The General Store Gossip Chair
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells the history of the seat beside the box stove in a New England general store: who sat in it, what it cost in tobacco, gossip, and pulled teeth to move them, and how the man in that chair warned the whole valley when a revenue man was coming. Blue Ridge herbalist and slang historian Clara Higgins brings new stories of Virginia store chairs, a spitting code, a hen traded for a seat, and Civil War slang for liquor. Wilkins then plays a call-in tape from Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, explains what hickory ash and red oak shavings really do in a thump keg, and debunks the blue-flame test at 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! Quit rattling that chain like a Methodist rattles a collection box. Yes, I came home from the store smelling of salt cod and cheese rind, and no, not one crumb of it is for you. You had a whole woodchuck Tuesday, fur, teeth, and opinions, and I heard every one of them come back up at midnight. Lie down.
♦ Bear grunt, a heavy thump as four hundred pounds drops into the dooryard dirt
Wilkins: There. Four hundred pounds of sulk under my window. Strike up the band.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, deacons and drunkards, and the one Merrimack County deputy I know is listening with his hat in his lap and his conscience in his boot. 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, New Hampshire. Tonight we take up the most powerful office in any New England village. It is stronger than the selectmen, more feared than the minister, and better paid than both: the gossip chair at the general store. Who sat in it, who wanted it, and what it cost to pry a man's rump out of it. Bring your own crackers. The storekeeper counts his.
♪ Theme fades under wax crackle
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Before the Doctor spins his yarn, know this: the Flame-Flow still, protected by United States Patent 10,561,960 and hand-wrought of heavy pure copper, waits for you at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com! Copper that works as hard as you do!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a single drip into the jar
♪ Short fiddle sting
Wilkins: Segment the first. History, and I mean the dusty kind you find under a cracker barrel along with a dead mouse and a Continental shilling.
Wilkins: Picture any country store in Merrimack County in this year of our Lord 1865. There's a box stove in the middle of the floor, glowing like a drunkard's nose. Round it, a sawdust spit box that has not been emptied since Fort Sumter. There's a cracker barrel with the lid half off, a pickle crock, a cheese under a wire bell, and a molasses hogshead whose spigot drips slow as an old man at the necessary. Shelves of calico, cut nails, saleratus, castor oil, Lucifer matches, powder and shot. In the back corner stands a cabinet of pigeonholes, because half the storekeepers in New Hampshire are the postmaster too. That means every letter in town, every love note and every dunning bill, passes within spitting distance of the man nearest the stove.
Wilkins: And nearest the stove sits the Chair. It's not a fine chair. Usually it's an old Windsor or a hickory splint-bottom with the rungs worn bright from boot heels. But I'm a metal man, so let me put it in foundry terms. When you cast iron, you press a wooden pattern into damp sand and the sand takes its exact shape. Well, that splint seat took the exact shape of Captain Asa Pickering's hindquarters over twenty-two winters. You could have poured molten brass into it and pulled out a perfect likeness of the Captain's arse, dimples and all. No other backside fit without slopping over the sides.
Wilkins: Why did it matter who sat there? Credit, friends. Nobody in this valley pays cash, because nobody in this valley has any. You buy on the book, and the storekeeper writes it in a ledger fat as a family Bible. You settle after harvest, or when your potash goes down to market. For any city ears out there: you soak hardwood ash in water and draw off the lye, then boil the lye down in a big kettle until you have potash, black salts that sell for soap and for glass. Every stump-clearing Yankee since the Revolution has paid his debts in burnt forest. You pay in butter and eggs too, in shingles, maple sugar, a quarter of beef. And the man in the chair can see the ledger right over the storekeeper's shoulder. He knows who owes, who pays in rancid butter, and who bought three yards of red calico the very week the hired man ran off west. Knowledge is power, and power sits down.
Wilkins: Now the liquor end of it. On paper, New Hampshire has been dry since 1855, dry as a Calvinist's sermon on the pleasures of the flesh. The only legal sale is through the town liquor agent, and only for medicinal, mechanical, or chemical purposes. Funny how many mechanical purposes a Pittsfield man finds every Saturday night. Then in 1862 Washington passed its great Revenue Act. Besides the gallon tax you've heard me curse before, it licensed nearly every trade under heaven. A retail liquor dealer pays twenty dollars a year for his license, and there are stamp duties on patent medicines, on playing cards, and on friction matches. Every box of Lucifers now wears a little government stamp. Mr. Lincoln found a way to tax a man for lighting his pipe, and I expect next year he'll tax the smoke.
