Barnaby and the Traveling Preacher
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells how Barnaby the bear pulled his chain staple, crashed a canvas revival on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, mauled a Concord informer and was declared saved by a hellfire itinerant who then had to baptize 400 pounds of bear in a tavern horse trough. Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins brings new tales of busted pulpit jugs, a whiskey peddler who measured the legal mile with a surveyor's chain, and a drunk persimmon bear in a Virginia belfry. Wilkins also teaches the cuts for apple brandy, debunks the burning-spoon test, and answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's call-in about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg.
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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 were baptized, God help us all, which means you are supposed to have peace in your heart and not my last smoked shoulder in your mouth. Drop it. Drop it, you black-furred backslider. ...Thank you. Hallelujah, the ham is saved, which is more than I can say for the bear.
♦ Bear grunt, chain settling into dirt
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swells and settles under
Wilkins: Good evening, sinners and saints, and those of you still deciding which one pays better. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor and twice-convicted distributor of medicinal comfort. Tonight's sermon is one I have been asked to tell in every tavern from Barnstead to Chichester: the tale of Barnaby and the Traveling Preacher. That is the summer my four-hundred-pound bear went to a revival, sat on the mourners' bench, and got himself saved, or so the preacher swore to every pulpit between here and the sea. Before we get to the hallelujahs, a word from the folks who keep my joints tight.
♪ Brief banjo sting
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♪ Theme fades
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the first. History, and the root of the trouble. To understand why a preacher came to pitch his tent within smelling distance of my still, you have to understand the camp meeting. It was born out in Kentucky at a place called Cane Ridge, in Bourbon County, in August of 1801. Bourbon County, mind you, and the Lord has a sense of humor. Somewhere between ten and twenty thousand souls came out of the woods to that meeting. They shouted, they wept, they fell down jerking like a hooked trout, they barked like dogs, and some of them conceived children in the bushes. A camp meeting is the only place a man can get religion, sunstroke and a bastard in the same week. Cane Ridge became the pattern, and the circuit riders carried it to every crossroads in the Republic.
Wilkins: New Hampshire is no stranger to the fever. Benjamin Randall organized the Free Will Baptists right over at New Durham in 1780, close enough that on a still night you can hear their grandchildren repenting. And only three summers ago, in 1862, with the war raging, the Methodists laid out a proper camp meeting ground down at Epping. They called it Hedding, and they have tents and cottages in rows like an army that marches only toward the dinner table.
Wilkins: Alongside the shouting came the temperance men. The American Temperance Society was founded in Boston in 1826, and they took to pledges like a Concord lawyer takes to a widow's estate. Every revival ended with a table of pledge cards, and every pledge card ended up as kindling in some farmer's stove by the first frost. The preachers hated liquor, but the liquor loved the preachers, because nothing sells a jug like five thousand people standing in a hot field, sweating out their sins with nothing to drink but creek water and guilt. So many a state passed laws forbidding the sale of spirits within a certain distance of a religious meeting. A mile, usually. And wherever the law draws a line, a Yankee sets up a wagon one step past it.
Wilkins: Now, what were those wagon-men selling? Here in New England, it was most often the fruit of the apple. Our grandfathers did not drink water if they could help it. Water gave you the flux. Cider was the table drink of every colonial farm in the Suncook Valley, and a family would lay down ten, twenty, thirty barrels against the winter. When a farmer wanted something with a little more kick to it, he made cider brandy. Applejack. There are two ways to make it, and one of them can hurt you.
Wilkins: The lazy way is freeze-jacking. You set your barrel of hard cider out in a January night, it freezes, you pull off the ice and what's left is stronger. Simple as sin. But understand this. Freezing pulls out only the water. Every bit of wood spirit, every drop of fusel oil, every devil that was in the cider stays in that little puddle of strong liquor, crowded closer together like Methodists at a free supper. That is why jacked cider gives a man a headache that feels like a mule shod his skull from the inside. The still is the honest way, because a still lets you cut those devils off and throw them away. Keep that in your vest pocket. It comes back in the craft segment.
Wilkins: So that is the stage. Camp meetings, temperance pledges, wagon-peddlers on the legal line, and one Pittsfield dentist with a copper pot, a reputation and a bear. Enter the preacher.
