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

Why he refused to speak was anyone’s guess. The Doctor chalked it up to obstinacy, pure and simple.
    One night, as he was sitting at the piano in one of his rare moments of relaxation, playing a better-than-passable rendition of “After the Ball” for little Rebecca, the doctor felt a sudden jab in his lower back. Startled—no one interrupted John Harvey Kellogg when he was relaxing—he stiffened his fingers over the keys and turned from the waist as the last chord hung suspended in the air. George stood directly behind him, the blunt stub of a pencil clutched in his hand. The doctor stared at him in surprise, and George, though he rarely made eye contact with his adoptive father, stared back. After a moment, the Doctor asked him if he wanted anything, expecting the usual dumb show in reply. But George surprised him. He cleared his throat and let a tight little smile creep across his lips. “Yes, Father,” he said, and his voice was flawless, strong and composed, “yes, I do want something: you haven’t got a nickel for me, have you?”
    George. Hildah’s boy. They should have left him in the shack where they found him, should have left him to starve and wither till the light faded from his eyes and the gums drew back from his lips. It was a terrible thing for a man of healing to think, but there it was. George had been nothing but trouble since the Doctor had first laid eyes on him, and now here he was back yet again, and this time it wasn’t merely a nickel he wanted, either. “A hundred dollars?” the Doctor repeated.
    George’s eyes were cold. Dab swallowed audibly at the very mention of the figure. “That’s right,” George grunted. “One hundred dollars and I’ll be out of your hair.” He paused and that venomous little smile, the smile he’d employed at the piano bench all those years ago, came backto him. “I get the sense, Father Kellogg, that I’m an embarrassment to you, and think how that hurts me. Don’t you want me here to entertain your patients? I can give them a terrific show.”
    John Harvey Kellogg was not a man to give up a dollar casually. In fact, he was widely known for his frugality, one of his commanding virtues. He’d built the San into the great institution it was largely on the basis of free or minimally paid labor—in the early days, his staff was composed almost exclusively of Seventh Day Adventist volunteers, and now that he’d wrested control of the place from the church, he staffed it nearly as cheaply with students from the Sanitarium-affiliated college, who were required to work in its kitchens, baths and gymnasiums in order to matriculate. And he pinched his customers, too. In summer, for instance, he prescribed the very healthful exercise of woodcutting for his male patients, thereby assuring himself of a plentiful supply of fuel with which to stoke the San’s furnaces in winter. He stopped his pacing to turn to George a second time. “It’s blackmail,” he said.
    George made a face. He ran a dirty hand through his hair and the doctor made a mental note to fumigate the carpet and chair when he’d got rid of him. “Blackmail? I’m offended, Father, I really am.”
    “Twenty-five dollars,” John Harvey Kellogg said, “on condition that I never have to lay eyes on you again.”
    “One hundred dollars,” George repeated, “and I’ll think about it.”
    “
Think
about it?” the Doctor spat back at him, and he could feel himself slipping, just as he had on that shadowy night so many years ago. “You’ll
think
about it? Ha! I can have you thrown out of here this minute.”
    George began to gather himself up now. He let his eyes wander over the framed portraits that decorated the walls—Luther Burbank, John Wesley, Thomas “Old Parr” Parr, the Englishman who’d reputedly lived to the incommensurable age of a hundred and fifty-two. “A big boast, Father. And I don’t doubt that you can live up to it, what with your henchmen stationed outside the