Wilkins: So the general store became the revenue man's dream and the smuggler's stock exchange both at once. There's a license framed on the wall, and something else entirely beneath the floorboards. The man in the chair knows about both.
♦ Wilkins drags a ledger across the table, pages riffle
Wilkins: I have kept my own tally of what it cost to move the great sitters of this valley. Here are the rates of exchange.
Wilkins: Captain Asa Pickering. He calls himself a veteran of the Mexican War. By every honest account he attended one militia muster in Epsom and fell off a borrowed horse. Price to move him: one plug of Virginia twist. It doesn't need to be good twist, either. The Captain would chew the stove legs if you salted them.
Wilkins: Widow Thankful Drowne. You can't buy her with goods. Offer her tobacco and she'll spit in your hat. She's moved only by assay. You put your gossip on one pan of the scale, she puts hers on the other, and the heavier scandal wins the chair. A Chichester drover once brought her word that the parson's wife bought rouge in Concord, real French rouge. The widow rose like a hen off a nest and was out the door before the bell stopped jingling. The drover sat in that chair three hours and swore it was the warmest seat he'd had since his mother's lap.
Wilkins: Deacon Ebenezer Crumb. He moved only for the Lord's business, or for a hot dram for the rheumatism, which he swore was the Lord's business. I pulled two of the Deacon's molars last spring. Both came out black as a stovepipe and smelling of the Lord's business.
Wilkins: And then there was old Jethro Bunce, who could not be moved at any price. Jethro held that chair through the hard winter, from Thanksgiving to sugaring. One February afternoon, halfway through a sentence about the price of wool, he simply stopped. Nobody noticed for an hour. Then the storekeeper said, 'Jethro hasn't spat,' and that's how they knew he was dead. By then the stove had burned low and the door had been opened twice, and old Jethro had set up stiff, bent exactly to the chair. They tried to straighten him to lay him out. His knees went off like dry kindling, crack, crack, and the storekeeper's boy fainted into the pickle crock. In the end they carried him out chair and all, and had to take the door off its hinges to do it. His widow refused to pay for the chair, so it went into the burying ground with him. Somewhere on that hill old Jethro sits in his grave the way he sat in life, waiting for somebody to say something interesting. And before they'd even got the door back on, four men were wrestling on the floor for the new chair.
♦ Barnaby grunts loudly outside, chain clinks
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees with me. He held a chair once himself, and the chair didn't survive it either.
♪ Banjo bridge, quick and plucky
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws, and runners. You have to understand that the gossip chair was the electric telegraph of the backwoods, only faster and more spiteful. Before any revenue man could ride from Concord to Pittsfield, the chair knew he was coming. The stage driver told the chair. The chair told the boy sweeping the floor. The boy lit out up the Catamount road, and by suppertime every still-house fire from Barnstead to Gilmanton had gone cold as a banker's heart.
Wilkins: And I'll confess I kept that telegraph oiled. You know my punch.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., struck into a copper cent on my anvil. Well, I filled Captain Pickering's waistcoat pocket with those cents and let it be known about town: any man who showed the storekeeper a Wilkins cent got the chair for one full hour, no tobacco, no gossip, no wrestling. The storekeeper honored it because I pulled his teeth for nothing and kept his wife's nerve tonic flowing. That made my cents the only currency in New Hampshire backed by molars.
Wilkins: One October afternoon, in comes a stranger in a checked waistcoat, a loud green-and-yellow check like a horse blanket that lost a bet. He says he sells lightning rods. He sits down in the chair without asking, which is as bad as kissing a man's wife at a funeral, and he starts asking questions. Where's Fort Wilkins? How many men work there? Is that bear real, or a story to scare children? Captain Pickering just smiled his three-toothed smile, slipped the boy one of my cents, and the boy ran the whole two miles to the fort without stopping once.
Wilkins: So when Mister Lightning Rod came up the turnpike, I met him at the gate all smiles. I told him the highest point in all Pittsfield needed protection, and walked him along the cabin wall. Right past my still-house window.
