The Bribe That Backfired
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells how a Barnstead cider-brandy man bribed a Merrimack County deputy with a smoked ham meant to buy a raid on Fort Wilkins. Barnaby smelled the ham grease on the deputy, the ham turned out to be stolen, and its owner, a widow, sued in replevin and dragged the whole bribe into open court. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance tells his own stories of bribes that went wrong, including a banknote baked into a mince pie, a horse that tracked down a sugarhouse still, and a jug its own maker refused to drink. Wilkins also takes up Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ash and red oak in the thump keg and debunks the blue flame test.
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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! Settle down, you overgrown fur muff. You've had your supper already: half a bushel of windfall Baldwins, a pail of spent mash, and the left boot of a Loudon peddler who walked too close to your chain.
♦ Chain rattles hard against the log sill, bear huffs
Wilkins: No, you will not get ham tonight. Ham is a cursed meat in Merrimack County this autumn, and before the night's out every soul listening will know why. Lie down.
♦ Low, sulky bear grunt, chain goes slack
Wilkins: Look at him sulking like a deacon passed over for the collection plate.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then settling under the voice
Wilkins: Good evening, you sinners, saints, and fence-sitters of the Suncook Valley and beyond. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and the most-arrested philosopher in Merrimack County, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, here in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. It's the back end of 1865. The war is over, the leaves are coming down, and somewhere in Barnstead a man is still picking smoked ham out of his teeth and wishing he'd never been born.
Wilkins: Tonight's story is The Bribe That Backfired. I'll give you a smoked ham, a crooked deputy, a scheming rival, a widow with a branding iron and a lawyer's appetite, and Barnaby, who was the only honest party in the whole affair. Later on I've got a revenue man in the parlor, Captain Donald Vance, retired, of Manchester, and a recording all the way from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, from a gentleman called Rabbit. First, though, a word from the folks who keep the lamp oil burning.
♪ Quick banjo flourish
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, is handcrafted from heavy-gauge pure copper and built to last a lifetime. See it gleaming at Fort Wilkins, or order yours today at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Banjo flourish resolves
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. Ham, Fees, and Informers: How Bribery Worked in Granite State Law Enforcement.
♪ Slow fiddle under
Wilkins: You can't understand a bribe until you understand the man taking it. People picture a New Hampshire sheriff as a tin star standing for justice. Our county sheriffs aren't elected at all. The Governor and Council up in Concord appoint them, which means the man got his post by knowing somebody, and he keeps it by knowing somebody else. Under him are the deputies, and here's the rot at the root: a deputy isn't paid a proper salary. He lives mostly on fees. He gets a fee for serving a writ, a fee for making an arrest, a fee for hauling a man to court. Every warrant is a meal ticket to him, and a man who lives on fees will always take one more fee from whoever's offering, the county or otherwise.
Wilkins: Then Washington joined the dance. When Mr. Lincoln's revenue laws came in to pay for the war, they brought assessors and collectors and every sort of paper-pusher, and they put a bounty on your neighbor's neck. If you informed on a man for dodging the whiskey tax, you could take a share of the fines and forfeitures. Think about what that does to a hill town. Every man with a grudge, a debt, or a spinster sister he wants married off has a cash reason to point at the next farm over and holler 'still-house!' Half the revenue cases in this state started with a jealous neighbor rather than a detective.
♦ Wilkins pours from a jug into a tin cup, sips, smacks lips
Wilkins: So what does a bribe look like in rural New Hampshire? It's seldom gold, and it's seldom even greenbacks. Out here the country runs on barter. A farmer settles his account at the store with eggs, butter, a cord of wood, a firkin of salt pork. I've been paid for pulling a molar with everything from a pair of mittens to a sack of seed potatoes to one sulky goat, and the goat bit me harder than I bit the patient. Hard money's scarce, so when a man wants to grease a deputy he goes to the smokehouse, and the finest grease in New England is a cured ham.
Wilkins: Let me tell you what goes into a proper New England ham, because it matters to the story. In the cold months, after the hog's butchered and the blood's run off into the snow and the dogs have had their fill of the scraps, the hams are rubbed down with salt, a pinch of saltpeter, and molasses or brown sugar, and left in the cellar to cure. Saltpeter keeps the meat rosy. It's the same saltpeter that goes into gunpowder, which tells you a ham and a musket ball have more in common than most deputies do with the law. After the cure, the ham goes up in the smokehouse over smoldering corncobs and hickory or maple, and it hangs there for weeks, dripping and darkening, until it's mahogany-brown and smells like heaven's own kitchen. A ham like that is worth more than a month of a deputy's honesty, and in some cases a good deal more.
