The Road to Wellville (49 page)

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   

S
pring 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 one 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.