Barnaby and the Tax Man's Horse: A Lesson in Livestock Diplomacy
Dr. Wilkins tells how a Concord revenue assessor arrived at Fort Wilkins without warning, how his high-strung gray mare met Barnaby on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, and how the bolted buggy, the eaten ledger, the split trousers and the fifteen-mile walk back to Concord taught Merrimack officials to send word before they visit. Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins brings new mountain tales of livestock against the gaugers: guinea-hen sentries, a persimmon lane that stopped a federal horse cold, and a borrowed mule that knew the way to the still. In the mailbag, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC asks about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and Wilkins knocks 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 carcass down, you great black sack of grievances. There is no horse on the road tonight. I looked. You have my word as a dentist, which is worth less than my word as a blacksmith, but more than my word as a distiller.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen ground, a long resentful groan
Wilkins: Ah, hell. I said the word 'horse.' I ought to know better. When that animal hears the word 'horse' he gets a look like a deacon smelling pie. Lie down, sir. Lie down, or I will sell you to a Concord furrier and wear you to church.
♦ Bear grumbles and slumps against the log wall with a heavy thud
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners and the occasional assessor listening at the keyhole. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am Dr. George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, stamper of coin, and a man whose name has been read aloud in more courtrooms than most Bibles. Tonight's tale is one the whole valley has begged me for and the whole Concord revenue office has begged me never to tell: Barnaby and the Tax Man's Horse: A Lesson in Livestock Diplomacy. We have a guest down from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, a call from the Carolina hills, and a myth I mean to hammer flat on my anvil. First, a quick word.
♪ Brief banjo flourish
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, handcrafted of heavy-gauge pure copper and built to last longer than your grandson's grudges! See it at moonshinestill.com, or stop by the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield. Moonshinestill.com!
♪ Fiddle sting fades
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a log settles in the stove
Wilkins: Segment the first. History, which is the art of remembering exactly who to blame.
Wilkins: To understand a tax man's horse, you must first understand the tax man. When Mr. Lincoln's Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1862, they did not just put a tax on whiskey. They built a whole machine to collect it. They split every state into collection districts, generally lined up with the congressional districts, and put an assessor over each one, with assistant assessors under him. Those assistant assessors were the boots on the road. They went door to door, farm to farm, mill to mill, making lists of what a man owned and what trade he worked.
Wilkins: And what did they list? Oh, friends, it was not only spirits. That Act taxed carriages. It taxed gold watches. It taxed gold and silver plate, so if your grandmother left you six silver spoons the government wanted a look at them. It taxed billiard tables, which troubled nobody in Pittsfield, because the only billiards played in this town is when Barnaby knocks a turnip off the woodpile with his nose. And it laid on an income tax, three percent on any income over six hundred dollars. The Treasury taxed my gold watch, my buggy and my income, and if they could find my conscience they would assess that at three percent too.
Wilkins: An assistant assessor is a man paid by the government to count your spoons, and he counts them the way a widow counts the mourners: slowly, suspiciously, and to make sure nobody slipped out before the end.
Wilkins: Now, how did these fellows get around? There is no railroad up the Suncook Valley. They have been talking about one for years, and I expect it will be finished some year after my funeral, when it is no further use to me. So an official coming out from Concord, fifteen-odd miles by Chichester or by Epsom, hired a horse and buggy at a Concord livery. Concord is the town that builds the finest coaches on this earth. Abbot, Downing and Company turn out Concord coaches that roll from here to California. But the Concord coach is not what the assessor gets. The assessor gets whatever the livery man has left in the back stall on a Tuesday, and the livery man always keeps the nervous ones for government men, because government men do not tip.
Wilkins: Now hear this, because it matters to tonight's tale. A horse is a prey animal. God made him to eat grass and to run from whatever eats him. And a horse's nose is a fine instrument, finer than any revenue man's, though about as easy to bribe with a carrot. A horse can smell a bear long before he sees one. Every teamster in these hills knows it. A team will go stiff in the harness on a still day for no reason a man can see, and the old boys will say, 'Bear in the beech woods,' and they are right more often than the almanac.