♪ Slow fiddle hymn phrase, 'Come Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy', played sour and wobbly
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws and one large convert. It was August of 1864, hot enough that the tar was bleeding out of the bridge planks over the Suncook. An itinerant came up the turnpike from the Concord road in a yellow-wheeled wagon with a canvas tent folded in the back. He went by the name of Elder Obadiah Fogg. He claimed ordination from three churches and had been thrown out of two, which is a better batting average than most bankers in Concord. He was a tall, stringy, crow-faced article with a beard down to his third waistcoat button, and he kept that beard glossed with molasses and bear grease, which tells you right there that the Lord was setting him up.
Wilkins: Elder Fogg rented Jeremiah Cram's back hayfield, a half mile down the turnpike from this very window, and he pitched that tent with the open end facing my still-house. That was deliberate. On the first night he preached a sermon he called Sodom on the Suncook, and he named me by name. Dr. Wilkins, the tooth-drawing Pharaoh of Pittsfield, who makes poison in a copper calf and feeds the wages of sin to a beast out of Daniel. I'll be honest with you, it was the best advertising I ever got for free. I sold more jars that week than I did all through haying season. Half his congregation walked down the turnpike after the benediction to see if Sodom had a back door, and it did, and it was open till midnight.
Wilkins: Now, Barnaby. Barnaby has a staple driven into the north sill log of the still-house, and that staple holds his chain. In August the sill dries out and shrinks, and I had been meaning to drive the staple deeper the way I have been meaning to go to church. On the fourth night of that revival the Elder's ladies held a dinner on the grounds, and I mean a dinner. Baked beans in molasses, brown bread, rhubarb pies, a crock of maple cream, ham, doughnuts fried in lard, and enough gingerbread to shingle a barn. The wind came round out of the south and carried every bit of that up the turnpike and through Barnaby's nose. I heard the sill log groan like a deacon at a tithe meeting. Then a pop, then the chain dragging, then nothing at all but crickets, and a bear-shaped hole in the moonlight.
♦ Distant chain dragging on gravel, fading
Wilkins: He got down to Cram's field right at the altar call. The fiddler was sawing out Come Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy, and Elder Fogg was hollering for the lost to come forward and take a seat on the anxious bench. That's the mourners' bench, the front pew where they put the sinners under conviction so the whole crowd can pray over them like buzzards over a dead ox. And in through the open end of that tent, slow and solemn and black as the inside of a Calvinist, came Barnaby. With six feet of chain dragging behind him like he was some sort of penitent fresh out of a Portsmouth jail.
Wilkins: Now, a bear walking into a tent full of hay-sweating Christians ought to cause a stampede, and it did, but it went the wrong way. Everybody in the back pushed forward to see, and everybody in the front was praying with their eyes shut. So Barnaby walked straight up the aisle unmolested and sat down on the anxious bench. That bench was a plank on two sawhorses and it was built for repentant farmers, not four hundred pounds of bear. It went down with a crack like a musket, and pinned underneath was Amos Peaslee, a cattle drover who had come forward to repent of a horse he'd sold to a Loudon man with a glass eye painted to match the good one. I heard later that the sound Amos made under that bear was like a feather tick full of walnuts being sat on by a fat aunt. He cracked two ribs and found the Lord on the spot, sincere as anybody ever has, because he could see Him from there.
Wilkins: Then Barnaby smelled the pies. Mrs. Hepzibah Tuttle in the second row had a rhubarb pie on her lap, which she was saving to give the Elder privately, and I will not say what else she was saving for him privately, but the gossip ran up and down the valley like a weasel through a henhouse. Barnaby put his whole face into that pie. The whole face, I tell you, and he ate it off her lap, crust and plate and a fair bit of her apron. She did not scream. She told me afterwards it was the most attention her lap had gotten since Mr. Tuttle's funeral.
Wilkins: Now here's where it turns grisly, and you ladies may cover the children's ears or just turn them up, since they'll hear it at school anyhow. In the back row sat a gentleman in a Concord collar named Thaddeus Pruitt. Mr. Pruitt was a paid informer for the revenue assessors. He had come up to the revival pretending to seek salvation, but he was really seeking evidence, writing down the names of every man who walked toward my still-house after service. He had a little leather notebook. And when Barnaby smelled the gingerbread crumbs in that man's coat pocket, God's providence did the rest.