♦ Chain snaps taut, a deep bear huff
Wilkins: Barnaby doesn't roar, friends. A roaring bear is a bear giving notice. Barnaby just huffs, once, like a bellows, and then he's on you. He caught the stranger by the seat of the trousers. First there came a sound like a mainsail tearing in a gale, that was the wool. Then a wetter sound, like a butcher pulling a ham off its hook, and that was the gentleman. The man went straight up off the ground, shrieking in a register I have only heard from a hog and from a Concord lawyer handed his bill. He came down running and never stopped. He went down Route 28 with his bare hinder shining like a harvest moon with a bite out of it, a perfect crescent of bear teeth.
Wilkins: Barnaby sat there all afternoon chewing checked wool like a deacon with a plug, and he passed it in October, in a pattern handsome enough to make a vest from. But here is the jewel. Out of what was left of the trouser pocket tumbled a letter addressed to the revenue assessor in Concord. In a fine clerk's hand it said, and I quote: 'The so-called bear at Wilkins's is surely a fable or a docile animal, and presents no hazard to a determined officer.' I read that letter aloud to Barnaby while he was digesting its author's trousers. He belched. I believe that was his reply to the Bureau of Internal Revenue.
♦ Wilkins laughing, slapping the table, wax crackle
Wilkins: Now I've got a guest who knows a thing or two about store chairs, liars, and liquor by every name the devil ever invented. She came all the way up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, through country that was shooting at us four years ago, which shows either great courage or poor judgment, and I respect both. Herbalist, forager, and keeper of mountain talk: Miss Clara Higgins. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, Clara.
Clara: Well, thank you, Doctor. I've been in your fort two hours and I've been growled at, spat near, and offered a tooth-pulling, and that's just the welcome your bear gave me.
Wilkins: Barnaby likes you. He only bites people who owe me money or work for Washington.
Clara: Then I'll pay cash and keep my mouth off the government payroll. Now Doctor, you Yankees call it the gossip chair. Down home we call it the settin' chair, and the fellows lined up on the porch outside are the Liars' Bench. In Floyd County whoever held the settin' chair got called Your Honor, because he ruled on every dispute that came in the door. Whose mule was faster, whether it'd frost by Thursday, whose marriage would last the winter. And his rulings stuck better than any judge's at the courthouse.
Wilkins: That's better law than we get in Merrimack County. Our judges rule on whatever's in the jar in front of them.
Clara: Ours too, but at least the jar's honest about it. Now I'll tell you one about chairs and the law. My granny's people traded at a store in Patrick County, right under the mountain, and the settin' chair there belonged to an old man everybody called Uncle Doss. Uncle Doss chewed from sunup to sundown, and he could spit with an aim that'd make a sharpshooter weep. He could hit a knothole across the room. So the men up the hollers worked out a code with him. When a stranger came in smelling of the law, Uncle Doss would lean forward real casual and spit on the hot stove top. Psssst. One sizzle meant nothing, a man's got to spit. Two sizzles meant watch him. Three sizzles meant the law is in the store. And the boy sweeping would hear three and walk out the back with his broom, easy as you please, and by dark there wasn't a lit still-fire for ten miles.
Wilkins: Spitting telegraphy! Clara, that's the finest use of tobacco juice I've heard since a Pittsfield girl put out a barn fire with her grandmother.
Clara: Well, it worked fine till the day a revenue man walked in with a cold and Uncle Doss got so excited he sizzled seven times. The boy didn't know what seven meant, so he ran off and told everybody the war had started again.
Wilkins: [laughing] Seven sizzles! Lord, Clara, half the county probably went back to digging rifle pits.
Clara: My granddaddy said three men took to the woods and didn't come out till Christmas.
Wilkins: Now, the second half of tonight's question. What did it cost to move a sitter down your way?
Clara: Depended on the sitter, same as here. But I'll tell you the dearest price I ever heard of, and the cheapest. My great-grandmother Viney wanted that settin' chair. Women didn't sit in it, see. It was the men's throne, and some dried-up old gossip named Pleasant Akers had held it since Monroe was president. Pleasant wasn't, by the way. Not one day of his life. So Viney walked in with her best broody hen in a basket and said, 'Pleasant, I'll swap you this hen for that chair.' He thought on it and took the deal. That hen would give him eggs and chicks, and the chair only gave him splinters. So Great-Granny Viney traded a setting hen for a setting man.