Wilkins: I will tell you what a bear-shy horse can do, because I saw it with my own eyes in Barnstead when I was a young man with all my own teeth. A farmer was hauling cordwood with a pair of bays when a sow bear came out of the alders with two cubs. The off horse smelled her first. He went straight up in the traces, swung the whole team sideways, and the two of them went through a rail fence like it was made of pie crust. The near horse took a split chestnut rail through the breast like a skewer through a Christmas goose. The sound it made, friends, was like a cider press when the screw lets go: a crack, a groan, and then a wet, whistling noise I hope you never hear. That horse stood there three full minutes with the rail in him, blowing red froth out of both nostrils, before he went down on his knees like a man at prayer. The farmer had to finish him with an axe, because nobody had brought a gun to haul firewood. And the sow bear? She stood up, looked at the ruin, and ambled off as if she had only come to say good morning. That is the nature of the thing. The bear does not have to do a blessed thing. The horse's own terror does all the butchering.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, chain clinks
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, I am getting to you. Patience, you vain old rug.
♪ Low fiddle bridge, slow and sly
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws, and one government employee who came up my road without writing first.
Wilkins: This was in September, after the surrender, with the war over and Washington still hungry as a spring bear. A fine warm afternoon with the wind out of the northwest. Remember that wind, friends. That wind is a witness. Up the Suncook Turnpike from the Chichester side comes a hired buggy with a black oilcloth top, and driving it is an assistant assessor out of the Concord office. I will call him Horace Twitchell, because that is near enough to his name and a good deal nearer to his nature. He was a thin, damp sort of man with a collar so high and stiff he had to turn his whole body to look at a cow. He had a leather valise on the seat beside him with his ledger and his inkpot and his dinner, and he had come to list my carriage, my gold watch, and in his own words to the tavern keeper at the bottom of the hill, 'that so-called alchemical apparatus.'
Wilkins: Pulling that buggy was a gray mare out of the Concord livery, a tall, fine-boned, high-headed creature named Lady Victoria. She had all the courage of a queen and all the sense of a royal marriage. That mare would shy at a butterfly if it came at her from the left.
Wilkins: Now, that same morning, Barnaby had been at my apple pomace. That is the mashed pulp left after you press cider, piled out back to rot and draw yellowjackets. Barnaby had spent three hours rolling in it, eating it and sleeping in it, and the September sun had set the whole pile working. So my bear smelled that day like a wet dog dipped in hard cider and rolled in sin, and the northwest wind carried that perfume straight down the turnpike, right into Lady Victoria's royal nostrils.
Wilkins: She smelled him a quarter mile off. Twitchell told the magistrate later that the mare 'began to dance.' Dance! She was doing a Virginia reel all by herself, sideways, backward, eyes rolling white, ears pinned flat. And Twitchell, being a city man, did the one thing you must never do with a horse. He wrapped the reins twice around his wrist to get a better hold. Any farm boy of seven could have told him that a bolting horse will drag you by those reins like a sack of meal, but no farm boy of seven was asked.
Wilkins: They came round the bend below my gate. And Barnaby, who had been lying in the shade by the still-house window like a heap of black laundry, heard the wheels. He got up. He got up on his hind legs, all four hundred pounds of him, a full seven feet of bear with pomace in his fur and yellowjackets circling his head like a crown. And then he yawned.
♦ A cavernous bear yawn ending in a wet, clacking snap of teeth
Wilkins: That is all he did. He yawned. But a bear's yawn, friends, shows you every tooth God gave him, and I am a dentist, and I tell you professionally that Barnaby has a mouth like a Concord jail: forty-two inmates and not one of them reformed.
Wilkins: Lady Victoria went straight up. She came down already running. The buggy slewed, the near wheel hit my stone wall and folded like a hymnbook, and Mr. Twitchell left that seat in two directions at once. His valise went left and landed within reach of Barnaby's chain. Twitchell went right, wrist still tangled in the reins, and was dragged maybe twenty feet down the turnpike on his belly before the leather tore loose. He fetched up face first in the ditch where my hired boy dumps the hog-pen slop.
