A Dentist's Guide to Bad Breath and Worse Neighbors
Dr. G. G. Wilkins opens up his daytime tooth-pulling trade: the 1860s war on foul breath with chalk and charcoal tooth powders, oil of cloves, battlefield teeth, the vulcanite patent men, and the 1862 federal license tax that charged him for his forceps as well as his worm. He also tells how a Pittsfield informer was found out by a counterstamped cent, and how Barnaby dealt with a dentifrice peddler who came for the copper worm. Appalachian herbalist Clara Higgins brings new mountain stories about sweet-birch courting, a preacher given away by persimmon breath, drunken hogs in a line-fence feud, and a whistling test for courting boys. Wilkins then ties the sulfur stink of a bad mouth to the sulfur copper takes out of the vapor, debunks the blue-flame test, and answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ash and red oak shavings in a 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, you great stinking sack of suet, settle down. That is the Widow Tuttle's tomcat on the woodpile, and if you eat him I will hear about it from her till one of us is in the ground, and I pray nightly it is her.
♦ Bear huffs, a long wet snort, chain slumps to the dirt
Wilkins: There. He has laid down. Lord above, you can smell him through the chinking. Barnaby has the breath of a tannery privy in August, and he is still better company than half the parish.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, and you creeping informers who think I can't see your lantern on the turnpike. You are listening to 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 Doctor George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, coin-stamper, and the nearest thing this valley has to a free man. By daylight I pull teeth and by moonlight I pull corks, and both trades end with a man on the floor thanking me.
Wilkins: Tonight's subject is A Dentist's Guide to Bad Breath and Worse Neighbors. These are two plagues I know as well as any man living, because I spend my days with my fingers in the first and my evenings with my shutters closed against the second. But first, a word from the patent man who keeps the lamp oil burning.
♪ Brief brass flourish, tinny and bright
Announcer: A quick word, friends! A still that leaks vapor is a still that tattles on its owner! Seal your joints right with Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills. Shop the hardware at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Flourish ends
♦ Wax crackle, a chair creaks, a forceps is set down on a tin tray
Wilkins: Now. Segment the first. The daytime trade. Before any of you picture me in a velvet parlor with a gilt sign, let me paint the true picture. My operating chair is an old ox-yoke bench with a horsehair cushion that has heard more screaming than a Concord gallows. My instruments hang on nails beside the forge: turnkey, forceps, gum lancet, and a mallet I am not proud of. I have had my hands in more mouths than a Concord tavern spittoon has had chaw, and I can report the spittoon is cleaner.
Wilkins: And bad breath, friends, is the bell that rings before the funeral. Folks come to me and say, Doctor, my wife won't kiss me, my horse won't let me near his nose, and the minister moved me to the back pew. And I say open up, and there it is: a molar black as a stovepipe, gums swollen up purple and bleeding at the touch, bits of last Thursday's salt pork wedged in the cracks and turned to cheese, and a tongue furred over like a Coos County trapper's mitten. The stink does not come from the stomach, whatever your grandmother told you. Nine times in ten it comes from the mouth itself, rotting right there on the porch.
Wilkins: Take Deacon Absalom Pickering of the upper road. Pious man. Never missed a meeting. And his breath could strip the varnish off a coffin lid. He came to me in March with a lower molar so far gone that when I put the forceps on it, the tooth didn't so much come out as surrender. It came apart in three pieces, and the smell that rolled out of that socket made my apprentice go out and stand in the rain for a quarter hour. The Deacon said, Doctor, is it bad? I said, Deacon, your breath is so foul the flies at your funeral will file a grievance. He tithed less that month, I am told, out of spite.
♦ Wax crackle; Barnaby grunts outside
Wilkins: Now what does the honest Yankee do about his mouth in this year of grace? He buys tooth powder. Peddlers sell it in little tins with a lady's face on the lid. And what is in it? Powdered chalk. Burnt charcoal. Cuttlefish bone ground fine as flour. A little orris root to make it smell of violets. The charcoal blackens your gums and scours like a stove brush, and I have seen fellows who scrubbed with it so faithfully they wore their front teeth down to little gray pegs, like a row of fence posts after a flood. Use it gentle, I tell them, or not at all. A hog-bristle brush on a bone handle, some plain chalk, and a mouthful of water will do more for you than the Professor's Celebrated Oriental Pearl Dentifrice at fifty cents a tin.
