Barnaby Gets Loose on Town Meeting Day
Dr. Wilkins tells how Barnaby, just out of his winter sleep and hungry, snapped his chain on the second Tuesday of March and walked into the Pittsfield town meeting. With a 400-pound bear in the hall, the voters threw out the article to banish him, paid for a new chain and elected him field driver. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance tells new stories about town meetings, town pounds and a drunk mother bear in the Pemigewasset country. Later Wilkins explains what to do with a still left running on a busy day, answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about wood ash and red oak in the thump keg, and strikes down the blue-flame test on his anvil.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby. BARNABY. Settle your great hairy carcass down. You have had your supper, half of mine, and the better part of a selectman this spring already. Lie down, you overgrown fur muff with an appetite.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen ground, a heavy thump as he lies down
Wilkins: There. He has gone down like a Congressman after a good dinner.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swells and settles under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and you three Concord Baptists I know are listening behind a locked door. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, Dr. George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, coin-stamper, twice the guest of the Merrimack County sheriff, and the only man in this valley who keeps his own bear. Tonight's story is one I swore to the selectmen I would never tell in public, which is about as strong as an oath gets in this town. It is the day Barnaby got loose on town meeting day.
♪ Theme flourish, fades out
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Want to understand the art of the still the way Doc Wilkins does? The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course teaches the cuts, the copper, and the history, all for one honest price. See it at moonshinestill.com today. That is moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Before we start, the plain truth, because a doctor tells you the bad news before he picks up the forceps. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. Everything on this program is for history and education. And a chained bear is a tall tale of the Suncook Valley, not a household plan. A wild animal fed by hand forgets to fear you, and the day it forgets, you are the meal. Now. On to the bear.
♪ Short fiddle bridge, minor key, a touch of mischief
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. The New Hampshire town meeting. For you city folks in Boston who think government comes from a marble building: in New Hampshire, government comes out of a drafty hall on the second Tuesday of March. It smells of wet wool, horse liniment, and two hundred men who have not bathed since the first snow.
Wilkins: It works like this. The selectmen post a warrant ahead of time, nailed up where folks can see it. The warrant lists the articles, one by one. Article One, to choose a moderator. Article Two, to choose a town clerk. Then selectmen, treasurer, highway surveyors. Then come the small offices, and those are the real treasure of the day.
Wilkins: We elect hog reeves, whose sworn duty is to catch loose pigs and impound them. We elect field drivers, who take up any stray beast and drive it to the town pound. We elect fence viewers to settle quarrels over line fences, and those quarrels have ended more friendships in Merrimack County than whiskey and adultery put together. We elect a surveyor of lumber, a sealer of weights and measures, and a pound keeper to mind the stone pound where strays wait for their owners to pay the fee.
Wilkins: And by custom older than the Republic, every man married since last March gets elected hog reeve. The theory is that a man who has just caught a wife can catch anything that squeals. The fact is the town wants to watch a bridegroom fall in pig muck in front of his in-laws.
Wilkins: Town meeting is the one day a year a New Hampshire man may call his neighbor a thief out loud, provided he first says 'Mr. Moderator.' I have heard Ebenezer Small call his brother-in-law a two-faced, sheep-stealing, fence-moving son of a bitch, and the moderator only ruled it out of order because Ebenezer forgot the 'Mr.'
Wilkins: These war years the meetings have turned grim and costly. Every March the town votes money for enlistment bounties. Pittsfield pays a man to volunteer so Washington will not come and draft him. It is an honorable thing and a heavy one. I have pulled teeth from boys who went south on that bounty money and came home with fewer teeth than I took. I do not joke about that article. I stand up and vote aye with my hat off.
Wilkins: The other article that sours my stomach is the town liquor agent. Under this state's dry law, the town may appoint one man to sell spirits for medicinal, mechanical, and chemical purposes only. I have never seen a crowd so mechanical as the fellows lined up at his door on a Saturday night. Every March somebody moves to appoint the agent, somebody else moves that it be Wilkins, the hall laughs for ten minutes, and the motion dies. I take it as a compliment to my product and an insult to my character, and I am content with both.
Wilkins: So that was the ground. Second Tuesday of this past March. The war was nearly won, the roads were mud to the axle, and the warrant on the meeting-house door had an article I had not seen coming. I will read it to you exactly as the clerk wrote it, because I tore it off the door and kept it.