Wilkins: And when he landed, his trousers split. Not a polite split, friends. From belt to bottom, along the seam, like a ripe milkweed pod. The whole valley saw the moon rise at two in the afternoon, and Mrs. Tilton across the road said afterward it was the palest moon she ever saw and she hoped never to see it full again.
♦ Barnaby chuffs outside, almost like a laugh
Wilkins: You think it is funny, do you? You were the worst of it.
Wilkins: Because now Barnaby had the valise. A bear does not open a bag, friends. He takes it apart the way the Lord took apart Jericho. He pinned it with one forepaw and hooked the other claws into the seam, and the leather tore with a sound like a wet bedsheet ripping. First out came Twitchell's dinner: two boiled eggs, a slab of cold mutton and a wedge of cheese. Barnaby ate the eggs shells and all, crunch crunch, like a man chewing gravel. Then he found the inkpot, bit the cork out, and licked that bottle clean. He walked around with a blue tongue for a week, looking like a bear who had been kissing a Federal paymaster.
Wilkins: Then he found the ledger. That ledger was bound with hide glue, and hide glue is boiled out of animal skins and bones, so to a bear's nose it smells like the finest gravy on God's earth. Barnaby held that book down and peeled the pages off it like bark off a birch log, chewing the binding, slobbering on the columns. And by the eternal and the holy Merrimack, the page he ate first, and ate entirely, and swallowed, was the Pittsfield page. Every figure Mr. Twitchell had written down about this town went down Barnaby's gullet, and I saw it come out the other end two days later, not one figure the better for the journey. That makes Barnaby the only creature in Merrimack County ever to digest a government assessment and keep it down.
Wilkins: Meanwhile Lady Victoria was a gray streak headed for Concord with three wheels and an empty seat, and Horace Twitchell was standing in my ditch with hog slop to his elbows and the moon showing behind him. I came out with a horse blanket for his dignity and a jar for his nerves. He took the blanket and he took the jar. Then he asked whether I would hire him a horse, and I told him the truth: every horse in Pittsfield had heard what happened, and not one of them would come up my road that week for love or oats.
Wilkins: So he walked. Fifteen miles back to Concord, in city boots with soles thinner than a Concord lawyer's apology. Through Chichester, with the farm wives coming to the doors to look at the blanket. A yellow dog followed him four miles barking at the back of him, and you can guess which part. He stopped at a tavern to wash, and the tavern keeper charged him extra for the smell. He limped into the Concord livery long after dark with blisters the size of hen's eggs, and what did he find? Lady Victoria, already home in her own stall, calm as a Sunday, eating her oats, and the buggy standing in the yard on three wheels. And the livery man charged him for the missing wheel.
♦ Wilkins slaps the table, wax crackle
Wilkins: Now here is the diplomacy, friends. Ever since that day the Concord office does not come up my road unannounced. They send word ahead by the post, polite as a wedding invitation: 'Dr. Wilkins: An officer of the United States will call upon you Thursday next. Kindly secure the bear.' And I write back, polite as you please: 'Bear secured. Whiskey not.' I hang a red flannel on my gatepost to show Barnaby is on the short chain, and a red nose on the visitor shows he found the whiskey anyway. The livery in Concord now charges a dollar extra for 'the Pittsfield trip,' and they send their oldest, deafest plow horse, a brown gelding named Moses who has a head cold eleven months of the year and could not smell a bear if it sat in his lap. That, friends, is livestock diplomacy. The bear did not have to bite anybody. The horse did the arguing, and the government learned some manners.
Wilkins: And now, a guest who knows a thing or two about animals, mountain folk and the gaugers who bother them both. She has come all the way up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, and she has already told Barnaby he smells like a church picnic gone wrong, which he took as a compliment. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, Clara Higgins.
Clara: Well, thank you, Doctor. I'll say this for your bear: he's got better manners than half the men at the tavern down the hill, and he bathes about as often.
Wilkins: Ha! She has been here one hour and she has roasted my bear, my town and my tavern. Clara, you heard the tale of Twitchell's mare. Tell me true. Down in your mountains, do the animals do the fighting for you?