Wilkins: And which one turned out the better bargain?
Clara: Oh, the hen. She laid more eggs that spring than Pleasant ever laid ideas. And Granny Viney held that chair eleven years, and she knew about every courtship in Floyd County before the girl's own mama did.
Wilkins: Now that's a woman I'd stamp a coin for. Clara, tell the listeners what those Liars' Bench boys called the liquor. They surely didn't call it liquor with a revenue man sitting by the stove.
Clara: No sir. During the war the soldiers came home with a whole new dictionary for it, and the store porches soaked it up like cornbread soaks up pot liquor. Tanglefoot, because it ties your legs in a knot. Bust-head, because of what it does the next morning. Oh-be-joyful, which is what you say on the first jar and pray on the third. And forty-rod. The story was the rotgut was so mean it'd drop a man at forty rods off, so you didn't even have to drink it, just stand downwind.
Wilkins: Forty-rod! We've got a fellow in Barnstead whose breath alone measures about forty rods. He kisses his wife from the far side of the pasture and she still faints.
Clara: I'd bet my bonnet you've measured it, Doctor.
Wilkins: I measure everything. That's alchemy. Now give me one more. Tell me about a sitter they couldn't move with any trade at all.
Clara: Well, there was a circuit preacher who came through every fourth Sunday, and he'd plant himself in the settin' chair and preach at whoever was in the store. Folks were trying to buy coffee and he was preaching at 'em. Six hours. The storekeeper couldn't throw out a man of God, and he couldn't sell a pound of coffee with all that hellfire going. So the storekeeper's boy, a little red-headed devil named Lafe, took the fire tongs, picked a good live coal out of the stove, and slid it right in under the preacher's seat cushion.
Wilkins: Oh, Lord.
Clara: For about a minute nothing happened. The preacher kept on about the lake of fire. Then you smelled feathers, then you smelled wool, then you smelled preacher. And that man came up out of the chair like a rocket on the Fourth of July, still preaching, only now he was hollering about the torments of the damned from first-hand experience.
Wilkins: Twenty years preaching hellfire, and that coal gave him his first honest research!
Clara: Granddaddy said it was the best sermon he ever gave. Folks got religion on the spot. Mostly they got religion about being careful where they sat.
Wilkins: Clara Higgins, you're welcome on my Liars' Bench any day, and if you ever want the chair at Fort Wilkins, it'll cost you one setting hen and a promise not to feed it to the bear.
Clara: Deal, Doctor. But I'm keeping my hen out of reach of your bear and your forceps both.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, wax crackle swells
♪ Patent-medicine show drumroll and brass flourish, antique and tinny
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, step closer! You have heard tonight of men who would not leave their chairs for love nor tobacco. Well, here is something worth getting up for! The Flame-Flow still, the flagship of Moonshine Stills, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! If you appreciate authentic American craftsmanship, look no further. The Flame-Flow is built of heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, the brightest, cleanest copper the refiner's art can make, and fitted with precision-machined brass unions that seal tight and true. It's shaped to keep heat circulating steadily through the whole charge, so it delivers outstanding purity for essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations. No poor man's tin! No lead-soldered pots! Honest copper, honestly made, the pride of any workshop for just eight hundred ninety-nine dollars! See it with your own eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, if you can get past the bear. Or order direct at moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still. Once more: moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still! The Flame-Flow still, a copper heirloom your grandchildren will fight over!
♪ Brass flourish ends with a cymbal crash
♦ Wax crackle, slow drip into jar
♪ Low fiddle drone
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft, alchemical metallurgy for the honest workman. I'll walk you through it the way it was done in this valley, for history's sake. And I'll tell you right off what the law says, since the law's got enough to do without me: making spirits for drinking without the government's license is against the law of the land, and this program is for history and learning only.
Wilkins: You begin with the mash, and the mash begins with the grain. Take your cracked corn and cook it in hot water to a porridge, the way you'd boil hasty pudding for an army. But mark this: corn starch is not sugar, and yeast can't eat starch, any more than Barnaby can eat a Bible, though he's tried. So you add malt, which is sprouted barley or sprouted corn dried and ground. The malt turns the starch to sugar while the mash rests warm, and the mash goes thin and sweet on the tongue. Then you let it cool, and cool it properly. If the mash is too hot when you pitch the yeast, you've cooked the yeast like a lobster. Wait till it's about blood-warm, so a clean finger in it feels neither hot nor cold. Then pitch your yeast and cover it loose against flies.
