The Road to Wellville (63 page)

But not tonight. There were too many things on his mind. Though it was a Sunday, generally the most tranquil day of the week for him, what with the time he spent in reflection at church and the musical half-hour he enjoyed at the piano with one or another of the children, he was far from tranquil at the moment. Among other things, he was wrought up over the following evening’s Question Box lecture. Not over the substance of it, that was never a problem: white sugar had been on his mind lately, a commodity as pernicious and enervating as bleached flour, and he would speak to that. No, the worry—the fear, actually—was over George. It had been two weeks since he’d made his criminal assault on the reception following the tapeworm lecture, and though he hadn’t attempted anything in the interval, the Doctor was sure he was planning some new hatefulness. And what better time for the odious little ingrate to strike than when he was at the podium? That was how George’s sinkhole of a mind worked.

They hadn’t caught him that night—and woe to George if they had. If they’d caught him—and the Doctor’s eyes snapped wide open at the thought—he didn’t know if he would have been able to restrain himself, didn’t know but that it would have been a repeat of that terrible night on the stairwell when George had first come to them. The boy had made a fool of him, set the curtains ablaze and scared the daylights out of a hundred patients whose nerves were in no condition to be tampered with. He’d very nearly ignited Mrs. Cornish’s taffeta gown in the process, and in fact had given her a nasty second-degree burn on the left breast when one of the missiles had lodged in her cleavage. How he’d managed to escape was a mystery. After stampeding the patients with his pyromaniacal display, he was somehow able to elude the Doctor, Frank Linniman and half a dozen attendants, no doubt slipping out one of the rear exits at the height of the confusion. He knew the building well—the Doctor had to give him credit for that.

But it was damnable. An outrage. This wasn’t merely an embarrassment, this wasn’t cadging change or shouting obscenities in the street; this was criminal assault, arson, attempted murder. Chief Farrington and his force of twelve deputies had been combing the streets for him ever since, poking through the tramp “jungle” under the South Jefferson Street bridge and roving as far afield as Kalamazoo, Olivet and Albion. George was going to prison this time, and no mercy was to be extended him, no mitigating circumstances taken into account. “Bill,” the Doctor had told the constable, “I made a mistake with that boy, a grievous mistake, and I’m sorry to have to admit it. There’s a taint in his blood, a sign of the degeneracy that’s already overtaking the race, and I want him put away behind bars where he’s not liable to hurt anybody else. You catch him, Bill,” he added, and his voice was steady and cold, “and you do it quietly and quickly, and while you’re at it, you just give a moment’s reflection as to how much my support and goodwill have meant to you and the mayor over the years.”

Farrington was no fool. He’d gotten the message, all right, no doubt about that, but it would be two weeks tomorrow night and George was still unaccounted for. And that was no small thing. The boy had made his intentions perfectly clear—it was all-out war on John Harvey Kellogg, the man whose only crimes were compassion, generosity and hope, the man who’d given him the clothes on his back, the roof over his head, the food in his mouth, an education, a name, a place in the world that was his for the taking. It was beyond fathoming, beyond human understanding. But at this point, the Doctor’s patience was exhausted—all that mattered now was that the boy be stopped. He was a self-declared enemy, for whatever reason—or lack of reason—and the Doctor knew how to deal with enemies. George would never see the light of day again.

Yet what frightened him as he lay there rigid in his bed, what kept the sound of the rain from lulling him and the pillow from loosening the knotted muscles at the base of his skull, what kept his eyes stuck on the shifting, ghostly, half-visible pattern of the wallpaper, was the way the boy had delivered his message, the balls of newsprint flaring through the air like rockets, like the bright semaphore of doom. It paralyzed the Doctor even to think of it. Fire was his bête noire, the
thing he feared above all else, the one thing he couldn’t control. And George knew it. How old had he been—thirteen? fourteen?—when the fire had swept the San? Whatever his age, the lesson of it hadn’t been lost on him. This was the way to strike out at the world, this was the way to humble his betters and twist the knife in his adoptive father’s heart, this secret spark, this flame in the darkness,
this
.