Clara: Doctor, in our hollows the animals do more fighting than the men. A mountain family can't afford a lawyer, so they keep livestock that'll testify for 'em. My great-grandmama lived up on a ridge in Patrick County, and she kept a flock of guinea hens. You know a guinea?
Wilkins: Speckled, foolish-looking bird, sounds like a rusty pump handle?
Clara: That's the one. A guinea'll scream bloody murder at anything strange that comes up the lane: fox, hawk, peddler, preacher, it don't care. Folks called her flock the Tattletale Choir. Well, after the surrender the gaugers came riding up our hollows. That's what the old folks call a revenue man, a gauger, after the fellows who measured barrels with a rod to figure the duty. So one of 'em comes riding up the creek on a fine bay horse, and the Tattletale Choir sees him. Doctor, thirty guineas let go all at once. It sounds like a sawmill eating a fiddle.
♦ A burst of shrieking guinea fowl, distant and crackly
Clara: That bay horse had never heard such a thing. He started backing up, and kept backing, and backed that gauger right off the bank and down into the creek. Waltzed him in backward, slow and stately, like a couple at a cotillion. Man sat there in the saddle, water up to his watch chain, guineas lined up on the fence screaming down at him. Great-grandmama come out on the porch, set her hands on her hips, and said, 'Mister, you're trespassing in our creek.' Then she charged him a nickel for watering his horse.
Wilkins: A nickel! Clara, that woman would have made a fine Yankee.
Clara: Don't you dare say that about my kin, Doctor, there's folks buried on that ridge would come up out of the ground.
Wilkins: My apologies to the dead. They have suffered enough without being called Yankees. Go on, what else?
Clara: Well, my Uncle Absalom was the craftiest man in three counties. He planted persimmon trees all down the lane to his place, a whole double row. You know persimmons, Doctor?
Wilkins: I know them by reputation. I am told a green one will turn your mouth inside out.
Clara: That's tannin in 'em. A green persimmon'll pucker you till you can whistle backward. But come October they drop, soft and sweet, and a horse would sell his own mother for a bellyful. So one October a federal assessor comes up that lane on a big gray gelding. Gelding smells the persimmons. He stops dead under the first tree, puts his head down, and starts eating, and that man could not move him. Kicked him, cussed him, prayed over him. Wouldn't budge. And half of what that horse was eating was green ones he'd shook down, so his whole face was puckered up so tight he couldn't have whinnied if Jeff Davis had pinched him.
Wilkins: How long did he stand there?
Clara: Three hours, Doctor. Three hours under the persimmons. And in three hours a mountain family can hide a still, a mash barrel, two jugs and a whole cousin. By the time that gelding come back to himself and walked on up to the house, there wasn't a thing on the place but a churn and a Bible. Uncle Absalom met him on the porch and handed him a bill for 'fruit damages.' Charged the United States government for persimmons.
Wilkins: Did they pay it?
Clara: Doctor, I believe it's still pending. Now I'll say one serious thing, because I love animals. You don't want a horse gorging on persimmons. Too many of 'em can ball up hard in a horse's gut and kill him, and Uncle Absalom knew it. He'd run out after with a rope and lead that gelding off before he took too many. He was a crafty man, not a cruel one.
Wilkins: There is the difference between a scoundrel and a gentleman, friends: the gentleman stops the joke before the horse dies. I have tried to teach that lesson to Barnaby. He nods and goes on eating.
Clara: Now here's one that went the other way, Doctor, because the animals don't always take our side. There was a gauger come up into the hills whose own horse threw a shoe, so he borrowed a mule off a neighbor at the foot of the mountain. What he didn't know was that this was the very mule that hauled corn and jugs up and down to my grandmama's still-house. Twice a week, every week, for four years.
Wilkins: Oh, no. Oh, Lord.
Clara: Oh, yes. That gauger says 'giddup,' and that mule takes him straight up the mountain, off the road, down a deer path nobody could find in daylight with a lantern and a hound, right across the branch, and stops square in front of the still-house door. Then the mule sits down. Waiting for his corn, like always.
Wilkins: The mule turned informer! What did your grandmother do?