Wilkins: Pruitt ran. That was his first mistake. You never run from a bear, because then you're not a man anymore, you're a dessert. Barnaby took two lopes and caught him by the coattails at the tent flap. The coat ripped clean up the seam with a sound like a sail splitting, and Barnaby didn't stop at the wool. He got a mouthful of trouser seat and, under the trouser seat, a strip of the gentleman's own hindquarter about the size of a pocket Testament. Pruitt squealed in a register you only hear from shoats and church sopranos, and he left a trail of blood across Cram's mown hay that the crows were working over by sunup. He ran the whole half-mile to the Pittsfield tavern with his backside open to the stars, and the notebook stayed behind in Barnaby's jaws. Barnaby ate it. Every name in it. He is the only revenue clerk I ever hired, and he works for gingerbread. I'm told Pruitt has sat sideways at every meeting since.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside window, chain clinks
Wilkins: Hush, I'm telling it right. Now Elder Fogg could have run too. Instead he saw his chance. A preacher with a bear in his tent is either a dead man or a famous one, and Fogg decided on famous. He climbed up on the pulpit box, flung out both arms and roared, Behold! The beast is humbled! The beast of the field kneels before the Lamb! What Barnaby was actually doing was rolling over on his back in the trampled straw to scratch the fleas on his shoulders, all four feet waving in the air, and if you squint in bad lamplight with a sermon to sell I suppose it looks like being slain in the spirit. Fogg came down off that box, walked right up to my bear, and laid both hands on his head.
Wilkins: The Elder laid hands on the bear, and the bear laid tongue on the Elder, and only one of them got the molasses. Barnaby stood up, put his nose in that glossy, molasses-greased beard and licked it from chin to eyebrows. A long, wet, pulling lick, with a sound like a boot being drawn out of a bog. Took every hair of it straight back over his ears like a hayrick in a gale. And Fogg cried out, Tongues of fire! The Pentecost has come to Pittsfield! And the whole tent went down on its knees. I arrived about then with a ham bone and a lantern, sweating like a forger at a bank, and I found the entire congregation of Merrimack County praying over my bear.
Wilkins: And now, I've got a guest at the table who's heard more revival stories than any living soul. She came up by the cars from Lynchburg, and she's an herbalist, a forager and a scholar of mountain talk from the Blue Ridge of Virginia. Please welcome Miss Clara Higgins. Clara, you've met my bear.
Clara: I have met your bear, Doctor, and he has met my pocketbook, and he found a peppermint stick in it I'd been saving since Harrisonburg. He has the manners of a tax collector and the breath of a tanyard.
Wilkins: That's the Pentecost you smell. He's been holy ever since.
Clara: Well, I'll tell you, that story of yours put me in mind of my granny's brush-arbor meetings back home in Botetourt County. You don't have the canvas money in the mountains, so you cut poles and lay brush over the top for shade, and that's your cathedral. My granny's circuit rider was a man named Brother Lafe Overstreet, and Lafe preached against liquor like it had personally kicked his dog. He'd call it tangle-leg and pop-skull and the devil's dishwater, and he'd stomp on that pulpit plank every time he said it. Stomp! Tangle-leg! Stomp! Pop-skull!
Wilkins: A man of conviction.
Clara: A man of convenience, Doctor, because he had a jug hid under that very plank. Everybody knew but the Lord, and the Lord was fixing to find out. One August Sunday he worked himself up so high about the sins of the jug that he stomped clean through the board and busted his own crock. A whole gallon of green corn went down through the leaves into the dirt, and the smell came up that arbor like smoke up a chimney. Brother Lafe stood there with one boot soaking in it, and old Mrs. Ammonette in the front row hollered out, Glory, it's the anointing! And from that day on, whenever anybody back home smells shine at a church picnic, they say somebody's been anointed.
Wilkins: Clara, if your mountain preachers stomped any harder, you'd have had to tax the pulpit.
Clara: Oh, they would have if they could've found it. Now, you talked about the mile law. Down in Rockbridge County there was a peddler named Dabney Shiflett. Dabney was too lazy to plow but he'd walk forty miles to win an argument. When the camp meeting came to the Natural Bridge country, the sheriff warned him off: not a drop of liquor within one mile of that meeting ground. So Dabney borrowed a surveyor's chain from the county clerk. Sixty-six feet to the chain, eighty chains to the mile. He and his boy dragged that thing through the laurel hells and over a pig lot, counting out loud, and he parked his wagon exactly one mile and one rod from the preaching stand. Then he drove a stake there and painted it white.
Wilkins: A Yankee would have done the same, but he'd have charged the boy for the paint.
