Free The Road to Wellville by T.C. Boyle Page A

the obstruction was behind him. It came to the Doctor then that if he stood there all night long, if he stood there until spring arrived and the trees burst into bloom and the bluebirds nested and a thousand abdomens went unplumbed by his surgical tools and healing fingers, George would continue to step round him, wordlessly, endlessly, as if the Doctor were nothing more than a statue carved of stone. And it was that thought, the thought of the boy’s blindness and stupidity and stubborn ingratitude, that put the good Doctor over the line.
    He was in his early forties then, and for all his short stature, he was among the healthiest and most physically fit men alive. In a single bound he was at the head of the stairs, and then he had the boy in his hands, the feel of flesh on flesh, and he was wringing the sticklike arms as if they were sopping towels. Grunting with the effort, he tore thejacket from the boy’s shoulders, tore it to pieces, and then, in the pale light of the moon in the still and shadowy hall, he slapped that unyielding little wedge of a face till his hand was raw. When he was done, when he’d spent himself, he turned his back on the boy and went to bed. For the first time in a week, he slept, slept like an innocent.
    In the morning, George, in his new jacket, was at school with the other children. According to Hannah, he’d slept in his bed, which he’d made up as soon as he awoke, and then he’d bathed, brushed his teeth, used the toilet and eaten his meals as he was expected to. There was no more shuffling in the hallway, no more the eternal whisper of those diminutive feet in their worn and diminutive shoes, no more the bowed head and the reproachful face. Dr. Kellogg felt a pang of regret when he thought of the violence to which he’d been driven—had Hannah noticed any marks on the child?—but he shrugged it off. He was a busy man. Busy? He was a juggler with a hundred Indian clubs in the air at once—and he hurried off to the San to take hold again of the world.
    The day was a whirl, as hectic as any he could remember. He had an acrimonious meeting with Sister Ellen White and half a dozen of the Adventist Elders, who then still controlled the San; he worked furiously in the lab to get his vegetable-milk formula to taste like anything other than the almond-and-peanut paste it was; he saw to his patients; he repaired the electric-light cabinet-bath in the Ladies’ Gymnasium (faulty wiring); and he gave his regular Monday-night Question Box lecture on the subject of self-abuse and the atrophied testicle. When he got home, it was past midnight and the house was quiet. He was tired but exhilarated, already thinking about the coming day’s work, about the potential of the soya bean and Japanese seaweed, about the universal dynamometer, the pneumograph, the orthopedic chair and a way of bonneting windows to channel healthful winter air to the bundled and sleeping patient—all the raveling links of the infinite shining chain of inspiration that propelled his brain through day and night. He felt good, it seemed, for the first time in weeks.
    Crossing the back hallway to fetch a journal from the library—a new number of
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he meant to look into—he stumbled upon something at the base of the stairs, something that wrapped itself like a hand round his shoe. It took him a moment, bending to the thinglike a paleontologist reaching out for a bone in the dirt, and even then his fingers had to interpret the material for him.
    A jacket. A child’s jacket.
    Yes, and then there was the first time George spoke. Eight months he’d lived with them, eight months of eating their food, attending their school, wearing the clothes and sleeping in the bed they’d provided, and in all that time not a word had passed his lips. The Doctor examined the boy himself and called in his colleagues in consultation, and they found nothing: George’s vocal apparatus was as normal as William Jennings Bryan’s.