Clara: Doctor, my grandmama didn't blink. She walks out wiping her hands on her apron and says, 'Well, you come at a good time, we're boiling sorghum.' See, sorghum cane had come into the mountains not long before the war, and every family boiled it down into molasses come fall. And she had a pan of real sorghum going over a fire not twenty feet off, for just such a day. She takes him by the elbow, walks him right past that copper pot like it was a washtub, and puts a spoonful of hot molasses in his mouth. He stood there with his mouth glued shut, thanking her through his nose. Then she sent him home with a jar of molasses for his wife and a whole other mule.
Wilkins: Clara, your grandmother is a better diplomat than the entire Senate. Now tell me some slang. What do your people call a skittish horse like Twitchell's Lady Victoria?
Clara: We'd call that mare booger-shy. A booger's any spook or haint, so a booger-shy horse is one that sees boogers that ain't there. My granddaddy kept a booger-shy mare on purpose. He called her Sweet Pea, and she was the gentlest thing you ever saw with family. But if a stranger come asking too many questions about where a man could buy a jug, Granddaddy would say, 'Why, borrow my mare and ride on over the ridge and ask.' And Sweet Pea would carry that stranger exactly as far as the first white rock in the road, see a booger, and leave him sitting on it.
Wilkins: A booger-shy horse is like a Concord alderman, Clara. Spooks at shadows, bolts at the truth, and always finds his own way home to the feed trough.
Clara: Doctor, I've met some aldermen, and I'd sooner trust the mare.
Wilkins: So would the mare. Stay right where you are, Clara. After this word from our sponsor I want to talk copper with you, and Barnaby wants a word about your remark about church picnics.
Clara: Tell him he can file a complaint with my guinea hens.
♪ Rollicking banjo transition into a brassy medicine-show vamp
♦ A crowd murmurs, a tin cup rattles on a wagon tailboard
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♪ Medicine-show vamp ends on a cymbal crash
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, the slow drip into the jar resumes
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft. Clara, sit close to the stove. Barnaby, you stay outside. You have done enough to the craft already.
Wilkins: Friends, before I say a word about the work, here is the law of our own day, plain as a church bell. The law of this land says no man makes distilled spirits for drinking without the government's permit. What I tell you tonight is history and learning, the way an old smith tells how swords were forged. Pour it into your understanding, not your cup.
Clara: Amen. My grandmama said a fool learns by doing, a wise woman learns by listening, and a dead man learns nothing at all.
Wilkins: Your grandmother should have had a pulpit. Now. The craft begins with the mash. Take your cracked corn and cook it in scalding water till it is thick as porridge. Corn is starch, and yeast cannot eat starch any more than Barnaby can eat a fence post, though he tries. So you stir in malted grain, barley or rye that has been sprouted and dried, and you hold the whole mess warm. Not boiling. About the heat you can just hardly keep your finger in, near a hundred and fifty degrees by the glass. The malt carries a ferment of its own that turns starch to sugar at that heat. Hold it there an hour or so, stirring, and the porridge thins and sweetens on your tongue.
Clara: Then you've got to wait for it to cool down, or you'll murder your yeast.
Wilkins: Right you are. Cool it to blood-warm, about as warm as a baby's bath, before the yeast goes in. Pitch your yeast too hot and you have made a very expensive bowl of mush. Then let it work four days, five, sometimes a week. It froths, it hisses, it rises in a cap, and when the cap falls and the hissing stops, the yeast has eaten its fill.
Wilkins: Now a trick the old Kentucky men swear by, and the reason my rye tastes the same in May as it did in March. Keep back a share of the soured, spent liquid from the last run. They call it backset. Stir it into the new mash. It sours the mash, which keeps out the wild bacteria that would make your batch stink like a tannery. That is the whole of sour mash: you start each batch with a piece of the last one, like a family name.
Clara: Like sourdough bread. My mama kept her starter in a crock for thirty years and fed it better than she fed Daddy.
Wilkins: A wise woman. Then you strain the wash and charge your pot. Hear me: no more than three-quarters full. Fill it to the brim and when it comes to heat it will foam up and puke over into the arm and the worm. The old boys say it pukes, and that is just what it is. Then you have mash clogging the vapor path, pressure building up behind it, and a copper pot that wants to become a cannon. I have seen a pot lid blown clean through a shingle roof in Gilmanton, and the man who overfilled it went three days unable to hear his wife, which he called the only blessing of the affair.