Wilkins: There's one more piece of law you'll need before I tell the tale, and it's a fine old word: replevin. It's an action at common law for getting your own goods back. If a man takes your property and won't return it, you go before the court and demand the thing itself, not just its value. Your cow, your plough, your clock, or your ham. Remember the word, because before this story's done a widow from Gilmanton is going to swing it like a cooper's mallet.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, chain clinks
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, you're in it too. Hush.
♪ Fiddle transition, a sly minor-key run
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Legends, Outlaws, and the Ham of Widow Pease.
Wilkins: Up at Barnstead Parade there lives a man named Thaddeus Grout. He makes cider brandy so harsh that the apples file a protest before they're pressed. Grout and I have been rivals since he tried to undersell me at the Epsom muster and wound up giving free samples to a regiment that marched home sideways. He's lean and yellow-toothed, with a laugh like a rusty pump handle, and he'd sell his own grandmother's teeth if he could find a buyer. I know he would, because I pulled those teeth and he tried to buy them back from me cheap.
Wilkins: Last September Grout decided the best way to sell more brandy was to get me raided. He couldn't inform on me himself without inviting a visit to his own cellar, so he went to Deputy Hosea Blodgett. Hosea has a face like a boiled boot and a waistline that suggests he's been bribed regularly since infancy. Grout made him an offer: raid Fort Wilkins, bust up my copper, haul me to court, and in return a fine smoked ham would be hanging in Hosea's smokehouse by Saturday night.
Wilkins: Grout had no ham. Grout has never in his life cured anything except his own reputation, and he did a poor job of that. What Grout did have was a mother-in-law, the Widow Mehitable Pease of Gilmanton, who keeps the best smokehouse between the Suncook and the Lakes. The widow has lost hams to thieves before, so three winters back she came here to Fort Wilkins and had me forge her a little branding iron with the letters M.P. on it, so she could burn her initials into the rind of every ham she cured. I hammered that iron on this very anvil. I'd know my own work blindfolded and drunk, and I've been both at once.
♦ Distant anvil ring for emphasis
Wilkins: One night, while the widow was at a prayer meeting, Grout crept into her smokehouse and helped himself to her finest ham, a fat, dark, twenty-pound beauty. He carried it over the hill to Epsom and hung it in Hosea Blodgett's smokehouse, bribe delivered. And Hosea loved that widow's ham dearly. He had his hands on it every night for a week, which is more than her late husband managed in thirty years of marriage.
♦ Barnaby huffs outside
Wilkins: The next Tuesday Hosea came up Route 28 on his swaybacked mare with a warrant in his pocket, a pistol on his hip, and a week of ham grease ground into the front of his greatcoat. He hadn't washed that coat since Lee surrendered. He meant to sneak round to the still-house window, peek in, and catch me red-handed. What he forgot was who lives under that window.
Wilkins: Barnaby smelled the ham on that coat the way a Concord lawyer smells a dead man's will. I was inside skimming a fresh run when I heard the chain go taut, a sound like a ship's cable snapping, and then a scream I can only describe as a church organ being stabbed. I came round the corner to find Hosea flat on his back in the burdock with four hundred pounds of black bear sitting on his belly, licking his face from chin to eyebrows with a tongue like a wet saddle blanket. Every lick took up a little more ham grease and a little more of Hosea's mustache. Then Barnaby found the coat pocket where the deputy had stashed a hunk of rind for the ride. He took the whole pocket off in one bite, and the lining and two brass buttons went with it. Then he decided the rest of the coat might taste the same and went to work on it with his teeth and claws. The coat came apart in three pieces, the way a boiled chicken comes off the bone.
Wilkins: All the while Hosea lay there wailing for his mother, his Maker, and the sheriff, in that order. His mare had bolted halfway to Barnstead. And the smell coming off that man by the time Barnaby let him up told me plain that his bowels had resigned their commission before the rest of him did. He lost his coat, his hat, his dignity, and the contents of his breeches that afternoon, and only the hat was ever recovered. Barnaby buried it behind the woodpile, which shows better taste than the deputy ever did.
