to the world, was the first of the high apostles of health to succumb to the inevitable. He’d never really got over the stomach troubles that had brought him to Dr. Kellogg’s doorstep in 1891, though positive thinking and the accumulation of a personal fortune that ranked him among the nation’s wealthiest individuals helped keep them in check for a time. Tall, dynamic, the most photogenic and opportunistic of Battle Creek’s breakfast-food barons, he fought his constitutional weakness with pamphlets and slogans (
Grape Nuts: There’s a Reason; Postum: It Makes Red Blood
), and rejuvenated himself in 1904 by divorcing his suspender-sewing wife and marrying his typist, an ingénue thirty years his junior. When his appendix gave out in 1914, he was rushed by special train from his home in Santa Barbara to Rochester, Minnesota, where the Mayo brothers performed an emergency appendectomy while half the world held its breath. The operation was a success, but it was just the tip of the iceberg. Charlie Post was sick, sick at heart, sick at stomach. On May 9 of that year, in the bedroom of his home overlooking the bright snapping banner of the Pacific, he put a rifle to his solar plexus and ended it all. He was fifty-nine.