Letters to Mrs. Wilkins
With Mrs. Wilkins away at her sister's in Barnstead, the Alchemist opens her cedar letter box on the air. He reads her letters from his jail days, her demand to the Merrimack sheriff for the return of her best kettle, and her account of what Barnaby did to a lightning-rod peddler who couldn't keep his hands to himself. He also covers the 1863 three-cent letter rate, coverture, and the old household still-room. Retired Wilkes County runner Junior Vance tells four new stories about his wife Ruby Jean, who ran his books, his signals and once his decoy car. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro asks about hickory ash and red oak in the thump keg, and Wilkins explains the lye chemistry and the leaky grain of red oak before striking down the blue-flame myth on his anvil.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby. BARNABY. Settle your great stinking carcass down. That is the postman's horse, not your supper. If you eat one more mail sack, the Missus says she will make a rug of you and a widow of me in the same afternoon, and she is a woman of her word on both counts.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen dirt, a heavy thump as he drops to his belly
Wilkins: Good bear. Stupid bear, but a good one. Lie there and digest the postman's glove.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners and you two deacons I know are listening behind the woodshed. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, here in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Doctor of teeth, smith of iron, alchemist of copper, and tonight a man taking a great risk with his own hide.
Wilkins: Here is the risk. Under our bed is a cedar box tied with blue ribbon, and in it are twenty years of letters to Mrs. Wilkins, from Mrs. Wilkins, and about Mrs. Wilkins. She does not know that I know where she keeps it. She went to her sister's in Barnstead till Thursday. So tonight's program is called Letters to Mrs. Wilkins: the long-suffering wife's side of the business. If she hears this broadcast, you will hear the next one from the bottom of the Suncook, read by a catfish.
♦ Wax crackle, a ribbon being untied, dry paper rustling
Wilkins: But first, a word from the man who sells the copper so I can afford the postage.
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♪ Short banjo sting
The History: Three Cents, A Still-Room, And A Wife Who Is Legally Me
♦ Fire popping in the stove, kettle ticking as it heats
Wilkins: Before I read anybody's private correspondence, I will give you the history, because a scoundrel with footnotes is still called a scholar.
Wilkins: When I was a young man, a letter cost you by the mile. Send one to Concord and it cost one sum; send one to Ohio and the post office charged you for every rut in the road. Then in 1863, with the war still on, Congress set one rate for the whole Union: three cents a half-ounce, Boston to the Pacific, effective that July. That means it now costs the same to insult your brother-in-law in Ohio as it does to insult him across the road, and I have taken full advantage.
Wilkins: There's another change the old-timers still grumble about. It used to be that the man who got the letter paid for it. You could send a creditor a fat envelope of nothing and make him pay to open it. But from 1855 the sender had to pay ahead, and from 1856 it had to be with a stamp. My Uncle Ephraim mailed his debts to other people for thirty years and then the government took away his only hobby.
♦ Wilkins sips from a tin cup, smacks his lips
Wilkins: Now to the wife's side of the business. A woman married to a distiller in the year 1865 is a woman in a peculiar legal fix. The old common law has a doctrine called coverture. It means that when a woman marries, her legal self is folded into her husband's like a letter into an envelope. She cannot easily own property apart from him, sign a contract or sue in her own name. The states have been chipping at it with married women's property acts, a piece here and a piece there, but the bones of it are still standing. In the eyes of the old law, Mrs. Wilkins and I are one person. In this house we settled long ago which one.
Wilkins: And here is the joke on the lawmakers. Long before any man in a leather apron stood over a whiskey pot, the still belonged to the women. In the old English manor houses and in the better colonial homes there was a room called the still-room, and it was the housewife's kingdom. She had a little copper alembic in there, and she distilled rose water, mint water, lavender water, cordials for the colic and waters for the complexion. She wrote it all down in her own hand in a household receipt book and passed it to her daughters like a family Bible. My wife's grandmother had one. The Missus keeps it in that same cedar box, and there is not one man's handwriting in it.