♦ Satisfied bear grunt, chain clinks
Wilkins: So I hauled Hosea up, sat him on a stump, poured him a medicinal tin of something clear, and asked him a gentle question: 'Hosea, where does a man get a ham this rich so early in October?' A deputy with a bear's breath still drying on his face isn't a cautious man, and a deputy with my medicine in his belly is even less so. He bragged. He said it was the finest ham in Merrimack County, with letters burned right into the rind like a gentleman's monogram. And I said, 'M.P., by any chance?' He said yes. I sent him home in a horse blanket and took my wagon to Gilmanton before supper.
Wilkins: When I told the Widow Pease where her ham had gone, she didn't faint and she didn't weep. She went into the parlor, got out her late husband's lawbook, put on her spectacles, and said one word: 'Replevin.' By Friday a justice of the peace had issued the writ, and Hosea Blodgett, of all the men in God's creation, had to produce the ham in open court.
Wilkins: You never saw such a crowd. Farmers came from Chichester and Northwood. The schoolmaster dismissed the children so they could learn some practical law. Hosea carried the ham in on a platter like a man bringing his own head to the executioner. Half of it was gone, carved to the bone, but there on the rind, black and plain as Scripture, were the letters M.P. The justice leaned over and asked him how he'd come by the widow's property. Now Hosea was stuck between a bear and a briar. He could confess to theft or he could confess to taking a bribe, and he chose the bribe, on the theory that a thief is a criminal while a bribed deputy is merely a public servant. He pointed straight at Thaddeus Grout in the third row and said, 'He gave it me to raid Wilkins.'
♦ Courtroom gasp effect, a gavel
Wilkins: The whole hall turned to look at Grout, and so did his mother-in-law. Grout tried to slip out the side door, but the widow is a quicker woman than she looks. She had him by the collar before he cleared the stove. She sued the both of them for the ham, the damages, and the costs, and the justice gave her every penny: four dollars and fifty cents for a twenty-pound ham, plus the fees. The sheriff relieved Hosea of his badge before supper, the only fee that deputy ever paid back. As for Grout, his wife locked him out of the house, and he spent three cold nights in his own cider barn, where I'm told he finally tasted his own brandy and repented.
Wilkins: The widow took home the hambone and hung it over her mantel like a twelve-point buck. She's had more callers come to admire it than ever came to admire her. She sent me a ham at Christmas, unbranded, with a note that said, 'For the iron.' I sent back a jar and a note that said, 'For the bone.' Folks, a bribe is just a confession that took the long way round by way of the smokehouse.
♪ Fiddle sting
Wilkins: My guest tonight knows all about bribes, having been offered more of them than a Concord alderman. He's a retired revenue officer from Manchester, a man who has crossed more frozen notches and walked into more dark cellars after copper outfits than any lawman living. He's no friend to a crooked still, but I'm told he tips his hat to a clean one. Captain Donald Vance, welcome to Fort Wilkins. Mind the bear on your way in.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. I minded him. He minded me too. He looked me over the way my old sergeant inspected a new boot, and I believe I passed only because I'd had the good sense not to eat ham for breakfast.
Wilkins: You're a wise man, Captain. Now, you heard about Deputy Blodgett. In all your years chasing copper, did a bribe ever bite the man offering it?
Captain: Doctor, I've found that a bribe is about the most reliable evidence there is. A man who isn't guilty doesn't bake you anything. Let me tell you about a farm wife in Bethlehem, up north of the Notch. I'd come to inspect her husband's barn, on account of a sour smell drifting downhill whenever the wind came round. She met me at the door all smiles and sat me down to a mince pie still steaming from the oven. I'm a weak man for mince pie, Doctor, and I'll say so before God and this microphone. I took one great bite and hit something that wasn't raisin or suet. It was a five-dollar greenback, folded into a little square and baked right into the filling.
Wilkins: Good Lord. Did you swallow it?
Captain: Very nearly. I coughed and choked until my eyes watered, and that good woman pounded my back like she was beating a rug, apologizing the whole time for the crust. When I'd got my breath I unfolded the note on her tablecloth, mince and all, and wrote it into evidence: one note, five dollars, baked. Her husband's barn had a forty-gallon outfit in the hayloft. In court the judge asked to see the note, and it was still sticky with mincemeat. He looked at it a long while and said it was the first bribe he'd ever had to lick his fingers after examining.
Wilkins: A five-dollar greenback baked at three hundred degrees is the only money in this republic that's ever been properly cooked by anybody but the Treasury.
Captain: [laughs, a deep rumble] I'll grant you that one, Doctor.