Wilkins: For a toothache I reach for oil of cloves. You dab it on the gum and it numbs the spot like a frost. It does the job, and it makes the whole chair smell like a Christmas ham, which comforts the patient right up until I pick up the forceps. Folks also chew cloves, parsley, or fennel seed to sweeten the breath before courting or church. That is like hanging a wreath on a privy door. Pleasant to approach, but the business inside goes on as before.
Wilkins: And the war, friends. The war rotted more mouths than it buried men. The boys came home from the Virginia camps on hardtack and salt horse with no fresh green thing for months, and the scurvy got into them. Gums swelled up spongy and bled if you so much as looked at them, and teeth went loose in their sockets like pegs in a rotted gate. I had a sergeant from Epsom in my chair last fall. He wiggled his own eyetooth with a finger and said, Doc, I reckon the Rebs didn't kill me, so the cornbread figures it'll try. I gave him a bushel of apples and told him to eat greens like a goat. His gums firmed back up by Thanksgiving. The teeth he'd already lost stayed lost.
Wilkins: Which brings me to the grisly end of my trade, and you will forgive me, ladies, but you tuned in. False teeth. When a man has lost his whole fence row, where do new teeth come from? Ivory, some of them. Bone. Porcelain from the city shops. And some, God help us, from the dead. After Waterloo, the scavengers went over that field with pliers before the bodies were cold, and the teeth went to London dentists by the barrel. They called them Waterloo teeth, and fine ladies smiled with dead Frenchmen's molars. And I hear it said that after Antietam and Gettysburg there were jackals at the same work. Imagine it: kneeling in the mud among the flies, a dead boy's jaw cracking open, the little click of pliers on enamel, then on to the next. And some banker's wife in Boston chewing her roast beef on a Georgia farm boy's teeth.
♦ A low, sour fiddle note
Wilkins: Nowadays the dentures are set in vulcanized rubber, Mr. Goodyear's process, pink as a newborn rat. Cheap and handy. But the patent men have got hold of it. Since last year the Goodyear Dental Vulcanite Company has been sending its agents round to every dentist in the country, demanding a license fee for every rubber plate we make. The vulcanite patent men have their teeth deeper into American dentists than any denture ever had into a pork chop. I told their agent I would pay his royalty the day he paid for the teeth he was standing on, and Barnaby rattled his chain, and the man found an urgent appointment in Concord.
Wilkins: And as if the patent leeches were not enough, there is our own Mr. Lincoln, God rest him. The Revenue Act of 1862 did not stop at taxing whiskey. It put a federal license on the trades, and dentists are named right in it alongside physicians and surgeons. So the Union charges me a license to pull teeth and a tax to make spirits. It is getting me coming and going out of the same mouth.
♪ Banjo bridge, a jaunty little run
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Segment the second: Legends, outlaws, and worse neighbors. Now, a bad mouth will drive off your sweetheart. A bad neighbor will drive off your livelihood. A gossip is a mouth with no bottom on it and a neighbor stuck to the top, and Pittsfield has been richly blessed in that department.
Wilkins: I will tell you a story I have never told on this program. A while back the county sheriff came out to Fort Wilkins on a tip. He had particulars: the location of my barrels, the night I fired the still, even the knot in the floorboard where I keep the jug for visiting clergy. Someone had sold me out, and the county was paying informers a reward in hard coin. Now, coin is scarce in these war years. So the sheriff's clerk paid that reward out of what was in the county box, and there was a copper cent in that box with a stamp on it. My stamp. G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., punched clean on my own anvil. It had wandered off in change and found its way into the public treasury like a stray dog.
Wilkins: Three weeks later, Horace Grubb, overseer at the mill, a man with a face like a boiled ham and a soul to match, laid that very cent on the counter at the store to buy a twist of tobacco. The storekeeper picked it up, read my name on it, looked at Horace, and said, Well now, Horace, where'd you come by a Wilkins cent? Everybody in that store knew the only fresh coin anybody in Pittsfield had seen in a month was the county reward. That informer spent my own coin, with my own name on it, at the only store in town, and showed more brains in his betrayal than he ever did at his plow. He has not had a peaceful pew since. And here is the sweetest part. Six months later Horace Grubb sat in my chair with an abscess the size of a robin's egg, crying like a calf, and I pulled that tooth for him. I pulled it slow, friends. Very slow. And I charged him one cent, and told him to make sure it had my stamp on it.