Clara: Well, the preacher found out, and that preacher was cleverer than Dabney. He didn't fight him. Sunday morning, he picked up his Bible, stepped off the stand and said, Brethren, the Lord goes where the sinners are. And he marched the whole congregation, four hundred people and a pump organ on a mule cart, one mile and one rod down the road, and he held the entire service at Dabney's wagon wheels. Prayed over every jug by name. You can't sell a man whiskey while his mother's singing Rock of Ages two foot from his ear. Dabney didn't sell a drop.
Wilkins: The Lord has artillery.
Clara: But this is Dabney we're talking about. The next week he drove those very same jugs over to the Lexington court day and sold every one of them as Jordan water, blessed by proximity. Charged double. He said it had been prayed over by four hundred Methodists and he could prove it by witnesses.
Wilkins: Clara, you've just described the entire medicine trade. Now, you know the mountain words. What did your people call the liquor that went around at these meetings?
Clara: My granny had a word for every kind of it. Tangle-leg was the green corn, fresh off the worm, the kind that ties your knees in a bowknot. Bust-head was anything somebody claimed was aged, and she said that meant it had been sitting in a horse trough behind the meetinghouse since Easter. And shouting water was the jug that went around the back of the arbor right before the altar call. You'd see a Methodist who'd never said boo jump two benches and holler in the unknown tongue. She'd say, That's not the Holy Ghost. That's shouting water.
Wilkins: A preacher who passes the plate twice is a doubler, and I suspect he thumps louder than any keg in Virginia.
Clara: Hush now, you'll get me churched. But Doctor, I have a bear story to set beside yours, and it's not near as bloody but it's louder. Near Buchanan, a farmer named Pleasant Dooley raised a black bear cub he'd found in a hollow log. Cute as a speckled pup and twice as greedy. Now our wild persimmons don't come sweet till after first frost, and when they do drop, they lie on the ground and go to work in the sun, the way your cider goes to work in the barrel. That cub ate a bushel of fallen, soured persimmons one October Sunday, got tight as a tick, and wandered off to the Union Church with a belly full of fruit brandy that never saw a still.
Wilkins: Don't tell me.
Clara: Climbed straight up the bell rope into the belfry. And he hung there, and swung, and rang that bell right through the sermon. Dong. Dong. Dong. Forty-five minutes, the preacher shouting, the bear swinging, the bell going. The preacher finally gave up, closed his Bible and said, Brethren, the Lord has sent us his own bell-ringer and I will not argue with the Lord's timing. They let him finish. Then Pleasant Dooley climbed up and carried that cub down over his shoulder like a sack of meal, snoring. From then on, any time a Buchanan man came to church late and smelling ripe, they'd say he's been ringing the bell.
Wilkins: Mine got saved and yours got drunk, and I'll wager yours stayed in the church longer.
Clara: Well, how long did yours stay saved, Doctor? I want the end of it.
Wilkins: Here's the end of it, Clara, and it's a doozy. Elder Fogg insisted on baptism that very night. Now he was a Baptist of the dunking sort, and his creed called for full immersion. The Suncook was too far and too dark, so he led that whole congregation, with Barnaby following my ham bone, a hundred and some people singing Shall We Gather at the River, down the turnpike to the horse trough in front of the Pittsfield tavern. And he went at it. He got Barnaby's front half in. He could not get the back half in. Four hundred pounds of bear and a seven-foot trough. A Baptist preacher who cannot fit his convert in the water is forced to sprinkle, and I watched a man's whole theology drown in a horse trough. He stood there in the lamplight with a dipper, sweating, saying, The Lord will make allowance for the larger creatures.
Clara: Oh, Lord have mercy.
Wilkins: He wrote it down in his ledger of souls. I saw the page. Number four hundred and twelve: One bear, Merrimack County, under conviction, baptized by partial immersion and supplemental sprinkling. Then the very next morning, he came up my lane to collect a tithe from the new convert's household and to break up my copper calf with an axe. He said a saved bear could no longer abide a den of iniquity. Well, the saved bear was chained again on a new staple, which I'd driven twice as deep, and he saw that axe and that beard, which still smelled of molasses, and he remembered. Fogg went up the sugar maple by my woodpile like a squirrel with a tax bill. And that man stayed up that tree the whole night, preaching down at Barnaby for eight hours straight, Jonah, Daniel, Revelation, the whole lot. Preaching to a bear from a maple tree all night is the only sermon I ever heard where the congregation and the preacher were equally sure who'd be eaten first.
Clara: How'd you get him down?