Wilkins: Then came the war. Half the men in the Suncook Valley went south with the New Hampshire regiments, and the women ran the farms, the shops, the accounts and the mail. The only thread between a soldier in Virginia and a kitchen in Pittsfield was a three-cent letter. So when I say letters, I mean the true history of this country, folded in quarters and sealed with candle wax.
♪ Soft fiddle bridge, melancholy then turning sly
The Letters, A Peddler'S Backside, And A Guest From The Brushy Mountains
♦ Paper unfolding, wax crackle
Wilkins: Letter the first. Most of you know I have been a guest of Merrimack County twice, on account of a misunderstanding about whether whiskey belongs to the man who makes it or the man who taxes it. During the first of those stays I wrote home from the Concord lockup. Here is my letter, and I quote: 'My dearest. The food here is an insult to a hog and the company is an insult to the hog's relations. Please send my good pillow, a jar of the medicinal, and your tender sympathies.'
Wilkins: And here is her reply. She wrote it on the back of a seed bill, which tells you how much stationery she thought I deserved. 'George. Pillow enclosed. Jar not enclosed, as that is what put you there. Sympathies not enclosed, as I have none to spare. The bear has eaten better this week than you, and I have slept better than either of you. The house has never been so quiet, and I have put up nine quarts of applesauce without anybody sticking a finger in it. Do not hurry home. Your wife.' And under that, a postscript: 'Barnaby misses you. He is the only one.'
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, almost on cue
Wilkins: Hush, you traitor.
♦ Second letter unfolding, stiffer paper
Wilkins: Letter the second, a copy in her own hand of a letter she sent to the Merrimack County sheriff after his deputies hauled away her copper kettle as evidence. Not my still, mind you. HER kettle. The good one, with the brass bail, that she cooked her apple butter in. The deputies decided anything copper on this property was a criminal. My wife's letter to the sheriff was so hot he read it with blacksmith's tongs.
Wilkins: She writes: 'Sir. Your men have taken a kettle that has never held anything stronger than apple butter and once, on a bad Christmas, my husband's foot. I would like to know whether the county wants it as evidence or as a hat, because it would fit your head better than your last idea. If it is not returned by Saturday, I shall come to Concord myself and the county will learn the meaning of the word assessment.' The kettle came back Friday, polished. The sheriff delivered it with his own hands and his hat in them. Mrs. Wilkins gave him a slice of pie and did not give him a fork.
♦ Wilkins chuckling, then a third envelope tearing open
Wilkins: Now letter the third. This one is from Mrs. Wilkins to her sister in Barnstead, and I am not supposed to have it, because her sister mailed it back to her to keep as a souvenir. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the story of the lightning-rod peddler.
Wilkins: Some summers back a lightning-rod man came up the Turnpike in a painted wagon. Waxed mustache, checked trousers, smelling of bay rum and bad intentions. While I was in the tooth room with a patient, he stopped at our pump, where Mrs. Wilkins was drawing water. He tried to sell her a copper rod for the roof, and when she said no, he said he had another rod she might like better. Then the man swatted her on the backside, the way you would slap a mare at an auction.
Wilkins: I will read it as she wrote it: 'Sister, I did not scream. I smiled and told him the Doctor kept his purse round back by the woodpile and would pay double for a man of his talents. He went round back. I went inside and closed the window, but not all the way.'
♦ Chain rattling hard, a deep huffing roar
Wilkins: My friends, I was elbow-deep in a Gilmanton man's jaw when I heard it. It started as a sort of bubbling yelp, like a hound stepped on by a cow. Then there was a sound I can only compare to a wet bedsheet being torn by two strong men, and then a howl that went up and up until it cracked like a boy's voice in a church choir. By the time I came round the corner with my forceps still in my hand, Barnaby had that peddler by the seat of his checked trousers and was shaking him the way a terrier shakes a rat. Coins flew out of his pockets. His mustache wax had melted down his chin. His left boot sailed clean over the woodpile.