Lying there in the chasm of the night, staring into nothing, the Doctor could see the San, his precious San, as it was on the day he rushed home from a lecture tour to find it in ruins—February 19, 1902. He would never forget that day, the most heartbreaking day of his life, and he would never forgive himself for having been absent at the critical moment. Fire had raced through the place the previous morning, taking the life of one patient and reducing the Sanitarium and all its equipment, its Experimental Kitchens and its vibrating stools, its heated tubs and physiologic chairs, to ashes. He could see the skeletal remains of the chimneys poking up out of the wreckage as if to mock him with their solidity, the fine white ash three feet deep and glowing with a satanic intensity, everything he’d built and struggled for and believed in eradicated in a single stroke. And he could see George’s face as it was then, the clotted venom of the eyes, the slug of a mouth, the smirk, the grimace, the undisguised satisfaction that reddened the tips of his ears and made his head bob on the wilted stem of his neck.

The boy had loved that fire, loved what it had done to the Doctor and his idea of himself. Dr. Kellogg could remember George standing there on the verge of the blackened pit, his shoulders slumped, a private hateful smile on his lips, while the other children gasped and cried out and held each other as if they were about to fall off the edge of the world.

They never discovered the origin of that fire. Though it stank with suspicion. Reeked. Oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed. The Doctor never thought of George at the time—and even now, after all that had transpired, he still didn’t think the boy had had an active hand in it. He might have abetted it mentally, might have prayed for the conflagration and inwardly cheered as the top floor collapsed round the elevator shaft, but he wasn’t yet devious enough to have conceived of the blaze itself. No, the finger pointed to Sister White and her Adventist vigilantes.

The prophetess and co-founder, with her husband, of the Sanitarium’s predecessor, the Western Health Reform Institute, Sister Ellen White had in those years become the voice of the Adventist church, her frequent and remarkably specific visions shaping its policies as neatly as a last shaped the shoe to fit it. For the better part of a decade she’d been struggling with the Doctor over control of the San, but he’d always kept one step ahead of her. When she dunned him for contributions to the church’s far-flung concerns—its shoddily managed and unprofitable sanitaria in places like Spokane, Peoria and Moline, its overseas missions and the print shops that spewed out its superabundant literature—the Doctor had the San declared nonsectarian and benevolent, ostensibly for tax purposes, and inserted a clause in its charter requiring that all its income be disbursed within the boundaries of the state of Michigan.

The move might have mollified the tax collector, but it didn’t please Ellen White. She had a vision, conveyed to all the faithful from the pulpit, suggesting that God Himself wasn’t pleased, either. The Sanitarium had become godless, she asserted, condoning “evolutionary” thinking and putting the greenback dollar above its mission of Christian charity. God’s wrath had been aroused. What Sister White saw, twisting and slashing at the firmament over Battle Creek, was the coruscating sword of that wrath—a sword of fire.

It was a prophetic vision. In July of ‘98, a fire raked the Doctor’s Sanitarium Health Food Company, and the following year a blaze of suspicious origin gutted the Sanitas Food Company plant, another of the Doctor’s concerns. Then there was the Sanitarium fire, and while he was rebuilding (the Elders hadn’t dreamed of the extent of his connections or the depth of his friends’ pockets), he had to contend with a steady stream of warnings, prophecies and rumblings of further divine intervention, all channeled through Sister White’s perfervid imagination. But this time he built of stone, though the San’s stables, vacuumed cows and all, were mysteriously consumed by fire less than a year after the present structure went up. Never for a moment did John Harvey Kellogg doubt who was responsible.

Till now.

But no, and he shook his head unconsciously against the pillow, he didn’t really think George capable of that, not at fourteen. No: it was
Ellen White. It had to be. She was the worst kind of rabble-rousing, evangelical charlatan, appealing to the most gullible and ignorant elements, and her followers, simple rural folk for the most part, would go to any lengths to see the word of God made concrete. Still, George had been a problem that year, no doubt about it—more of a problem than usual, his adolescence clinging to him as awkwardly as a shirt two sizes too small.