♦ Barnaby grunts loudly, chain rattles
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, I'm coming to you. Barnaby wants me to tell about the peddler. This was a traveling man out of Barnstead way, selling Professor Peabody's Rose Dentifrice from a sample case, forty tins at a time. He'd been in my shop in the daytime, and his eyes went to my copper worm like a hungry man's eyes go to a pie. Copper is dear these war years, and a coiled worm of pure sheet will fetch real money from a scrap man in Manchester. So that night he crept back to steal it, round the back of the still-house in his stocking feet, sample case under his arm, thinking himself mighty clever. He didn't know about Barnaby, or he forgot, or he thought a bear sleeps like a Christian.
Wilkins: A bear does not sleep like a Christian. I woke to a sound like a ship's sail ripping in a gale. That was the man's breeches. Then a sound like a sheep being stepped on by an ox. That was the man. By the time I got there with the lantern, Barnaby had him by the seat, and I mean the whole seat: wool, drawers, and a good fist-sized portion of the meat God gave him to sit on. Blood down both legs into his stockings, squelching with every kick. And that peddler's voice went up two octaves and never came down. I hear he leads the treble in a Barnstead choir now.
Wilkins: Then the sample case burst open on the stones, and Barnaby, being a sensible animal, dropped the peddler's backside to see what smelled like roses. He ate all forty tins. Lids and all, crunching tin like rock candy, pink powder blowing out his nostrils in two little clouds. The peddler crawled off through my squash patch on his elbows, howling, and I let him go, because a man with half his hindquarters in a bear is punished plenty. Barnaby foamed pink at the mouth for a week like a mad dog at a ladies' tea, and in that week he was the sweetest-smelling thing in Merrimack County, which only goes to show there is hope for the Widow Tuttle.
♪ Fiddle sting, then quiets under
Wilkins: Well. Now I'm pleased to bring a guest into the fortress. She has come up by the cars all the way from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, now that the rails are running again and nobody's shooting at her. She knows the mountain herbs, the mountain tongue, and every name a mountaineer ever gave to his liquor and his enemies. Miss Clara Higgins, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Clara: Why, thank you, Doctor. I'd say it smells like home in here, but at home the bear's on the other side of the mountain, where the good Lord meant him to be.
Wilkins: Barnaby is on the other side of the window, which in Pittsfield counts as a mountain. Now, Miss Clara, tonight is bad breath and bad neighbors. What does a Blue Ridge granny do about a foul mouth?
Clara: Chews a twig, Doctor. Sweet birch, black birch, whatever you Yankees call it. You cut a little switch, chew the end till it frays out like a paintbrush, and scrub your teeth with it. Tastes of wintergreen and sets your gums to tingling. My granny swore by it. And I'll tell you how she nearly lost my granddaddy over it.
Wilkins: Tell it, by thunder.
Clara: Well, when Granddaddy came courting, he'd heard Granny was particular about breath. So the poor fool chewed sweet birch the whole four miles over the ridge. Twig after twig. Chewed through half a sapling. By the time he got to the porch he smelled like a horse liniment bottle, and his lips had gone so numb he couldn't say her name proper. Kept calling her Mith Abigail. And Granny's old hound, Judge, smelled that wintergreen and took a powerful liking to him. Followed him home that night, slept under his bed, and wouldn't come back. Granny told him, You can keep the dog or you can have me, but you can't have either one till you quit smelling like a mule's sore leg. He gave the dog back on Sunday and married her in June.
Wilkins: Ha! A man who'll walk four miles chewing a tree for a girl deserves her. Now, liquor on the breath. That's how a lot of a neighbor's sins get found out, ain't it?
Clara: Lord, yes. We had a preacher in Floyd County, I won't say his name because his grandchildren are still big and mean, and he'd preach hellfire against liquor every Sunday. Popskull, tanglefoot, ruckus juice, stump liquor, he named them all from the pulpit like a man calling hogs. And afterward he'd stand at the church door shaking every hand. But wild persimmon brandy has a smell, Doctor. Sweet and musky, like a fox in a fruit cellar. And every soul that shook his hand got a good whiff. So the congregation took to calling his preaching persimmon sermons. You'd hear it at the store: Did you catch the persimmon sermon? Mighty strong this week. Ripe, I'd call it.
Wilkins: A man who swears off liquor in a sermon ought to rinse first. Now, Miss Clara, the worse neighbors. Every hollow's got a feud.
Clara: Ours was the Pruitts and the Coles, over a line fence. Thirty years they hadn't spoken. Moved that fence back and forth by night, a rail here, a post there. One man'd plant a locust tree on the line, the other'd girdle it. Then one fall old Pruitt dumped his apple pomace, the mashed-up leavings from his cider press, out behind the hog lot. It sat in the sun and worked, the way pomace will, and his hogs got into it.