Wilkins: Now the first warning, and it's a deadly one. Fermenting mash breathes out a heavy, invisible gas, and in a closed cellar or a pit it sinks and pools like water. I've known a man to climb down into a fermenting pit to fetch a dropped dipper and never climb back out. He didn't even struggle. He just lay down and went quiet. So keep air moving through your fermenting room, and never stick your head into a closed vessel. Keep it warm, too, near the stove but not on it. In three to five days the bubbling slows and the cap falls, and you've got your wash, a sour, beery stuff only a few parts in a hundred strong.
Wilkins: Strain the wash off the solids and charge your copper pot, and never fill it more than about three parts in four. A grain wash foams when it heats, foams like a Baptist at a dance. If it foams up into the cap and the arm, it can plug the vapor line. A plugged line on a hot pot builds pressure, and a pot under pressure turns into a bomb that will scald you and set your building afire. That's why you never seal a still and you never leave it unattended. Alcohol vapor is fire looking for a place to happen. Keep your flame low and steady, keep the worm cold with running water, and never bring an open lamp near the spout where the spirit drips.
Wilkins: Now, why copper? I've lectured you on the chemistry before, so tonight I'll just say it the alchemist's way. Copper is a scavenger. As the vapor rises, the copper grabs the stinking sulfur out of it the way a jealous wife grabs a letter, and holds it fast on the metal as a dark crust. That's why the inside of a working pot goes black. After every run, rinse that pot and scrub it bright with salt and vinegar, then rinse it again with clean water. The bright metal is the working metal. A green crust left inside is filth, not character.
Wilkins: Now the cuts, where a distiller proves whether he's an artisan or an undertaker's friend. Don't collect into one big jug like a sot. Use a long row of small jars and number every one. The first spirit that comes off is the foreshots, sharp and nasty, and you throw it out without a second thought. Throw out more than you think you need to. Next come the heads, and they smell like varnish, like a new-painted wagon, like the stuff a cabinetmaker cleans his brushes in. Those go too. Then come the hearts, sweet and clean, smelling of the grain and the field. That's what all the work was for. Last come the tails, which go oily and flat and smell of wet dog and old dishwater. Set those aside.
Wilkins: My own secret, which isn't much of a secret: line up your numbered jars and let them stand overnight with a cloth over them. In the morning your nose is rested and the spirit has settled. Go down the row and smell each one, and you'll find the very jar where the varnish stops and the sweetness starts. Your nose is a finer instrument than any brass gauge sold in Boston. And mind this especially if you work with fruit: apples and pears put more of the poison into the early part of the run than corn does, so with a fruit wash you cut even more generously at the front. A man who keeps his heads to save a few cents is buying a blind man's cane, or a coffin, at a very dear price.
♦ Drip into jar, slower now
Wilkins: There it is. Corn, malt, yeast, patience, copper, and an honest nose. Alchemy without the lies.
♪ Banjo roll
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang, and the mailbag. Tonight we have a listener who sent his question in by recorded tape all the way from the Carolina hills. Roll it.
♦ Tape hiss, a click, a faint wind
Wilkins: That's our call-in line. Here's the gentleman.
♦ Recorded voice, crackling and distant
Wilkins: The gentleman is Cletus Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, who goes by Rabbit, and I'll read you his question since the recording's as scratchy as a revival tent blanket. He writes: '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?'
Wilkins: Rabbit, God love your uncle, and God love you for asking. Let's take them one at a time, and let me strike a coin for each, because the truth deserves a stamp.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: First, the hickory ash. You heard me say earlier tonight what happens when you soak hardwood ash in water: you get lye, the same caustic stuff our grandmothers made soap with, and the same lye that takes the hulls off corn for hominy. Hickory ash makes some of the strongest. So when your uncle tosses hickory ash into a thump keg, he isn't cleaning his liquor. He's making soap with extra steps and a worse hangover. That lye fights the natural sourness of the run and can leave a soapy, flat taste. If any of it gets into the mash before the still, it can upset the yeast and stall the whole ferment. And it does not touch the poison. The poison in the heads boils off early in the run no matter what you put in the keg. The only way to get it out of your jar is to keep it out, by throwing out your foreshots and heads.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Second, the red oak shavings. Now, there's a reason no honest cooper in this land makes a whiskey barrel out of red oak. Red oak is full of open pores, like the cheek of a man who's had the smallpox, and spirit seeps straight through it. You could fill a red oak barrel Saturday and find it empty and the barn drunk by Monday. That's why coopers use white oak for tight barrels. Red oak shavings in the keg will give your liquor color and a woody bite, and they may fool a customer into thinking it's been aged. But color isn't cleanliness, Rabbit. Red oak in a thump keg is like a red-headed cousin at a wedding: it adds plenty of color and leaks all over everything.