He wouldn’t eat, for one thing. Just took it into his head that he wasn’t going to eat anymore, and that was that. No reason, no explanation. He woke up one morning that fall, sat down at the table with the other children and refused to touch his food. This was the sort of thing the children’s nurses were expected to deal with, and it might never have come to the Doctor’s attention but for an unusual circumstance. Ordinarily, he and Ella took their meals in their own quarters, the Doctor’s irregular schedule preventing him from dining with the children, which he was disinclined to do in any case, finding their habits—the twice-handled food, the furtive wipe of lip on sleeve, the unconscious dribble and the tendency of sauces to collect about the corners of the mouth—unsettling to his own digestion. But around this time—the fall of ‘01, that is, some months before the fire—the Doctor had been experimenting with several new food products, and had taken to strolling through the children’s dining room at mealtimes to observe their reactions to them.

He was then in his couscous-kohlrabi phase, attempting to blend the semolina and the high-fiber vegetable into a mash that could, like the breakfast foods he’d pioneered, be twice-baked, desiccated and dextrinized, for easy digestion and prolonged shelf life. They’d tried it, reconstituted, as a porridge, but the kohlrabi infused the resulting mixture with an odd greenish tint and a taste of the earth that even the most pliant of the children had had difficulty with. For subsequent meals it was baked into wafers, stirred into a clear broth of reduced vegetables, ground up and sprinkled like bran on a lettuce salad, and congealed in an eggplant-chayote ratatouille. On this particular evening, at the Doctor’s suggestion, the cook had rolled it into a Protose loaf to serve as an entrée, accompanied by a yogurt-piccalilli sauce.

When the Doctor entered the room, the children looked up as one
and sang out, “Good evening, Father,” before a gesture from him let them know they might return to their plates. He took a seat in the corner, unfolded a newspaper and made a show of studying it in order to put them at their ease. In reality, his spectacles twinkling in the light of the chandelier as he cocked his head ever so slightly this way or that, he was studying them, attuned to every least curl of the lip, every grimace and smile. He watched the hovering forks, the dutifully Fletcherizing jaws, the dip and rise of the Adam’s apples. The older children—the Rodriguez boys, Lucy DuPlage and Nathaniel Himes—studiously maintained the approved dining posture and a commendable silence as they finished up their portions and waited patiently for the soup course—Saniterrapin—and the stewed gooseberries with Graham mush they would receive for dessert. The younger ones had some difficulty with their utensils and general deportment, as was to be expected, but their nurses were there to guide them, and, in general, they seemed pleased enough with the new dish.

George, alone among them, refused to eat. He merely sat rigid at his place, staring down at the table as if in a trance. When Hannah Martin, his nurse since he’d come to them at the age of six and perhaps the person closest to him in the world, bent to ask him what was the matter, he refused to answer. The Doctor, observing from behind his newspaper, felt a tic of annoyance start up in his left cheek: George, it was always George.

The boy’s face was a hard little kernel of fury as Hannah Martin leaned over him, murmuring blandishments and words of encouragement. George wouldn’t respond. He sat there like a dead thing, the balls of his fists clenched tight in his lap. After this had gone on for several minutes, the Doctor folded his newspaper in irritation and spoke up. “George?” he called out in his voice of authority, and the children looked up at him with their blameless faces, forks suspended over their plates. “What seems to be the matter?”

No reaction.

“George Kellogg,” the Doctor intoned, resisting the urge to rise to his feet, “I’m speaking to you, George—now, what seems to be the problem?”

Hannah Martin straightened up and gave the Doctor a stricken look. “I, uh, I don’t think he feels well, sir….”

Dr. Kellogg silently cursed the boy for his unrelenting, puerile, pig-headed obstinacy. He was a negative thinker, born to it, and there was no changing him. But that was just where the danger lay: the attitude was subversive, contagious. Let him get away with an infraction, however minor, and the others would slip, too, and before long license would rule. The Doctor focused on the boy’s simian ears, the wedge-shaped head with its fringe of irregularly cut hair (he’d apparently taken a scissors to it himself, defacing the perfectly good haircut he received twice a month from the Sanitarium barber), and couldn’t suppress a flare of hatred. How had this human wreckage come into his life? How could the Fates be so cruel? Still seated, he directed his response to the nurse. “If he doesn’t feel well, perhaps I should examine him? Or perhaps he simply needs a purgative.”