♦ Crinkle of old paper
Wilkins: 'Article Fourteen. To see if the town will vote to require Dr. G. G. Wilkins to remove his bear beyond the limits of the town, or take any action thereon.'
Wilkins: Beyond the limits of the town. As if Barnaby were a smallpox case or a Democrat.
♪ Banjo roll, quick and nervous
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Now, the bear. A bear comes out of the winter den thin, sour, and hungry as a lawyer's widow. Barnaby had slept since the first hard frost in a hollow I dug under the woodshed. On the second Tuesday of March, the sun hit his side of the yard, and the smell of the meeting-house dinner came down the turnpike on a south wind. The ladies of the town lay on beans, brown bread, salt pork, and the widow Tuttle's mince pies. Barnaby lifted his nose, sniffed once, and the ring bolt I had sunk in the oak sill came out of the wood like a rotten molar.
♦ Wood splintering, a chain clattering free
Wilkins: I was not home to see it. I was at the meeting, God help me, sitting in the third row, ready to defend my bear's good name against Article Fourteen. Deacon Ezra Pottle had the floor. He had been working on that speech all winter. He said a bear is a menace to public order, a terror to Christian women, and a stain upon the good name of Pittsfield. He was just reaching the part about Sodom when the back doors opened.
♦ Heavy doors banging open, a crowd gasping, a bench scraping over
Wilkins: Four hundred pounds of bear walked down the center aisle with three feet of broken chain dragging behind him. He went straight past the voters to the dinner table by the stove. Barnaby ate four of the widow Tuttle's mince pies and the plate of a fifth, the crust and the crockery together. You could hear the plate crack between his back teeth like river ice in April. The widow says it is the first honest compliment her cooking has had since the Mexican War.
Wilkins: Then he went for the beans. Then the salt pork. Then he stood up on his hind legs, a full six feet of him with molasses dripping off his chin, and looked over the room the way a farmer looks over a field of corn.
Wilkins: That was when Deputy Horace Plumb tried to make an arrest. Horace had come to keep the peace. He drew his old horse pistol, which had not been fired since the Aroostook War, and hollered, 'In the name of Merrimack County!' Barnaby took Horace by the coat-tails in his teeth and shook him the way a terrier shakes a rat. His buttons popped off like corn in a hot skillet and hit the walls, ping, ping, ping. The seat of his trousers tore loose with a sound like a sail splitting in a gale. Barnaby dropped him on the floorboards with his bare white backside in the air, then licked the deputy's whiskers clean of the molasses Horace had been saving for later. Horace went up the stovepipe like a squirrel up a maple. The stove was lit. For a month he sat down like a Methodist on a hot pew, and his drawers still carry the scorched shape of the damper.
♦ Wax crackle; distant laughter on the recording
Wilkins: Now, Moderator Josiah Haynes is a man of iron procedure. Josiah would keep order at his own hanging. He banged his gavel so hard he drove the handle through the table and into his own reputation, and he said, in a voice like a cracked church bell, 'The meeting will come to order. We are on Article Fourteen. The Chair sees the bear is present.'
Wilkins: Then he said, 'Is there a motion?' Not one man in that hall breathed. Deacon Pottle started again on public order, and Barnaby turned and looked at him. Just looked, with pie on his face. The Deacon's speech went out of his hand, and Barnaby caught it in the air and ate it. Paper and all. Three pages of Scripture and slander, chewed twice and swallowed.
Wilkins: So Josiah called for a division of the house. All in favor of banishing the bear, stand on the right. All opposed, stand on the left. Ladies and gentlemen, I have never seen two hundred Yankees agree on anything faster. Every man jack went to the left side of that hall, the Deacon first. I believe he wet himself on the way, judging by the trail, but we are a charitable town and the clerk did not record it. Article Fourteen failed, nobody voting yea, one bear abstaining. The clerk wrote it down with a hand shaking like a dog passing a peach pit.