Wilkins: At dawn I brought out a ham bone for the bear and a pint jar of hearts for the preacher. He said it was for communion. He came down the tree, took the jar, and left Pittsfield by noon. He must have communed clear to Portsmouth, because I heard he preached Barnaby's salvation in every pulpit from Concord to the sea. He even put it in a tract. The Bear of Pittsfield, A Beast Made Meek. As for Barnaby, he stayed saved for nine days, which is eight days longer than any selectman in Merrimack County. On the tenth day he got loose again and broke into Ezra Drake's smokehouse on the Sabbath. Ate two hams, a side of bacon and Ezra's best Sunday boots. That's the most honest convert that tent ever produced. He never pretended to be anything but hungry.
Clara: Doctor, that is the finest sermon I ever heard and there wasn't a word of Scripture in it you got right.
Wilkins: Clara Higgins, ladies and gentlemen, from the Blue Ridge of Virginia. Stay at the table, Clara, the jar's still dripping. Now, a word from the people who keep my vapor where it belongs.
♪ Brassy medicine-show banjo vamp, fast and bright
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
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♪ Banjo vamp ends with a bright flourish
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, slow drip into jar
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft. Before Elder Fogg went up that maple, he stood in my still-house door with his axe, and he asked me with a curled lip what a man like me thinks he's doing with heads and hearts. And I told him: Same as your congregation, Elder. Throw out the first ones to holler, keep the steady middle, and set the dregs aside for later. Tonight I'll show you all how it's done with apples, since we've been talking cider brandy, and because a fruit run needs more caution than a corn run, not less.
Wilkins: Mark this first, for I'll not have any man say Wilkins led him wrong. A man who makes distilled spirits for drinking without a license from the federal revenue is breaking the law. Everything I tell you on this program is history and instruction, not an invitation to the county jail. I've been there twice and the bread is stale.
Wilkins: Step one, the fruit. Take sound apples. A few bruises are fine, but rot is not, because rot brings in molds and wild spoilage that will follow you clean through to the jar. Grind them to pomace in the mill, then press out the juice. Russets and sharp cider apples give you more character than sweet table fruit. Step two, the fermenting. Put your juice in clean barrels with the bung loose, so the gas has somewhere to go, and keep the barrels in a cool cellar. Let it work two or three weeks till it's gone dry and quit bubbling. Now listen close. If your cider starts stinking of rotten eggs while it works, your yeast is starving. Yeast needs nitrogen the way a blacksmith needs breakfast, and when it runs short it gives off sulfur stink, what the chemists call hydrogen sulfide. Hold that thought, because copper is going to save us from it.
Wilkins: Step three, and this is the important one. Apples are full of pectin. That's what makes your wife's jelly set. During fermentation, pectin breaks down and makes wood spirit, what the chemists Dumas and Péligot named methyl alcohol back in 1834. Fruit gives you more of it than grain does. Not enough to frighten a man who cuts honestly, but plenty to cripple a man who doesn't. That is why jacked cider hurts. The freezer throws out nothing but water. A still lets you throw out the poison.
Wilkins: Step four, the stripping run. Charge your pot with the cider, strained off the lees so nothing scorches on the bottom, and bring her up slow over a low fire. Run it through briskly and collect everything that comes over. That's your low wines, weak and cloudy and not fit for a hog. Step five, the spirit run. Put the low wines back in the clean pot and run them again, slow as a Sunday sermon. This is where the cuts are made.
Wilkins: First come the foreshots, a small portion right at the start, sharp and solvent-smelling like a cobbler's glue pot. That's where wood spirit is thickest. Into the fire bucket it goes, and never into a mouth, a cup, or a toothache. Then come the heads, still harsh, smelling like varnish and nail polish on a whore's fingers, if you'll pardon the comparison. Collect them in small jars, one after the next, and set them apart. When the smell turns from solvent to sweet apple blossom and the spirit runs smooth on a drop rubbed between your palms, you've reached the hearts. That's your brandy. Keep it. As the run goes on, the hearts give way to the tails, which run oily and flat, like wet dog and cardboard. Set them aside to go into the next run. A careful man works by smell and by small jars, not by guessing, and when in doubt he throws more heads away, not fewer.
Wilkins: Now, the copper. Remember the rotten-egg stink from the starving yeast? That sulfur rides up the still in the vapor, and if your still is iron or tin, it rides right on into the jar. But copper reaches out and grabs it. The sulfur binds to the copper and stays on the metal as a dark film, while the spirit goes on through clean. That's the alchemy of it, and that's why I hammer my pots from good copper and scrub them bright after every run, so the metal stays hungry. A dull pot is a lazy pot.