Wilkins: Now, I'm told your horse once did better work than half the revenue service.
Captain: He did. I rode a big bay gelding named Deuteronomy, so called because he was the second law, and he followed the first one, which was me, only when he cared to. We were working the country around Stowe over in Vermont. I'd stopped at a farmhouse to ask a few questions of a man I'd heard things about, and he answered every one of them politely and lied in all of them. While I was in his kitchen, the scoundrel slipped out and left a cake of maple sugar on my saddle, the size of a family Bible, with a note tucked under it that said 'For your trouble, and your forgetting.'
Wilkins: And Deuteronomy ate the evidence.
Captain: Deuteronomy ate the evidence, the note, and a corner of the saddle blanket. I rode off with nothing to show. But the next morning that horse would not go down the road. He planted his feet, put his nose to the wind, and turned up the hill onto the sap road with his ears pricked like a hound's. I let him have his head. He went a mile and a half through the sugar bush, right to the man's sugarhouse, and pushed his nose against the door. Behind the evaporator pan, among all that maple steam where nobody would notice another sweet smell, was a copper still running full tilt. The man had bribed me with his own sugar, and my horse followed the scent home like a child following a peddler's cart.
Wilkins: Captain, that's the only revenue officer in New England with a sweet tooth and a perfect arrest record. Did the horse get a share of the forfeiture?
Captain: He got an apple and a commendation in my report, which is more than the Treasury ever gave me.
Wilkins: Now, I've heard a story about a goose.
Captain: [sighs] Doctor, I was hoping you hadn't. Down near Woodstock there was a distiller who thought every problem could be solved with livestock. My partner that season was a young inspector, earnest as a Sunday school teacher and twice as soft. The distiller met us in the dooryard with a fat gray goose under his arm and held it out to my partner. He said, 'Christmas is coming, young man. Take her home to your mother.' My partner reached out to refuse it politely, and that goose took his thumb in her bill and twisted like she was wringing out a dishrag.
Wilkins: Ha! I know that twist. I've used it on molars.
Captain: Then she got loose and chased him three times around the woodpile with her wings out, hissing like a teakettle on a hot stove, while the distiller stood there shouting, 'She likes you!' My partner climbed onto the chopping block. I didn't lift a finger, because I was laughing too hard to stand. When I wrote the report I put it down exactly as it happened: one goose, offered, refused, resisted. The judge made me read it out loud twice.
Wilkins: A goose is a bribe that bites back, which makes it the most honest bribe ever offered. Captain, you're the only revenue man I know who's been bribed with a pie, a horse's breakfast, and a goose, which makes you either very honest or very poorly paid.
Captain: Both, Doctor. They usually go together. But let me tell you the one bribe I'm proudest of turning down, because there's a lesson in it. Up in Lisbon there was a man who ran a sloppy little outfit in a root cellar. He came out to meet me with a jug in his hand and a big grin and said, 'Captain, have a taste, and we'll call it square.' I said, 'Friend, I'll take that jug on one condition. You drink from it first.' His grin dropped like a shot crow. He wouldn't touch it. He made excuses about his stomach and his wife and his temperance pledge. A man who won't drink his own whiskey has told you everything you need to know about it.
Wilkins: And he's told you for free.
Captain: Exactly so. I went down into the cellar, and sure enough, his worm was patched together from scrap with lead solder at every joint. Lead is a slow poison. It works into the drink, and it'll rot a man's gut and his mind and his kidneys over a few seasons. That fellow was selling it to mill hands in Littleton and wouldn't drink a drop himself. I broke up that outfit with my own boot heel the same day, and I didn't feel one ounce of pity. Now, a man with a clean copper pot, honestly made, who takes care with his cuts, I'll arrest him if the law says I must. But I'll shake his hand while I do it. A man who poisons strangers for silver doesn't get a handshake from me.
Wilkins: Spoken like a man I'd let past my bear. Captain Donald Vance, thank you for coming up the turnpike. Barnaby says you may leave with all your limbs, which is the highest honor Fort Wilkins can give.
Captain: I'm obliged to you both, Doctor. Tell the bear I'll bring him an apple next time. No ham.
♦ Barnaby grunts approvingly, chain clinks
♪ Banjo and fiddle bridge, bright and quick
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
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♪ Banjo flourish and fiddle stomp to close the ad
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft: Cider Brandy, Wicked Pectin, and the Honest Run.