Wilkins: Then a fellow from the back moved that the town raise fifteen dollars to buy Dr. Wilkins a stouter chain, at public expense, for the public safety. Passed. Then old Asa Blake, who had been dead drunk since the second article, got up and nominated the bear for field driver. Field driver is the man who rounds up stray beasts. I seconded it. The moderator, God bless his rigid soul, could find nothing in the statutes against it. It carried. Barnaby of Fort Wilkins is the first stray animal in the history of Pittsfield to be put in charge of catching stray animals, and he has done better at it than the last man.
♦ Bear grunt outside, chain clinks
Wilkins: You hear him? He likes this part. I walked him home on a length of rope with Horace Plumb's trouser seat still in his mouth like a flag of truce.
Wilkins: Now, I have a guest tonight who has seen more town meetings, mash barrels, and bad temper than any man in the state. He is a revenue man out of Manchester, long retired, a man who chased copper up and down the White Hills and over into the Green Mountains, and who can tell a good old pot from a poison box faster than I can tell a bicuspid from a buttonhook. Captain Donald Vance, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Captain: Doctor, thank you. I came in past that bear, and I will say he looked at me like I was gravy.
Wilkins: He looks at everybody like gravy, Captain. He has looked at me like gravy for six years. Now, you have walked into a few town meetings on business.
Captain: I have. And it was never by choice. Here is one. In a Green Mountain hill town over in Vermont, I will not say which because they still remember my face, I had a warrant for a man who ran a fine big copper pot up a sugar-maple hollow. I knew he would be at town meeting, as every man is. So I walked in the back with my warrant in my hand, and I said, 'I am here to serve a federal paper on Mr. So-and-So.' And the man I wanted was the moderator.
Wilkins: Oh, Lord.
Captain: He was up front with the gavel. He looked at me over his spectacles and said, 'The gentleman is out of order. He is not a legal voter of this town and has not been recognized by the Chair.' Then he said, 'The Chair will entertain a motion to table the gentleman's paper.' Somebody moved, a dozen seconded, and they voted to table my federal warrant until the following March.
Wilkins: That is the most a Green Mountain man has ever done with a piece of paper besides start a fire. Did you take him?
Captain: I took him that night at his own supper table. He had saved me a plate, and he said he had expected me. He came along quiet. But I will tell you, Doctor, in Vermont the table motion has more force than the United States government.
Wilkins: Now you mentioned the town pound before we went on, and I nearly swallowed my pipe.
Captain: This was over here in New Hampshire. A hill town with a fine old stone pound by the road, walls higher than a man's head, and a gate with a padlock. A pound keeper minds it. He is elected at meeting, same as your fence viewers. I had a smell of mash on the wind for two weeks and could not find the source. One morning I passed the pound, and a red heifer that had been taken up for straying was walking in circles in there, singing.
Wilkins: Singing?
Captain: Lowing, Doctor, but tunefully, and falling against the wall like a sailor on shore leave. I climbed over. Under a pile of brush in the corner there was a fine copper still, a mash barrel, and a heifer with sour mash on her nose. The pound keeper was the distiller's brother-in-law. Nobody looks in a pound. Who would? It is full of other men's cows.
Wilkins: It is the perfect hiding place. The town builds you a stone wall and elects you a guard. What did you do with the heifer?
Captain: I logged her as a witness, and she was the most honest one in the case. She never denied a thing.
Wilkins: Now we have been talking bears all night. Have you ever had a bear in the business?
Captain: Once, and she won. Up in the Pemigewasset country, in spring, much like your Barnaby's spring. A mother bear, a sow fresh out of her den, found a mash barrel at a still site, tipped it, and drank herself senseless. When my posse came up the trail at dawn, she was lying across the path like a fallen spruce, snoring loud enough to shake the needles. Sitting beside her was the distiller's old hound, guarding her like she was his own.
Wilkins: And not one of you brave Federals would step over her.
Captain: Doctor, I have stepped over a good deal in my career. I have stepped over drunk men, dead mules, and a Methodist elder in a ditch. I will not step over a sow bear. We sat on a log for two hours eating hardtack while she slept it off. When she finally got up, she went off into the brush groaning like a man the morning after a wedding. The hound looked at us with contempt and went home. And by then, of course, the distiller and his copper were halfway to Canada.
Wilkins: The bear ran your raid better than you did. I had a thought, Captain, that you were once in the town office business yourself.