Wilkins: When Barnaby finally let go, it was not because I asked. It was because the trousers gave out. The bear kept the whole seat of the breeches, plus a strip of hide off that man's left haunch about the size of a Sunday ham slice, plus a red flannel shirttail. He sat down and ate the lot, chewing it thoughtfully, like a deacon with a hard biscuit. The man lay face-down in the chips with his naked hindquarters steaming in the August air and a set of tooth marks on him you could have read like a newspaper.
Wilkins: I stitched him up on my dental chair with waxed silk, eleven stitches. I charged him a dollar for the stitches and two bits for listening to him holler, and I let him keep his life for free on account of Christian charity. In his back pocket he had a tin of snuff, which Barnaby also ate, and that bear sneezed for a week like a Methodist at a pepper mill. The peddler never came up Route 28 again. I hear he sells his rods in Vermont now and sits on a feather cushion.
Wilkins: Mrs. Wilkins's letter ends: 'The Doctor says it was a shocking thing to witness. The Doctor did not witness the swat. I did. We are both content.' And that, friends, is what a long-suffering wife looks like: she suffers long, and then somebody else suffers all at once.
♪ Banjo flourish
Wilkins: Now, I am not the only man in history who married above his station and below his patience. My guest tonight comes up the long road from North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, out of the Brushy Mountains. He's a driver of considerable reputation and, I am told, the husband of a formidable woman. Please welcome Junior Vance.
Junior: Evenin', Doc. Lord, that bear's got breath like a gut wagon in July.
Wilkins: He had a peddler for lunch some years back and has never fully aired out. Junior, I asked you here because tonight is about the wives. Behind every man who ever ran a jar down a mountain there was a woman at the kitchen table who did the ciphering, did the worrying and did a good deal of the cussing. Tell me about Mrs. Vance.
Junior: Ruby Jean. Doc, Ruby Jean could do sums in her head faster'n I could take a curve, and I could take a curve. She kept every dollar I ever hauled in a ledger, and you know where she kept the ledger?
Wilkins: Under the mattress, like a sensible woman?
Junior: In her hymnbook. The Baptist hymnal, in pencil, in the margins, coded by hymn number. 'Rock of Ages' was the fellow in Statesville. 'Shall We Gather at the River' was the buyer over toward the creek. If she wrote 'Amazing Grace, four verses, twice,' that meant forty dollars come in and twenty owed. Revenue men tore our house up three times. Pulled the floor boards, poked the flour sack, went through my sock drawer like they was lookin' for the Lost Dutchman. Not one of 'em ever opened that hymnal.
Wilkins: Junior, a man who keeps his books in a hymnal is either very holy or very crooked, and I have never seen the two be strangers.
Junior: Preacher asked her one Sunday why her book had so many pencil marks. She said she was makin' notes on the Lord's arithmetic. He shook her hand and said he wished more of the congregation studied that close.
♦ Wilkins slapping the table, laughing
Wilkins: Ha! That woman ought to be in charge of the Treasury. What else did she do?
Junior: She ran the signals. We lived up high, and you could see our backyard clothesline from the road comin' up the hollow. If she hung my red long johns out, that meant revenue men on the ridge, turn around and go home the long way. A row of white pillowcases meant the road was clean as a church floor. Worked slick for years.
Wilkins: I sense a calamity coming.
Junior: One March there come a wind straight off the Blue Ridge, and it blew the neighbor woman's red flannel petticoat off her line, across the pasture and smack onto ours, right in amongst Ruby Jean's white pillowcases. I come up the hollow with a full load, see that red flappin', and figure the whole federal government's waitin' on the porch. I turned around and drove four hours the wrong direction, hid the load in a hay barn in another county and slept in the car with a mouse in my hat. Come home two days later and there's nothin' on the ridge but a turkey buzzard and Ruby Jean on the porch with her arms crossed, wantin' to know where I'd been.
Wilkins: A red flannel petticoat in the wrong wind did what no revenue man in North Carolina could ever do: it turned Junior Vance around.
Junior: The neighbor woman never did get it back. Ruby Jean kept it. Said it'd done more honest work in one afternoon than I did all spring.
