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behavior on meat, gravy, butter, jam, eggs, pastry, white bread, coffee, pepper, tobacco, tea, beer, and liquor. These substances inflamed the nerves and the genitals, he believed, and he invented a flat biscuit to replace the offending foods. He named it the graham cracker.
    Adventists came up with other products: peanut butter, soy milk, Granola, and Kellogg’s corn flakes, invented by John Harvey Kellogg, who was raised in an Adventist family. Today’s widely available veggie burgers from companies such as Worthington, Loma Linda, and Morningstar Farms also have an Adventist legacy.
    As part of the health reform movement, Americans during the nineteenth century also gave themselves “internal baths”—known nowadays as enemas. Many believed constipation caused sexual excitement in males and nymphomania in females. John Harvey Kellogg gave himself several enemas a day, and by the early twentieth century, Americans of all classes and faiths were enthusiastically flushing their bowels, even giving enemas to their children. Mattie had an enema bag hanging over her shower in Dodge Center that she probably used on Shirley. 11
    Mattie tried to be a good wife, mother, and member of the community. Usually she functioned quite well. With extraordinary energy she did volunteer work for the church, collecting money for missionary work and taking minutes at meetings of the women’s society. She made house calls to the town’s less fortunate. She yelled greetings to people on the street and laughed her odd laugh. Following the recipes in Adventist cookbooks, she kneaded dough from wheat flour, then washed and washed it until the starch was rinsed out, leaving a wad of glutinous plant protein. She mixed the gluten with ground peanuts and tomato sauce, pressed it into tin cans, baked it, and sliced it into rounds of substitute meat.
    But then she would slow down and turn worried, snappish, and distant, confusing her daughter terribly. After weeks of laughing with Shirley and playing dolls with her, she would ignore her, or worse, call her names. Mattie labeled her moods “the blues.” Sometimes they got so bad that she would sit motionless in a chair for hours.
    Mattie got the blues in 1927, after she miscarried a male fetus. It wasso well developed that she and Walter named it Willard before they buried it. 12 If losing the baby was not upsetting enough, the Masons had to move five miles out of town that year, to a piece of farmland they owned. The only habitable building was a one-room structure originally intended as a chicken house. The move apparently was made because of bank failures in the Dodge Center area, which wiped out Walter’s capital, and because of Walter’s lackadaisical business sense even when times were good. He would buy lumber and cement on credit, then build barns and houses in spring and summer without yet being paid by his clients. He would wait till fall to collect, when the farmers got their crops in. But if the harvest turned out badly, he was in trouble.
    It seems that Walter had problems with creditors, and to hide from them he moved his family to the chicken house. Mattie was devastated. Her home in Dodge Center boasted a piano in the parlor, heirloom china in polished cabinets, and light streaming through the sunroom. The chicken house had none of these luxuries, and Mattie got the blues so bad that she spent days barely moving.
    The Masons left the farm in spring 1928 to enroll Shirley in kindergarten. The Adventists had their own school, which all their children were supposed to attend, to protect them from what the Adventists called the “polluting, corrupting” influence of secular education. Virtually all parents supported the denominational facility, but not the Masons: For reasons unknown, they chose public school for Shirley. They may have felt they could not afford the church’s modest tuition. More likely, they were venting their own conflicts about Seventh-Day Adventism through their