Captain: My own town elected me hog reeve the March after I married. I took it in good humor. A week later a real boar got loose, a great tusked thing belonging to the parson, and the selectmen sent for me. 'Your duty, Hog Reeve.' I got hold of him by the hind leg, and he dragged me the length of the parson's onion bed on my face. My bride stood at the fence and laughed until she had to sit down. I smelled of onions until the Fourth of July.
Wilkins: The only election in New England where losing your dignity is the qualification for office. Captain, you spent a career finding stills. What does a decent man owe his town?
Captain: Honest copper, honest cuts, and no poison in the jar. I chased a good many men who did good clean work, and I respected them, though the law was the law. The men I hated were the ones who poured lead and filth to a neighbor's boy. A town meeting will forgive a man a good deal, Doctor. It will not forgive him a dead neighbor.
Wilkins: Well said, Captain. And for the record, the bear also votes with you.
♦ Bear grunt, chain clinks
Captain: I would not dream of voting against him.
♪ Brassy pitchman fanfare on a parlor piano and cornet
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♪ Fanfare button, fades
♦ Wax crackle, slow drip into a jar
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the craft. And I will confess the true shame of town meeting day. It was not the bear. It was me. I left the still running when I went to vote.
Wilkins: That is the second most foolish thing a man can do in March. The first is voting for the man who wants your bear banished. When Barnaby pulled his ring bolt, he went past the still-house, and I learned later he rubbed his shoulder against the door frame and knocked the condenser line loose. If a fresh charge had been coming up hot, that alcohol vapor would have found the firebox, and I would have come home to a black chimney and a cooked bear. As it was, the fire had burned low, and God loves a fool in moderation. So here is the first rule, before mash or cuts: never leave a running still. Not for town meeting, not for church, not for the President. Alcohol vapor and an open flame will burn a house to its cellar hole quicker than a Concord lawyer bills you.
Wilkins: Now let me show you how it was done in the old way, as history, so you understand the craft. A corn and malt mash first. You crack your corn coarse and cook it in water at a rolling boil until it goes soft and thick as porridge. That cooking breaks open the starch. But yeast cannot eat starch. Yeast needs sugar. So you let the pot cool, to about the heat of a good hot bath but under a boil, somewhere around a hundred fifty degrees. Then you stir in ground malted barley. Malt carries a natural ferment, a kind of digesting virtue, that turns starch into sugar the way a man's stomach turns pie into bad temper. You hold it at that warmth an hour or so, stirring, and you will taste it go sweet.
Wilkins: Then you cool it again, down to lukewarm, about the heat of milk from the cow. Pitch your yeast only then, because hot mash kills yeast as surely as Barnaby killed the widow's pies. Then cover it loose and let it work four or five days in a warm room with a good draft. Fermenting mash breathes out a choking gas, and you do not want to breathe it in a shut room.
Wilkins: What you have then is a sour, beery wash of a few parts in a hundred alcohol. That goes into the copper pot, and the fire stays low. I say it on every broadcast and I will say it on my deathbed: low fire. The spirit comes over first in a thin trickle, and here is where the honest man is separated from the murderer.
Wilkins: Some say: Doctor, wood alcohol boils first, at about a hundred forty-eight degrees, and good spirit at about a hundred seventy-three, and water at two hundred twelve, so just watch your thermometer and you are safe. That is schoolroom thinking. In a real pot they do not come over in tidy rows like Sunday school children. They come mixed and smeared together. So the old distillers did not trust a thermometer alone. They threw out the first portion, the foreshots, by measure, generously, a fixed amount for the size of the charge. Then they caught the heads in small jars and judged them by the nose. The heads smell like a cobbler's glue pot or a druggist's back room, sharp and solvent-like. Those go on the ground, never in a man's mouth. When the smell turns sweet and clean and grainy, that is your hearts, the part you keep. Later the stream turns oily and wet-dog smelling, and that is your tails, which you set aside.
Wilkins: As for the copper. A clean copper pot gives a sweet spirit and a dirty one gives a sour, so I scrub mine bright after every run with a little vinegar and salt and plenty of rinsing, then dry it. I will not have a speck of green in my product. Heavy-gauge copper keeps its shape over the fire and spreads the heat even, so the bottom does not scorch your mash into a stink. And no solder of lead anywhere in it. Not in the seams, not in the worm, nowhere. I would sooner pull a man's teeth with a fork.