Wilkins: And the fire. Here's a thing most men never learn till they're standing in their underwear watching the roof go. Spirit vapor is heavier than air. A leaking joint doesn't send it up the chimney. It pours down along the floorboards like invisible molasses, creeping toward your firebox or your lantern. And once it gets there, whoomph. Keep your joints tight, keep your fire low and under the pot, keep the lantern high and away from the worm's outlet, and keep a pail of sand by the door. Never leave a running still alone. I've seen a still-house in Gilmanton go up so fast the owner came out with his eyebrows in one hand and his jar in the other, and he saved the jar.
♦ Barnaby grunts
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. He has no eyebrows to spare.
♪ Short fiddle bridge
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang, and a message from the Carolinas. Back to the anvil.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's a fresh copper cent, stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., warm off the anvil. Here's tonight's myth, and Elder Fogg himself believed it. When I gave him that jar at the foot of the maple, he wouldn't drink till he'd tested it. He poured a spoonful, put a match to it, saw a pretty blue flame and said, Praise be, it is pure. That's the burning-spoon test, and half of New England swears by it. Blue flame safe, yellow flame bad, red flame lead. Hogwash.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Wood spirit burns with a pale blue flame almost exactly like good spirit does. You could set fire to a spoonful of pure poison and admire the color while it blinds you. A spoon test tells you only that a thing will burn, and anything strong enough will burn. It cannot find wood spirit and it cannot find lead. The burning spoon proves only that a man owns a spoon and a match, and half the drunks in Pittsfield own neither. The only protection against wood spirit is honest cuts. The only protection against lead is never letting lead solder or scrap metal anywhere near your still. Got it? Good.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now, we've had a talking cylinder come up on the Concord stage, all the way from the Yadkin country of North Carolina. Let's give it a crank.
♦ Hand-crank whir, heavy crackle, faint hiss
Wilkins: This is from Cletus Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, whom his friends call Rabbit, I suspect because of his speed in leaving a still-site. Go ahead, Rabbit.
♦ Cylinder playback, distant and tinny
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: Rabbit, my boy, your uncle is half a chemist and half a Methodist bishop, which is to say half right and wholly convinced. Let's take them one at a time.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Hickory ash. What is ash? It's potash, Rabbit. Lye. The very stuff your grandmother leached in a hopper to make soft soap. It's an alkali, and an alkali will sweeten some of the sour acids in a charge. That's why the old-timers felt it did something. But ash cannot touch wood spirit. Wood spirit boils off first, early in the run, in the foreshots and heads, and nothing you throw in a thump keg will catch it on the way through. Worse, a lazy man with too much lye in his doubler gets a run that tastes like he's licked the washtub. Wood ash in a doubler makes about as much sense as soaping a hog to make him a Christian.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings, and here your uncle gets a little credit. When hot vapor bubbles up through a doubler with wood in it, it picks up a little color and flavor from the wood, much as a doubler with apples or peaches in it flavors the run. That's seasoning, Rabbit, and seasoning's a fine thing. But it's not cleaning. Red oak shavings in a thump keg are like a clean collar on a horse thief: it improves the look and does nothing for the character. If the heads are bad, they're bad, and only your cut buckets can save you. Throw out the foreshots and the heads, keep the hearts. That's the only gospel there is in a still-house, and I'll preach it from a maple tree if I have to.
Wilkins: So tell your uncle he's welcome at Fort Wilkins any time. I'll take care of his molars, Barnaby will take care of his ham, and I'll take care of his hickory ash, which is to say I'll dump it on my turnip patch where it will do some good. Rabbit Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, here's a shout from the Suncook Valley. This cent's for you.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, coin rings as it is flipped onto anvil
Wilkins: Stamped and in the mail with a three-cent stamp, Rabbit. Don't spend it on ashes.
♪ Theme returns softly beneath
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♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: That's the program, friends. My thanks to Miss Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, who is leaving tomorrow on the Concord stage with a bag of herbs, two jars of tooth tonic and every peppermint stick Barnaby hasn't found yet. If you want to learn this craft the honest way, the copper, the mash, the cuts, the fire, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. It's a full course of instruction from my own hand, covering everything from hammering the pot to the last drop of the hearts, and you'll find nothing in it about ashes, spoons or horse troughs. And if any traveling preacher comes up the turnpike looking for a convert, tell him the bear's been done already, the job only half took, and the back half is still a heathen.
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 rises, then fades into wax cylinder crackle