Wilkins: Oh, no.
Clara: Oh, yes. Seven hogs drunker than a selectman at a ribbon cutting, and twice as honest about it. They busted through that fence they'd been fighting over for thirty years and rooted through Cole's whole corn patch. Squealing, falling over. One big sow tried to climb a fodder shock and slid down it backwards. Cole came out with his rifle to shoot them, but he couldn't hit a single one, they were weaving so. So he set down his gun and laughed till he wet himself. When Pruitt came running down, the two of them ended up carrying those hogs home together, one man on each end, the hogs grunting a hymn the whole way. Fence was never moved again. They split the corn loss and were neighborly till they died.
Wilkins: There's a lesson for Merrimack County. Get the hogs drunk first, then talk. Now, mountain slang for a foul mouth. Give me a good one, something to throw at the Deacon.
Clara: My Uncle Ransom would say a man had breath that could knock a buzzard off a gut wagon. Or a mouth like a buzzard's nest. Or he'd say a fellow's breath could peel a hog. And my Aunt Delphie had the cleverest trick about breath you ever saw.
Wilkins: Let's have it.
Clara: When a boy came calling on her girls, she'd meet him at the door and say, Whistle me Shady Grove. A sober boy can whistle it clean, but a boy with a few swallows of popskull in him, his lips go loose and he just spits and wheezes. One boy came up having chewed a whole raw onion to cover the liquor smell. Whistled half a bar, gave up, eyes watering from the onion. And Aunt Delphie said, Son, an onion is a liar's overcoat. It don't hide the body, it just tells everybody you're wearing one. Sent him right back down the hill.
Wilkins: An onion is a liar's overcoat. I'm stealing that and stamping it on a penny. Miss Clara Higgins, you've cleaned my mouth out better than birch bark. Thank you kindly.
Clara: Thank you, Doctor. I'll just sit over by the window where the bear can't get to me.
Wilkins: The bear can get to anywhere, Miss Clara. Sit by the door.
♪ Banjo flourish into ad break
♦ Wax crackle, a hand bell rung three times
Announcer: Step right up, friends, step right up! Do you hear that hiss? That faint little whistle from your still joint at midnight? That, friends, is the sound of your fortune leaking into the dark! Flour paste cracks. Rye dough crumbles. Hose clamps slip like a deacon's promise. And a vapor leak near an open flame is how good men lose their still-houses, their eyebrows, and their good names! Introducing the Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills! Precision 304 stainless and copper hybrid fittings, heavy-gauge and true, made to mate with stills of heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper! Food-grade PTFE gaskets that seal tight run after run! Quick-release stainless wing clamps you snug down by hand in a heartbeat. No wrench, no wrestling, no swearing! Pressure-tested! Precision-milled! Airtight for a lifetime! All for just thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents! See them with your own eyes in the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, if the bear allows it! Or order this very night at https://moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings. Once more, friends: https://moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings! Moonshine Stills: seal it right, sleep at night!
♦ Hand bell rung once
♪ Fiddle returns, low and warm
♦ Wax crackle; the fire in the forge pops
Wilkins: Segment the third: Copper and the Craft. And here's where my two trades meet in one smell. When I lean over the Deacon's rotten molar, that stink of bad eggs and boiled cabbage is sulfur, friends. Sulfur gases breeding in the rot. And when a charge of fermented mash warms in the pot and the vapor rises, there's sulfur riding up in it too, the very same family of stinks. The chemists will give them fancy names someday, hydrogen sulfide and methyl mercaptan, but you and I need only the nose. Copper takes hold of those sulfur vapors and keeps them on its own skin, and the spirit comes out the far end sweeter. Copper is the tooth powder of the still, and like any mouth, it rots if you only scrub it for company. Scrub it after every run, or the cure turns to crust.
Wilkins: Now let me say it plain, as I do every week: making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and what I tell you on this program is history and education, not an invitation to the hoosegow.
Wilkins: The old distillers of this valley knew one thing above all: the first of the run is poison. What comes off first, the foreshots and the heads, smells sharp as a lamp-spirit bottle and carries the stuff that blinds men and stops hearts. It goes on the ground or in the lamp, never in a cup, never in a mouth rinse, never in a jug for the sheriff, however tempting. Heads in your jar are like a gossip at your table: they smell sweet at first, and by morning your whole head aches. The hearts are the honest middle. The tails come oily and stinking at the end, wet dog and old socks, and the old-timers set them aside. A good distiller cuts wide and throws away more than he'd like. A greedy one keeps too much, and the county coroner pays him a visit.