Wilkins: Now, Junior, I've been told there was a night your wife made you sleep outside.
Junior: Three nights, Doc. There was a buyer down in Charlotte who ran short of cash and paid me part in goods: a crate of cheap rose toilet water, the kind a dance-hall girl splashes on. Comin' home on the washboard road, the crate busted in the trunk. Every bottle. I come in at two in the morning smellin' like a whole flower garden had died on me.
Wilkins: Junior smelled like a Boston bawdy-house parlor and swore it was business, which is the same thing every man in a Boston bawdy-house parlor swears.
Junior: That's about what she said, only she used words the hymnbook don't have. She put my pillow and the quilt on the porch alongside Buford, our coonhound. Buford got one smell of me and went and slept under the truck. Three nights I was on that porch, swattin' skeeters and smellin' like a church wedding. Finally the buyer come up the mountain himself, took his hat off at the door and swore on his mama's grave it was his toilet water and not some woman's. Ruby Jean let me back in. Car smelled of roses for two years. Deputy pulled me over once and asked if I was headed to a funeral.
♦ Barnaby sneezes loudly outside
Wilkins: Even the bear's offended. One more, Junior. The one I'm told you don't like telling.
Junior: Aw, Doc.
Wilkins: The Missus is in Barnstead and your Ruby Jean is in North Carolina. Nobody's listening but sinners.
Junior: All right. I busted my wrist one winter. Slipped on the ice carryin' a sack of sugar, of all the fool things. I couldn't drive. We had a load that had to go, and a deputy who'd been sittin' on the end of our road for a week. So the plan was a decoy: the empty car goes one way loud and fast, the real load goes the other way quiet with my cousin. Only there was nobody to drive the decoy.
Wilkins: Oh no.
Junior: Ruby Jean got up from the supper table in her pink hair curlers, her housecoat and her house slippers, took my keys off the nail and said, 'Hold the baby.' She come out of that driveway throwin' gravel like a hailstorm. That deputy lit out after her, and she ran him all the way round the Brushies, up past the church, down the back of the ridge and twice past his own house. Finally she pulled into the Pentecostal church lot, got out, and when he come up with his flashlight she was standin' there in her curlers holdin' a Bible she kept in the glove box. Told him she was late for prayer meetin'. He apologized to her, Doc. Apologized. Meanwhile my cousin had the load clean to Charlotte and back.
Wilkins: His wife outran the law in curlers, and I have known Concord sheriffs who could not outrun a sermon.
Junior: Doc, that's forty years ago, and every time I get a little proud of my drivin' at a family supper, she sets down her fork and says, 'Pass the curlers.' And the whole table busts out laughin'. I ain't won an argument since.
Wilkins: Junior, I have pulled four thousand teeth and not one patient bit me as hard as one sentence from my wife. You and I are brothers in a very old order. Thank you for making the trip.
Junior: Thank you, Doc. And keep that bear away from my rental mule.
♪ Rollicking fiddle reel transitions to a brass bell ding
Ad Break
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♪ Brass bell ding, banjo returns
Copper And The Craft: Her Still-Room And Mine
♦ Copper lid lifted with a soft ring, steam hissing
Wilkins: You heard the pitchman talk about Grandmother's still-room, and for once a pitchman told the truth, which ought to be written up in the Concord paper. Mrs. Wilkins has her own little copper pot. She uses it for rose water, and she makes better spirit of roses than I make spirit of anything. So tonight's craft lesson has two halves: her pot and mine.
Wilkins: Her rose water first. In June, when the old cabbage roses by the stone wall are fully open, she picks them early in the morning, after the dew dries and before the sun cooks the scent out. She pulls the petals and throws away the green. They go into the pot loose, and she pours in just enough clean spring water to cover them. Then on goes the cap, the arm goes into the worm, and the worm goes into the cold tub.