♪ Low, thoughtful fiddle under
Wilkins: Since tonight's villain is a cider-brandy man, let's talk about apples. Before there was a drop of corn whiskey in New Hampshire there was cider, and where there's cider some clever devil will try to make it stronger. But apple spirits have a trap in them that grain spirits mostly don't, and Thaddeus Grout has fallen into it head first for twenty years.
Wilkins: The trap is pectin. Pectin is the stuff in fruit skins and pulp that makes jelly set. Your grandmother boiled it out of apple peelings to firm up her preserves. When fruit ferments, pectin breaks down and gives off methanol, the wood alcohol that blinds and kills. Grain mash and sugar washes make very little of it. Apples, especially mashed whole with skins and pomace and the bruised windfalls nobody wanted, make a good deal more. That's why a fruit brandy needs even more care in the cutting than a corn whiskey. Grout ferments every rotten windfall in Barnstead, skins, worms, and all. That's why his brandy is the only drink that gives you the headache before you've finished pouring.
Wilkins: Then there's jacking. Some of you up in the hill towns don't bother with a still. You set a barrel of hard cider out in the January cold, let the water freeze into ice, and pour off the strong liquor in the middle. Applejack, they call it, and it's easy and cheap and it'll give you a headache for a week. Here's the alchemy of why: freezing takes out water and nothing else. Every bit of methanol and every drop of fusel oil that was in the cider is still in the jack, packed tighter than before. A still lets you throw the bad parts away. A frozen barrel keeps all of it for you. Jacking is how a Gilmanton farmer turns ten gallons of honest headache into one gallon of first-class misery.
♦ Wilkins taps a copper pot, a warm bell-like ring
Wilkins: Now let me walk you through how a careful man runs cider brandy, so you understand the old craft. Remember the law of the land: making liquor for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and I tell this for history and education, the way a professor talks about cannon without handing you one.
Wilkins: First, the fruit. Sound apples only, washed, with the rotten ones thrown to the hogs or to Barnaby, who isn't particular. Grind them, press the juice, and leave the pomace behind as much as you can, because the pomace is where the pectin lives. Second, the ferment. Put the sweet cider in clean casks in a cellar that stays cool but not freezing, and let it work for some weeks until it's dry hard cider. That's your wash, a few percent alcohol and no more. Third, the still. A good copper pot, sound joints, no lead anywhere, and a fire you can control. Fourth, and this is where the fools get burned, fire it gentle. If you rush the heat, the cider foams up and pukes wash straight over into your worm. That fouls the whole run and can choke the vapor path. A man who fires his still too hot is like a young husband on his wedding night: all rush, a terrible mess, and nothing worth keeping at the end.
Wilkins: Fifth, catch your run in small jars, lined up on a plank and numbered with chalk. Don't use one big crock. The first trickle, the foreshots, goes straight to the ground or the lamp, never down anybody's throat. Then come the heads, which smell sharp, like varnish or nail-polish solvent. Those go aside too. Next are the hearts, sweet and clean and smelling of baked apple, and those are the keepers. Last come the tails, oily, wet-dog, and cardboard-tasting, and those are set aside to run again another day. With numbered jars you can judge each one by nose and taste and pour off the bad without ruining the good. With one crock you've married the whole run, bad relatives included.
Wilkins: Sixth, mind your fire, because a still-house is a powder magazine in an apron. Liquor vapor is heavier than air. If your still leaks, the vapor doesn't rise politely up the chimney. It creeps along the floor like a cat after a mouse until it finds your lantern or your firebox, and then the whole building goes up in one breath. I've seen a still-house in Strafford burn down in the time it takes to say the Lord's Prayer, and the owner came out with no eyebrows and religion. Keep the place aired out. Never leave a running still alone, not even to relieve yourself behind the woodpile. Keep the jars well away from the flame, and keep a bucket of sand and a bucket of water handy. Copper can clean up your sulfur, but it can't do a thing for your stupidity.
♦ Barnaby yawns loudly, chain clinks
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. Barnaby's afraid of exactly one thing in this world, and it's fire, and he's a wiser creature than most distillers on that account.
♪ Fiddle and banjo transition, jaunty
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, Slang, and the Mailbag. Tonight we've got something fine: a wax cylinder sent up by post all the way from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, wrapped in cotton batting and a page of the Wilkes County newspaper. The war's over, the mails are running, and a man down South has a question for a Yankee alchemist. Let's crank her up.
♦ Phonograph crank turning, needle scratch, hiss of a distant recording
Cletus: Alchemist, this is 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?