Wilkins: Now the fire. Low and patient. And here is the safety law of every still-house: alcohol vapor is heavier than air. It does not rise politely up the chimney like a Christian soul. It sinks and creeps along the floor like a snake looking for a hen-house, and if it finds a lantern or the open door of a stove, it lights, and it runs back along its own trail to the source. So you keep air moving through the still-house. You keep your receiving jars well back from any flame. And you never, never walk off and leave a running still, not to eat, not to sleep, not to chase a bear.
Clara: Doctor, my uncle walked off from a run one time to go courting. Came back to a black spot on the hill where the still-house used to be. He married the girl, though. Said it was the costliest courting in Floyd County.
Wilkins: I believe it. Now, the cuts. This is where the alchemist earns his name. Methanol, the wood spirit, the blinding poison, boils at about a hundred forty-eight degrees. Your good ethyl spirit boils at about a hundred seventy-three. Water at two hundred twelve. So when the pot warms, the light, wicked stuff comes over first. That first trickle is the foreshots, and it goes on the ground or in the lamp, never in a mouth. I throw out a good half pint for every five gallons of wash at the very least, and more is no sin. And mark this, Clara: a fruit mash, apple or pear or persimmon, makes more of that wood spirit than corn does, on account of the pectin in the fruit, the stuff that sets jelly.
Clara: That's the truth. The old women in the mountains always said fruit brandy wants a heavier hand at the front of the run. They didn't know the why of it, but they knew the what.
Wilkins: After the foreshots come the heads. They smell of solvent, of varnish, of a cabinetmaker's shop, sharp enough to make your eyes water. Those are set aside. Then the hearts, sweet and clean, smelling of the grain, smooth on the nose. That is your spirit. And last come the tails, oily and heavy, smelling of wet dog and old cardboard boxes and regret. Those are the fusel oils, and you set them back.
Wilkins: And how do you know where one ends and the next begins? Not by guessing. You catch the run in a long row of small jars, a dozen, two dozen, numbered in order. Then you set them out on a board and you smell every one, from the first to the last. Your nose is your magistrate. A man who catches his whole run in one big jug is a man who has married all his relations at once and must now live with every one of them.
Clara: And what's the copper for, Doctor? Because back home there's men who'll tell you it's just tradition.
Wilkins: Tradition my hind end. Copper does real work, and here is the part most men get wrong. It is the copper the vapor touches on its way up and over that does the most good: the helmet, the arm, the worm. The vapor rises hot through that copper, and that is where the sulfur muck gets caught and left behind on the metal. A copper bottom with a tin arm is like a church with a fine steeple and no preacher. All show at the bottom, no salvation at the top.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, chain rattles
Wilkins: And Barnaby agrees, or else he wants his supper. With him it is generally the second.
♪ Fiddle bridge, playful
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang and the mailbag. We have a call-in recording from down south, put on a cylinder and carried north by a peddler with a cough and a mule with opinions. Let us hear it.
♦ Heavy wax cylinder crackle, a scratchy pop, faint wind
Cletus: Alchemist, this here's Cletus Miller, folks call me Rabbit, from Wilkesboro, North Carolina. 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?
♦ Cylinder crackle fades out
Wilkins: Rabbit! Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, a fine town full of men who know how to climb a hill fast with a jug under each arm. Rabbit, your uncle is a man of faith, and faith is a beautiful thing until you pour it into a doubler. Let us take his two cures one at a time.
Wilkins: First, hickory ashes. Clara, what do farm wives make with hickory ash?
Clara: Lye soap. Granny said hickory made the strongest lye in the woods. You drip water through a hopper of ash and what comes out'll take the hide off your hands.