Wilkins: Then the secret, which is patience. Gentle heat, a slow simmer, never a roaring boil. Boil roses hard and you get stewed roses, and your whole parlor smells like a widow's funeral. She lets the floral water come over drop by drop and stops when about a third of the water in the pot has passed over. If you look close in the receiving jar, you'll see a little film like oil on a puddle floating on top. That is the true essential oil, the attar. Her receiver is a long-necked glass with a spout low on the side, the old Florentine flask, so the water runs out underneath and the oil stays on top to be spooned off. It takes a mountain of petals for a thimble of oil, which is why rich ladies pay gold for it.
♦ Wilkins tapping a glass jar with his fingernail
Wilkins: Now my half. I'll go through the method the way it was done in this valley, and I'll put the legal truth first: making spirits to drink without a federal permit is against United States law, and everything on this program is for history and education only. The Missus would add that it's also against her law, and hers carries a rolling pin.
Wilkins: Step one is the mash. Cracked corn is cooked soft in water and cooled to blood-warm. Malted grain goes in to turn the starch to sugar, then the yeast, and it sits in a warm, airy shed for several days, bubbling like a fat deacon after beans. When it goes quiet and sour-sweet, you have your wash, which is weak beer, really.
Wilkins: Step two is the stripping run. Charge the pot with the strained wash, no solids to scorch on the bottom, and run it fast to pull everything out. What you get is low wines, cloudy and rough. Step three is the spirit run. Charge the low wines again and run them slow, low and careful, the same as she does her roses.
Wilkins: Step four is the cuts, and here a man earns his reputation or his headstone. I catch the run in small jars, numbered, one after another, in a row on the shelf like choirboys. Remember your boiling points, which every alchemist ought to know: methanol boils at about 148 degrees by Mr. Fahrenheit's glass, good ethanol at about 173 and water at 212. The lightest and nastiest things lead the parade. The first jars are the foreshots, and they smell like the inside of a cobbler's glue pot. They go out on the ground, all of them, and more than your greed wants to throw. The heads come after, still sharp and solvent-smelling, and they're set apart and never drunk. Then come the hearts, sweet and clean, and those are the reason we work. Last come the tails, oily and wet-dog, which go back in the next run. When you aren't sure about a jar, it isn't a heart. Pour it out.
Wilkins: Now the alchemy. Why copper? You've heard the old men say it's tradition. It's chemistry. The stinking sulfur compounds in a mash, the ones that smell of rotten eggs and Sunday cabbage, react with bare copper. Most of that scrubbing happens up in the vapor path: the cap, the arm and the worm, where hot vapor rubs against the bright metal on its way out. Open your arm after a run and you'll see it darkened inside. That darkening is the sulfur the copper caught so it didn't end up in your jar. So scrub the vapor path bright after every run. She says my copper worm is the only coil in this house that still gets properly hot, and the worm has never once asked for credit.
Wilkins: Last, the fire, and I'll be dead serious for the length of one Pittsfield sneeze. We seal our joints the old way, with a paste of rye flour and water, and it bakes on like bread crust. But you never, NEVER seal a still shut. It has to breathe out freely through the worm. Choke that path and the pressure builds until the pot bursts like a Rebel shell. Never walk away from a still with fire under it, not for a jar, not for a pretty neighbor, not even for a bear fight. If any joint smells of spirit, that's vapor escaping, and vapor near a flame is how good men's barns turn into bonfires. Shut down the heat and fix the joint before you go on. My wife has buried no husbands yet and has no plans to start with a careless one.
♪ Low fiddle hum
The Call-In Cylinder And Myths On The Anvil
♦ Wax cylinder hiss, a hand crank turning, a pop as the recording begins
Wilkins: Time for the mailbag, or the cylinder bag, I should say. A listener from down Wilkesboro way, Junior's own country, sent this question in for the program. Let's hear it.
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?
♦ Cylinder clicks off, crackle fades
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, I like you already, because nobody earns a name like Rabbit by sitting still while a deputy walks up. Your uncle is half a chemist and half a fool, which in my experience is about the proportion of most uncles.