Wilkins: Barnaby, by the way, now has his fifteen-dollar chain, paid for by the voters of Pittsfield, and the new ring bolt goes clear through the sill with a nut on the far side that I peened over on my own anvil. He has not pulled it yet. He has looked at it in a meaningful way.
♦ Bear grunt, chain rattles once
♪ Fiddle reel, playful
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths and the mailbag, or the talking-tube, or whatever you call this wonderful contraption that carries a man's voice from the Carolina hills to my log wall. We have a recorded message. Roll it.
♦ Crackle, a faint hiss, then a distant voice
Cletus: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Crackle ends
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. A fine name. A Rabbit calling a man with a bear. Rabbit, I will answer you straight and with some new chemistry, because your uncle is half right, and half right is the most dangerous kind of right there is.
Wilkins: Hickory ash first. Wood ash soaked in water makes lye, the same potash my grandmother boiled with tallow to make soap. Lye is a strong alkali. Put some alkali in a still and it can take hold of some of the sour, vinegary acids in the charge. It turns them into salts that stay in the pot instead of riding over. So your uncle's spirit may well have smelled a little less sour, and that is where the old men got the notion. But that has nothing to do with the bad heads. The poison spirit in the heads is not an acid, and ash does not touch it. Lye in the thump keg is like a lawyer at a christening: it takes the sour off a little, it burns everybody it touches, and it leaves the devil exactly where he was. And it does burn. I have treated a fellow from Barnstead who got a splash of hot lye water in the eye from his doubler. He wore a patch for a month and still cannot tell a heifer from a haystack on that side.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Oak gives off tannin, color, and a woody taste. That is the whole reason a barrel turns clear spirit the color of strong tea. So your uncle's oak in the doubler surely made his liquor darker and woodier, and a man drinking it would swear it was older and finer. Rabbit, that is like painting your barn and calling it a new horse. Darker is not cleaner. The only thing that cleans out the bad heads is a man with the sense and the self-denial to throw them on the ground.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That is one for your uncle, struck on my anvil: 'G. G. WILKINS / PITTSFIELD N.H.' Rabbit, if you ever make it up to the Suncook Valley, it is yours, and Barnaby will greet you with the respect owed to anything named after a small meal.
Wilkins: Now while my punch is hot, let me finish off a myth I hear in every tavern from Epsom to Gilmanton. The blue-flame test. A man pours a spoonful of spirit, sets it alight, and says, 'Burns blue, it's good. Burns yellow or red, it's lead, and lead will make you dead.' There is even a rhyme to it, which always makes a lie easier to swallow.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Hogwash. The poison wood spirit in the heads burns with a pale blue flame too, pretty as a church candle. So a blue flame tells you nothing about whether that spoonful will blind you. And a burning spoon is not a reliable way to tell whether lead from a bad solder joint is in the jar. A man who judges his whiskey by the color of its flame would judge his wife by the color of her bonnet, and he deserves what he gets either way. The only proof of a clean spirit is a clean still, honest cuts, and no lead anywhere in the copper. Burn your spoon if it pleases you. It is pretty to look at. It is worth about as much as a deacon's speech in front of a hungry bear.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, coin drops into a tin cup
Wilkins: Rabbit, thank you for calling, and give your uncle my love and my sympathy. Tell him I would sooner drink from his doubler than from the town liquor agent's medicinal cask, and that is as close to a compliment as he will get from me.
♪ Soft banjo, closing theme begins low under
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course: eight weeks, thirty-plus hours, blueprints and live sessions, all for one hundred ninety-nine dollars. Get the details at moonshinestill.com. That is moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Thank you to Captain Donald Vance, a lawman with a sense of humor and a scar from a parson's boar, which is the best kind of lawman. Thank you to Rabbit Miller and his uncle. And thank you to the voters of Pittsfield, who looked a four-hundred-pound bear in the eye and found their consciences on the left side of the hall. And if you want to learn the craft the way I teach it, the copper, the cuts, the fire, and the history, the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course is waiting. Enroll at fortwilkins.com/course, or come see the copper at the showroom here on Route 28. Mind the field driver at the door. He is on duty.
♦ Bear grunt, contented
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme swells, then fades into wax cylinder crackle