The Road to Wellville (51 page)

When the cage was delivered to the platform, its occupant became visible to all: a second wolf, black as a dream in the deadest hour of the night, crouched against the bars, its eyes flaring yellow, knotted strings of saliva dangling from the white flash of its teeth. The Doctor had to raise his voice to be heard above it. “Calm yourselves, ladies and gentlemen. Believe me, this is a demonstration only. No harm will come to any of you.” The audience was stirred up, not simply buzzing but distressed, exclamatory, cacophonous even. The Doctor had to clap his hands sharply to get their attention. “Ladies and gentlemen, calm yourselves,” he repeated.

Though they quieted then, the Doctor held off. He merely stood there, the white wolf lying placidly at his feet, its counterpart tearing at the bars of its cage, giving the audience the benefit of a good long look at the tableau he’d arranged for them. Finally he spoke. “You’ve all had an opportunity in these last few minutes to observe the radical disparity in temperament between these two beasts, beasts of the same species, though judging from appearances you might find it hard to believe. The second wolf—that’s a boy, yes, yes, growl for us now—as I say, the second wolf, until seven days ago, knew nothing but the reign of unholy terror that rules the forest day and night—and not just in some dimly imagined Western setting, but here in the fens and glades of Michigan. Yes, here. This specimen was brought to me by one Bjork Bjorksson, a local trapper, who caught him in a leg snare not twenty miles from where you now sit.” Master of the moment, Dr. Kellogg paused to let this information have its effect. “And do any of you doubt, on the evidence, that this wolf means you no harm? Or that
this
wolf would roll playfully across our lawns with the young of our deer herd?”

As if on cue, the caged wolf raised the level of its growl a decibel or two. The Doctor’s point was taken.

“And what is the difference between the two—the one fed on bloody chunks of raw meat torn piecemeal from its prey, the other on vegetable things? Would any man or woman amongst you care to experience the emotions of the beast in that cage? Yes? I don’t hear you.” Silence, but for the steady crosscut growl. “Well, just feed yourselves up on meat, then, on caffeine, bourbon whiskey and tobacco, and you’ll know the
rage in that heart. But let’s have a demonstration, shall we? Frank? Frank, where are you?”

Frank Linniman, efficient and obliging as ever, was there to assist him, rising from a chair at the foot of the platform as if the Doctor were working him with levers. “Yes, Doctor?”

Perfect. Couldn’t have been smoother if they’d rehearsed it. “May we have the other package from Tuckerman’s Meat Market, please?”

And here, Frank mounted the platform, bent to the icebox and retrieved a second package wrapped in butcher’s paper: inside was a prime beefsteak, marbled with fat and oozing blood, a steak not dissimilar to the Post Tavern issue of November’s demonstration. But how many of them remembered back that far? The San had turned over at least half or more of its clientele since then—and if some few of them had been present, what did it matter? The more he impressed upon his audience the perils of meat eating, the more the Doctor was doing to save their lives—and the lives of their children and their children’s children. Slipping on his gloves—this was the danger, this red and dripping time bomb, not the animal in the cage—the Doctor lifted the steak from its paper nest and laid it on the floor at Fauna’s feet.

The wolf sniffed, sniffed again. Then she looked up helplessly at the shining Doctor, whimpered, and backed away as far as the leash would take her. “You see?” the Doctor cried, and he couldn’t begin to count the number of solemnly nodding heads. “She will
not
eat this obscene and unnatural food, not by choice or preference—or even, at the risk of inflaming the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, by compulsion.” (What he didn’t mention was that she had been trained, through negative reinforcement, to view meat as the prelude to a beating—just touch her tongue to it and she was whipped—or that her vegetarian diet had so weakened her, she wouldn’t have had the strength to chew it in any case.)

Making a face, the Doctor bent to retrieve his lump of flesh, and after handing Fauna’s leash to Frank Linniman, he crossed the stage and gingerly dangled the steak over the cage. As he’d approached, the growling rose in volume, but now suddenly it choked off entirely and for the first time since the caged wolf had entered the door, the room was silent. The silence held a second longer, and then the wolf lunged
at the meat with a snarl and bolted it as if it hadn’t eaten in a week. (“Which it hadn’t.) But was it thankful? Not a bit of it. The moment the beast’s throat was clear it started in again, and, if anything, it was louder now, more ferocious and hateful. The Doctor made a feint for the cage and the animal threw itself at the bars, gagging on its rage. “Is that gratitude for you?” he asked, and one or two members of the audience gave an uneasy chuckle, but then he was bowing like an orchestra leader and with a nod and smile recognizing his co-performers, the white wolf and the black, and the applause rose up to engulf him: the show was over. Or so they thought. But the impresario of health, the preceptor of the stage and resuscitator of the race had one more surprise in store for them.

“I thank you all, ladies and gentlemen, for your attention tonight. The Question Box lecture has now come to an end, but I’ll be back next week, same time and place, with my trusty assistant, Dr. Frank Linniman”—a spatter of applause—”to answer your health questions. And now, before you hurry off to tonight’s reception in the Palm Garden, I’d like to leave you with this, a thought for the evening, as it were….” He cleared his throat, adjusted his spectacles. “It’s a poem I’ve written for the occasion of this lecture and demonstration…. I call it ‘Methuselah’:

The balding head shot up again and an antic smile played across the Doctor’s face. “And how long did
he
live, my friends?”