Wilkins: Now, here's where your uncle isn't entirely crazy, and I'll give the old man his due. Over in Tennessee, before the war, some makers dripped their new spirit slowly through vats of maple charcoal, and it does smooth the bite of finished liquor. Charcoal is real stuff and does real work on flavor. So your uncle heard a true story about charcoal and turned it into a tall tale about ash, the way a gossip chair turns a sneeze into a consumption. But charcoal, ash, and shavings all share one gospel truth: none of them takes the poison out. The cuts do that, and only the cuts.
Wilkins: So, Rabbit: your uncle's not making swamp medicine exactly, but he's making swamp seasoning. Tell him Alchemist Wilkins of Pittsfield says to save his hickory ash for his wife's soap kettle and his red oak for the fireplace, and to cut his heads like he's cutting a bad debt. Shout-out to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller and all the good folks of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. If you ever come north, there's a Wilkins cent waiting for you, and you can trade it for an hour in my chair. Barnaby will probably let you keep your trousers.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside
Wilkins: Now one more myth to bury before we go, and it's an old one: the blue flame. You've all seen it at some store. A fellow pours a spoon of spirit on the counter, touches a match to it, and says, 'See there, clean blue flame, she's pure.' And if it burns yellow or red, he whispers that there's lead in it. Well, here's my verdict.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, twice, ringing
Wilkins: Hogwash, horsefeathers, and bear droppings. A blue flame proves your liquor will burn, the same way a pulled tooth proves you had a mouth. The very poison you most need to fear, the stuff in the heads, burns with a pale blue flame itself, so pretty a parson could warm his hands at it. A spoon of heads poured on a counter would pass the flame test with honors and still blind you by Sunday. And as for reading lead in a red flame, that's store-chair science, a story passed from mouth to mouth until everybody believes it and nobody ever checked. You can't see lead in a flame with any certainty. The only sure guard against lead is never to let it near your still: no lead solder, no salvaged metal, honest copper only. And the only guard against the poison in the heads is the cuts.
Wilkins: The blue flame is a parlor trick. Leave it to the medicine show.
♪ Brief tinny brass flourish
Announcer: Speaking of medicine shows, here's one last quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow still, United States Patent 10,561,960, pure electrolytic copper built to last a lifetime. Order today at moonshinestill.com. Once more: moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle, stove door clanks shut
♪ Theme returns softly, banjo and fiddle with antique warmth
Wilkins: That about settles the evening, friends. Thanks to Miss Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge for her spitting signals, her setting hen, and her scorched preacher. Thanks to Rabbit Miller for his question, and to his uncle for his swamp seasoning. And thanks to every sitter in every gossip chair from here to the Notch for keeping a country well informed and deeply suspicious of itself.
Wilkins: Remember, a gossip chair is a throne without a crown, a pulpit without a sermon, and a courthouse without the inconvenience of evidence. Treat its occupant kindly. He may be the man who warns you when the law is coming up the turnpike.
Wilkins: And if you want to learn the craft properly, from mash tub to the last numbered jar, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You'll learn copper, fire, fermentation, cuts by the nose, and the history behind all of it, taught honest and taught safe, with no blue-flame foolishness and no hickory ash in the keg. Ask at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, or ask the man in the chair down at the store. He already knows you're interested. He probably knew before you did.
Wilkins: As for old Elder Crumb, who told me on the store steps this very afternoon that I'm going to hell: Deacon, I'll hold you a seat by the stove.
♦ Barnaby huffs, chain clinks
Wilkins: Hush, Barnaby. I'm finishing.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme fades out into wax cylinder crackle