Wilkins: And fire, friends. More still-houses in New Hampshire have burned than were ever raided. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air and creeps along the floor like a cat, looking for a spark. A leaking joint near an open flame and you have a fireball with your name on it. Keep the house aired out, keep the fire low and steady, keep a bucket of water and a wet blanket by the door, and never, ever walk away from a running still to go gossip with your neighbor. I knew a man in Northwood who stepped out for a pipe and a chat across the fence. He came back to find his still-house gone, his eyebrows went with it when he tried to save it, and his neighbor had the news all over the county by suppertime. A bad neighbor will burn you with his tongue. A careless distiller does it himself.
Wilkins: And join your copper honest. Silver solder or proper fittings, never lead, and no salvaged junk. Lead poisons slow and sure. I've pulled teeth from lead-sick men, with gums lined blue-gray at the edge like a dirty collar, and I'd not wish it on Horace Grubb. Well, maybe Horace Grubb.
♪ Banjo bridge
♦ Wax crackle; anvil set rings faintly as Wilkins lays a coin on it
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: Myths, slang, and the mailbag. And tonight the call-in line brought us a voice all the way from North Carolina. Let's play it.
♦ Tape hiss, a click, a scratchy distant voice
Wilkins: That was Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and here's his question as he put it: 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?
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Rabbit, I'll take the ashes first. What is hickory ash? It's potash and lime. It's what your granny leaches through a hopper of straw to make lye for soft soap. That's the sum of it. Put lye-ash in your doubler and you've got a fine way to make a soap nobody can wash with and a whiskey nobody can drink. It does not touch the bad heads. The poison in the heads boils off early in the run no matter what you throw in the keg, and the only cure is to cut it off and throw it out.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Here's where your uncle got a crumb of truth and baked a whole cake of nonsense out of it. Oak does improve whiskey. But white oak, Rabbit, charred, and in a barrel, over months and years. Ask any cooper why he won't make a whiskey barrel of red oak. Red oak is open in the grain, the pores run clean through, and it leaks so bad the coopers call it a sieve with ambitions. Shavings in a hot thump keg give you a bitter, puckering tannin, like chewing an acorn. Color, maybe. Cleaning, no. So your uncle's not a liar exactly. He's a man who heard a true thing in a tavern and brought it home wearing the wrong coat. An onion is a liar's overcoat, as Miss Clara says, and red oak is a mistaken man's.
Wilkins: And while we're on old nonsense, here's tonight's myth: the blue flame. Every jug-hound in New England will pour a spoonful, set a match to it, and say, Burns blue, it's good, burns red, it'll kill you dead. Friends, that test is like judging a man's honesty by the color of his hat. The poison in the heads burns pale blue, near invisible, same as good spirit. A blue flame tells you there's alcohol in the spoon, and that's all. As for lead, the red-flame saying will no more find lead in your jug than a dowsing rod will find your wife's temper. The only safe jug is one made on clean copper with honest cuts.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Rabbit Miller, that coin I just struck is yours. G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., fresh off the anvil, and I'll send it south with my compliments. Spend it anywhere but the sheriff's office. Give your uncle my regards, and tell him to save his ashes for the soap kettle. And all you good folks of Wilkesboro, Rabbit says it's whiskey country down there, so keep your ears up and your cuts wide.
♪ Brief brass flourish
Announcer: A quick word before we part, friends! Don't let a slipping clamp or a crumbling paste joint tattle on your copper. Heavy-Duty Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets, just thirty-four ninety-five, at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Flourish fades; fiddle plays soft under
♦ Wax crackle; fire low in the forge
Wilkins: Well, friends, that's the night. You learned that the stink in your mouth and the stink in a bad run come from the same devil, that the Deacon's breath can outlive the Deacon, and that a counterstamped cent will catch an informer faster than any court in Merrimack County. A sheriff and a toothache are alike: both show up in the night, both cost you money, and both go away if you apply enough spirits. I am told the sheriff is listening, so I mean ginger tea.
Wilkins: If you want to learn the old craft proper, the history, the metallurgy, the copper, the cuts, and the safety, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I teach it the way my forge taught me: slow, honest, with all your fingers left at the end. That's more than I promise my dental patients. My thanks to Miss Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, and to Barnaby, who has eaten nobody this evening, though the night is young.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme swells and fades into wax cylinder crackle