Will Lightbody stood beneath the banana tree in the Palm Garden, a cup of Kaffir tea in one hand, a bran-nut health cookie in the other. The tea smelled and tasted like something you might use on the woodshed to discourage dry rot, and the cookie, though vaguely sweet, had the consistency of animal fodder. Still, Will was glad to be admitting this liquid and this food to his body—any liquid or any food, for that matter, so long as it didn’t look, feel, smell or taste like milk or grapes, or contain, in even trace amounts, any milk or grape products. Actually, milk was a fading memory, though his throat still seized up at the thought of it—at the moment, it was the grape that was uppermost in his mind. He’d been on the grape diet until eight days ago, taking in nothing but grapes, grapes in all their varieties and guises, from Concord jelly on muscadine halves to Tokay pudding, black-currant stew and tall unending glasses of faintly cloudy thrice-strained Sanitarium-blessed grape juice. But no wine, of course. Not a drop of the only form in which grapes would ever again be acceptable to him, even if he should live to be twice as old as Methuselah.

Grapes. The very thought of them, of the way they popped individually between the teeth to release their pulpy, mucousy load, to the bitterness of their seeds, to the blatant bulbous sight of them, gathered to the vine like little cannonballs, dollops of lead, mucilage, poison, was enough to send him gagging for the toilet. Whenever he spotted some poor deluded soul picking away at a plate of peeled Perlettes in a forlorn corner of the dining room, he had to turn his head. He couldn’t help himself. Toward the end he would awaken in the night, certain that he was in the grip of a thick ropy vine, leaves sprouting behind
his ears, tendrils creeping down his throat to strangle him, and he’d find himself heaving up off the bed, gasping for breath. In the morning, he would sneak off to the toilet before Nurse Bloethal could catch him, and deposit whole strings of perfect little royal-purple spheres in the white porcelain basin.

But now he was drinking Kaffir tea and eating cookies. He hadn’t gained any weight—had lost a good fifteen pounds, in fact—and he stood there in his dinner clothes like an animated coat rack. Beneath the starched white shirtfront, which was fastened with onyx studs and secured by his black satin cummerbund, he wore a summer undershirt, and beneath the undershirt, he wore a neat and tidy six-inch scar, a single railway spur running up the slope of his abdomen. This was Dr. Kellogg’s handiwork. He’d done the cutting, the delving, the poking and removing, and he’d done the sewing, too. It was said among the patients that in idle moments, while traveling or dictating, the Doctor often practiced his sewing on articles of the children’s clothing, keeping. his eye sharp, his fingers nimble and his stitches tight. Will couldn’t speak to that, but he couldn’t complain, either: the wound had healed beautifully. Of course, as far as he could tell, the operation hadn’t accomplished a thing. Oh, perhaps the fire in his gut had been damped a notch or two, like the flame under a kettle set on a gas range, but it was there still, burning, burning.

He had questions about that, of course, questions he’d like to bring up during one of the Chief’s absurd lectures—really, the wolf in the cage had been too much, though he had to admit it was high entertainment—but he hadn’t quite got up the nerve. And in private, consulting with Linniman or the bearded little saint himself, Will had learned not to complain, learned to fake recovery, in fact. It was either that or drown in milk and die of grapes. His father had told him to go ahead and stay for as long as it took—he’d long since found a replacement for him at the Water Street plant, and Will’s position there had never been more than ceremonial in any case—and Eleanor, after six solid months, still showed no inclination to leave. And so here he was, in Battle Creek, at the Sanitarium, paying a monthly stipend to the Kellogg coffers that would have bankrupted any number of South American dependencies, and improving at a glacial rate. He figured that if
he stayed on into the 1920s the flame might almost be extinguished (until he lit it again with booze, cigars, coffee and porterhouse steak—and there was no sense in living at all if you had to abjure those things forever), but he’d weigh less than he had at birth. It was a real conundrum, and he was brooding over it and working his tongue up behind his molars to dislodge a stubborn fragment of bran-nut cookie, when Eleanor entered the room in the company of Dr. Frank Linniman.

Eleanor had lingered in the Grand Parlor with a group of enthusiasts to exclaim over the Doctor’s performance, and Will had left her to wait here alone under the saw-toothed fronds, dipping his boredom into the noxious tea like a crust of stale bread. She came up to him now with a swish of her skirts and emitting a sort of clucking, cooing sound that set his teeth on edge, and already she was gushing on about something—pottery shards, skull fragments, some sort of expedition she was planning with Frank, precious Frank, who stood smiling at her side. “Only for a morning and an afternoon,” she gasped, looking up into his eyes and glancing away again, as if she already knew what she’d discover there and didn’t find it worth examining. “Virginia Cranehill will be going, too. And perhaps Lionel.”

“Expedition?” he echoed, but she’d already turned away, distracted by a bloated matron in yellow taffeta who just happened to have organized her own deep-breathing club in Milwaukee and would be the happiest thing alive if she could inveigle her way into Eleanor’s group. A further flutter of skirts and they were gone. Will was left alone with Linniman. For lack of an alternative, he gave him a. partial smile.

Linniman was studying him with a doctorly eye. “Feeling up to snuff lately?” he asked. “Taking to the new dietary?”

“Food, you mean?” Will said. “Yes. Sure. It’s been proven advisable in the human diet, essential, even, hasn’t it? By all those teams of health professionals and researchers, I mean.”

Linniman wouldn’t rise to the bait. He just smiled and nodded, his breathing easy, features composed, mind elsewhere. Will had a sudden urge to drive a fist into his physiologic gut and leave him writhing on the floor, but he resisted it. “What’s this expedition Eleanor’s talking about?”

“Oh, that.” Linniman, who’d been watching someone across the
room, came back to him. “My phrenological studies. So much has been done with the modern skull, but hardly anything at all with the ancient. We’ve just found an Indian site—pre-Potawatomi, by all indications—out in the Springfield area, to the west of town. Professor Gunderson—you’ve seen him here, the rachitic little man with the lame leg?—well, he’s been staying with us to combat severe autointoxication, but he’s an archaeologist by trade. He discovered the site. But he’s offered me the opportunity to collect some of the skulls.”