Wilkins: Exactly. Hickory ash is lye-making ash, the finest there is. So when your uncle tosses hickory ash into his keg, Rabbit, he is not cleaning anything. He is making soap. He is putting lye into his liquor, and lye turns oils into soap and can burn the lining of a man's throat. Your uncle's hickory ashes will give you soap, Rabbit, and a man who drinks soap will be the cleanest corpse in Wilkes County.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Second, red oak shavings. Now this is a fine piece of irony. Any cooper will tell you he will not make a whiskey barrel out of red oak. Red oak has open pores running clean through the grain. Fill a red oak barrel and it weeps out every side. That is why the coopers use white oak, which is tight. Red oak leaks like a gossip at a quilting bee: the secret goes in one side and out every pore. Shavings in a keg will put some tannin and some color in the spirit, a little oaky taste, but color is not cleanliness, Rabbit. Painting a privy does not make it a parlor.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And bad heads? There is only one cure for bad heads, and it is not in any keg or any woodpile. It is in your jars and your nose. That wood spirit comes over early because it boils early. You throw out the foreshots, you set aside the heads, and you keep only the honest hearts. A keg full of ashes and shavings is just a wooden box of excuses.
Clara: Doctor, I've heard the same from men in my hollow. Now, I'll grant some of those old-timers dripped their finished liquor through charcoal afterward to smooth it. But that's after, in a filter, and it's a far different thing from flinging trash in a keg.
Wilkins: True as gospel. And now, as long as my punch is warm, let us take down another myth, one I hear in every tavern from Concord to Wolfeborough: the blue-flame test. A man pours a spoonful of shine on the table, touches a match to it, and if it burns blue he declares it safe as mother's milk.
♦ Match strike, a soft whoosh
Wilkins: Friends, a blue flame proves exactly one thing: your liquor burns. Good ethyl spirit burns with a pale blue flame, true. But the wood spirit, the methanol, the very poison you fear, burns pale blue as well, so faint in daylight you can hardly see it. A jar full of foreshots can pass the blue-flame test, take the tavern's applause, and then blind the man who drank it. A blue flame proves your liquor burns. So does a Baptist's temper, and nobody calls that safe to drink.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, three ringing strikes
Clara: Down home they'll shake a jar and read the bead, light a spoon and read the flame, and I swear some of 'em would read tea leaves if it gave 'em an excuse not to throw out the first of the run.
Wilkins: Every one of those tests is a way for a lazy man to skip the hard part. Make your cuts. And Rabbit, I have just stamped a copper cent on my anvil, 'G. G. WILKINS / PITTSFIELD N.H.,' and I have set it aside with your name on a slip of paper beside it. It is the first coin in Wilkesboro worth more than its owner's opinions, and the next peddler heading south will carry it to you. Give your uncle my regards, and tell him to wash his doubler and throw out his ashes, or else wash his hands with them. That is what they are good for.
♦ Coin dropped into a tin cup, a bright ring
Wilkins: Clara Higgins, you have been a joy and a terror. Any last word for the folks?
Clara: Just this, Doctor. Be kind to your animals, because they'll remember who fed 'em when the gauger comes calling. And Barnaby, honey, I take back the church picnic. You smell like a whole revival.
♦ Barnaby lets out a long, satisfied groan through the window
Wilkins: He accepts. He has never accepted anything from me but a meal. A bear, a horse and a tax man walked onto the Suncook Turnpike, and only the bear kept his dignity and his dinner.
♪ Banjo and fiddle swell, then settle low
Announcer: A quick word before we part, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, handcrafted of pure electrolytic copper, bright as a new cent off Dr. Wilkins's anvil! Order yours today at moonshinestill.com, or see it in person at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield. Moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme rises gently under Wilkins
Wilkins: Friends, if tonight's talk of mash and jars and noses has woken your curiosity, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I teach the history, the metallurgy, the cuts and the safety of the old craft, with every lesson keeping you on the right side of the law and of the fire. You will learn more from me than Mr. Twitchell learned on his fifteen-mile walk, and your trousers will stay whole the entire time. Inquire at moonshinestill.com or at the showroom here on Route 28.
Wilkins: My thanks to Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, to the Concord livery for its generous supply of nervous horses, and to Horace Twitchell, wherever he is tonight, who taught the whole Merrimack Valley that a letter is cheaper than a wheel. And to Barnaby, who did nothing at all and won the day.
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 fades into wax cylinder crackle