♦ Needle lifts, crackle fades
Wilkins: Rabbit Miller! Welcome to Fort Wilkins, son. Barnaby says hello, and he says Wilkesboro sounds like a place with a good many rabbits, which to Barnaby is a compliment and a dinner invitation at once. Now let me give your uncle his due before I take him to the woodshed.
Wilkins: Start with hickory ash. Every farm wife in New England knows what wood ash is, because she makes soap with it. You pour water through a barrel of hardwood ash, the water runs out brown and slick, and that's lye. In my granddaddy's day this whole country made potash for trade the same way, by leaching hardwood ash and boiling the lye down in big iron pots. That's how the stuff got its name, pot-ash. So when your uncle throws hickory ash into his thump keg, he isn't purifying anything. He's making a soap kettle. Lye is caustic. It'll burn the skin off your knuckles and blind you if it splashes. It can make a hot charge foam up something terrible, and it does nothing to carry bad heads away. Your uncle's hickory ash is fine for making soap, Rabbit, and after a few jars of his swamp medicine he may need some.
Wilkins: Now the red oak, which is the funnier half. Ask any cooper on the Suncook and he'll tell you he'd never make a whiskey barrel out of red oak. It leaks like a Concord politician. Red oak is so open in the grain, all little tubes running the length of the wood, that you can cut a short stick of it, put one end in your mouth, and blow pipe smoke out the other. I've done it in a tavern to win a bet, and I've watched a drunk try it with a white oak stick and nearly burst a lung. That's why tight barrels are white oak. Here's the grain of truth in your uncle's tale: oak shavings soaked in spirit do give it color, tannin, and a woody flavor, the way a barrel does over time. So the old-timers who tossed oak into the run may have thought the spirit tasted smoother. They were flavoring it, not cleaning it. You can blow smoke through red oak, and judging by that letter, your uncle has been blowing smoke through his whole beard.
Wilkins: The only honest way to deal with bad heads, Rabbit, is to make your cuts and throw the heads out, and before that to ferment a clean mash so you have less trouble to begin with. Ash, shavings, prayers, and rabbit's feet are all decoration.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's a fresh Indian Head cent with my mark on it, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and I'm putting it in the post to Wilkesboro for Rabbit Miller. Let it be the first piece of Yankee copper to go south since the war that wasn't fired out of a cannon.
Wilkins: While the anvil's still ringing, let me knock down a myth that's killed better men than your uncle: the blue flame test. You'll see it at every county fair and corn husking. A fellow pours a spoonful of liquor, sets a match to it, and if it burns clean and blue he pronounces it pure and safe. If it burns yellow or red, he says there's lead in it or poison or the Devil. It's all humbug.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Methanol, the blinding wood alcohol, burns with a pale blue flame, almost invisible in daylight, just like good grain spirit does. A spoonful that would put out your eyes will burn as pretty and blue as a church candle. That flame can't tell you a thing about methanol. And no flame on God's earth will reliably tell you about lead, because lead doesn't announce itself with fireworks. The blue flame test is like asking a horse thief whether the horse is his: you'll get a pretty answer and no truth whatsoever. Your protection is clean copper, honest joints, a decent mash, and cuts made by a sober man with a good nose. Shout-out to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Give your uncle my compliments, and tell him to keep his ashes for the soap kettle.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
♪ Banjo flourish
Announcer: A quick word before we part, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, heavy-gauge pure copper, handcrafted to shine for generations. Order yours today at moonshinestill.com, or visit the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28!
♪ Banjo flourish resolves into the theme, low and warm
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: That's the night's work, friends. To sum it up: a deputy took a ham, the ham took the deputy, and the widow took them both to court. Barnaby has never taken a bribe in his life, because he prefers to eat the man offering it. That's the closest thing to incorruptible you'll find in Merrimack County.
Wilkins: If tonight's talk of pectin and jars and cuts has your curiosity burning, and I mean only your curiosity, not your still-house, then sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You'll learn copper, mash, fire, and history from a man who's been arrested for it twice and has the teeth of half the county in a cigar box to prove his credentials. Study the craft, respect the law, and keep your eyebrows.
Wilkins: My thanks to Captain Donald Vance, to his horse Deuteronomy, and even to that Woodstock goose. My thanks to Rabbit Miller for his recording, to the Widow Pease for her courage, and to every one of you out there by the stove with the lamp turned low. 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 out under wax cylinder crackle