Wilkins: Let's take the hickory ash first, and here my wife will teach you something. Out back of this house is her ash hopper, a wooden trough full of hardwood ash. She pours rainwater through it, and what drips out the bottom is lye, potash lye, strong enough to eat the skin off your knuckles. She boils it with tallow and gets soap. So hickory ash in water isn't magic. It's a caustic alkali, the same as in a washerwoman's kettle.
Wilkins: Now the kernel of truth, because there usually is one. Sour acids can sneak into a run and give it a sharp, vinegary bite. Alkali binds those acids and holds them back in the pot. So the old city rectifiers did sometimes put a measure of potash or soda in a redistillation to keep the sour down. Your uncle's granddaddy probably saw something like that and figured that more ash meant more cleaning.
Wilkins: But listen close, Rabbit. Alkali does not touch methanol. Not one drop of it. Methanol doesn't care whether you sweeten the pot with ash, honey or a hymn. It comes over early because it boils early, and the only cure is to throw out those first jars. And a careless man who dumps loose lye in his keg may scorch it, foam it over and send caustic splash into his worm. Rabbit, your uncle threw hickory ash in a thump keg and called it purifying, when Mrs. Wilkins throws the same ash in her soap kettle and gets something useful, which tells you who the chemist is in most families.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Here's a cooper's secret. White oak has little plugs in its pores that make it tight. That's why every whiskey barrel and every cider barrel worth the name is white oak. Red oak doesn't have those plugs. Its grain is wide open like a straw, so a red oak barrel weeps like a widow at a wake. Red oak has more holes in it than a Merrimack County alibi. Throw red oak shavings in a hot thump keg and you'll pull out raw tannin and bitterness and maybe a little color. You'll get a spirit that tastes like you licked a fence post, and you won't have cleaned a thing. So that's the verdict: part fact, mostly swamp medicine. Rabbit, you tell your uncle the Alchemist of Pittsfield sends his regards and a bar of his wife's soap.
♦ Wilkins pulls the anvil close, a coin set down with a tink
Wilkins: Since we're busting myths, let's do one more, and the anvil will keep score. Every tavern loafer from here to the Carolinas will tell you to dip a spoon, light it, and watch the flame: blue means safe, red or yellow means lead or poison.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: FALSE. Methanol burns blue too, a pale, nearly invisible blue, the same as good spirit. A blue flame proves a jar is full of spirit about the way a loud sermon proves a parson is full of the Holy Ghost: it shows something is burning, and nothing about what. Lead doesn't announce itself in a spoon fire either. It hides in the solder and the scrap. The only honest tests are clean pure copper, proper joints and proper cuts.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's two cents struck tonight with G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. One goes to Rabbit Miller for asking good questions, and the other goes to Mrs. Wilkins to pay for the postage on the letter she'll send me when she hears all this.
♪ Banjo and fiddle swell gently
Sign-Off
Announcer: One more QUICK WORD! Bring Grandmother's still-room back to your own table with the Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still: spun pure copper, hand-riveted, made for floral waters and botanical oils. Explore Tabletop Stills now at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Fire settling to embers, wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Friends, if you want to learn the craft properly, the copper, the mash, the cuts and the fire, then enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you how a still works from the bottom of the pot to the end of the worm, with the safety, the history and the law laid plain, and with less shouting than you'd get from my wife.
♦ One last envelope opened, soft and slow
Wilkins: I'll close with the last letter in the cedar box. It's the oldest, from before we married, when I was a young fool with soot on my face and a pair of tooth forceps in my pocket. She wrote: 'George. My father says you are a menace, a tooth-yanker, a smoke-eater and a scoundrel. I told him I know. I will marry you anyhow, on the condition that you never once in my life make me bored.'
Wilkins: The good Lord made woman from a rib, and Mrs. Wilkins has spent twenty years reminding me she would have picked a better bone. But I have kept that condition, my dear. I have kept it with jail cells, bears, sheriffs, peddlers and one radio program you were never supposed to hear. So to every wife on every mountain, from the Suncook to the Brushies, who did the sums and hung the signals and kept the coffee hot and the husband humble, this broadcast is yours.
♦ Barnaby grunts softly outside the window, chain clinks once
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme fades under wax cylinder crackle