Fort Wilkins After Dark
Dr. G. G. Wilkins opens his nighttime ledger of Fort Wilkins: who came after dark, who left in a hurry, and the wall of hats that visitors left behind. He starts with where the word moonshine came from and the deadly lamp fuels of the 1860s, tells how Barnaby caught a midnight copper thief, and talks with Wilkes County runner Junior Vance about a hat with his name in it, an owl that ruined a signal, and a possum that rode along to Charlotte. Wilkins then explains running the still at night and why the run goes into small numbered jars, and he answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg by explaining lye, red oak's open pores, and the blue-flame myth.
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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 wind in the hemlocks, not a deputy, and if it were a deputy you would have smelled him first, because they all bathe on Christmas and not a day more.
♦ Bear grunt, low and sulky, chain dragging across frozen ground
Wilkins: You get your supper when the moon clears the pines and not one minute before. Lie down. Lie DOWN, you four-hundred-pound sack of grievances.
♦ Heavy thump of a bear lying down, chain settling
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, rising then easing under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, and good evening to the rest of you too. 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 the town of Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, your dentist, your blacksmith, and on a bad night your alibi. The lamp is trimmed, the jar is filling, and the bear is sulking under the window like a jilted schoolmaster.
Wilkins: Tonight's subject is one I have been saving: Fort Wilkins After Dark. Who came up this turnpike after sundown, who left in a hurry, and who forgot his hat. I keep a ledger of night visitors the way a parson keeps a ledger of sins: more entries than anybody is comfortable with, and nobody ever pays up. And on my back wall, above the slack tub, are eleven hats on eleven pegs. Every one has a story, and not one owner has ever come back to claim his property.
Wilkins: But first a word from the folks who keep the copper shining in this establishment.
♪ Quick bright banjo sting
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Copper is king at Fort Wilkins, and the king of copper is the Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960. Heavy-gauge pure copper, built to last a lifetime. See it at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Sting resolves
♪ Slow fiddle drone, a minor-key lament, under
Wilkins: Segment the first, a bit of history. Moonshine. Where did the word come from? The Treasury men of Washington would have you think we Yankee and mountain folk invented it to spite them. Not so. The English were saying moonshine for smuggled spirits long before any of us were born, for the plain reason that smuggling is done by moonlight. Nobody rows French brandy onto a Kentish beach at high noon with a brass band.
Wilkins: Now there is a tale out of Wiltshire, in the old country, that every distiller ought to know. One fine moonlit night some village men had sunk kegs of smuggled brandy in the pond to hide them from the excisemen. They were out there with hay rakes fishing the kegs back up when the King's riders came along the lane. The riders pulled up and asked what in thunder they were doing. The chief of the villagers pointed at the moon floating round and yellow on the water and said, 'We be raking out that great cheese, sir.' The excisemen laughed themselves sick at the simple bumpkins and rode on. The villagers raked up every keg. To this day Wiltshire men are called Moonrakers.
♦ Wilkins chuckling, the scrape of a stool on a plank floor
Wilkins: The excisemen laughed at the Moonrakers for raking the cheese, and the Moonrakers laughed all the way to the tavern with the brandy, which tells you who the real cheese was.
Wilkins: Now let me tell you what darkness meant to a working still-house in my lifetime, because it is not just romance and moonbeams. Darkness meant light, and light meant fire, and fire around spirit vapor is how a man becomes a cautionary sermon. When I was a younger and better-looking fellow, a country house was lit by tallow, by whale oil if you were rich, and by a devilish brew called camphene if you were cheap. Camphene is distilled turpentine. Mix it with alcohol and the peddlers called it burning fluid. It burned bright and white and cost next to nothing.
Wilkins: It also blew up. Burning fluid was sold as a lamp oil but it behaved like a mother-in-law: bright, warm, and liable to blow up the whole house at supper. I have seen what it does. A woman in Barnstead, God rest her, went to refill a lamp still warm from use. The vapor caught off the wick and the can went off in her hands like a Fourth of July petard. The fluid ran down her apron burning, a blue-and-yellow sheet of it, and it stuck. She ran for the dooryard, which is the worst thing you can do because running feeds the fire. Her husband rolled her in the snowbank. The doctor from Pittsfield village, a man I will not name because he still owes me a horseshoe, sent for me to help dress her hands. The skin came off with the bandages like the peel off a boiled pear. She lived, and she never touched a lamp again as long as she drew breath. The newspapers were full of such deaths in those years, one after another, and most folks laid it to carelessness. It was the fuel.
Wilkins: Then in 1859 a fellow named Drake punched a well into the ground at Titusville in Pennsylvania and struck rock oil. Inside of a few years every peddler on the Suncook turnpike was selling kerosene, coal oil they called it, and it is a far gentler fuel. My own still-house is lit now by a coal-oil lantern hung outside the window on a nail, with the glass between it and my copper. I will tell you why when we get to the craft. For now, mark this: the history of moonshine is the history of men working at night beside a fire, and a good many of them did not live to tell their grandchildren about it.
♦ Wax crackle swells; the drip continues, steady
Wilkins: Running a still with a camphene lamp is like courting a widow with a lit cigar in a powder magazine: romantic, brief, and much talked about afterward.
♪ Fiddle lament fades
♪ Rollicking banjo breakdown, under
Wilkins: Segment the second: legends, outlaws, and runners, and tonight that means the visitors who climb my turnpike after dark. Let me read from the ledger.
♦ Heavy leather-bound book thumped onto a table, pages riffled
Wilkins: Item. A Concord lawyer, November, near midnight, in a silk stovepipe hat. He came, he said, about a molar. He had no bad molar. He had a dry throat and a wife who counted the jars in his cellar. He left by the window when he heard a horse on the road, which turned out to be his own horse, which had untied itself and gone wandering. The hat stayed behind. Barnaby got it first. There is a bite out of the crown the shape of a half moon. The Concord lawyer's silk topper has a bite out of the crown, and so does his reputation, and only one of those was Barnaby.
Wilkins: Item. A tin peddler from over Gilmanton way, in a wool slouch hat, who tried to sell me a copper kettle that was brass with a copper wash on it. I sounded it with my hammer.
♦ Light hammer tap on thin brass, a dull, cheap clank
Wilkins: You hear that? Copper rings like a church bell. That is a liar's kettle. He left without the kettle, without his hat, and with one fewer front tooth, which I took off his bill as a professional courtesy.
Wilkins: Now I promised you a grim one, and you will have it. A hat left on my peg is a confession with a brim on it, and the worst confession on that wall is a brown beaver hat with the nap worn off. It belonged to a copper thief.
♪ Banjo drops away; a single low fiddle note sustains
Wilkins: Picture it. February, a hard moon, snow crust so thick a dog could walk on it. Somewhere past two in the morning I am asleep in my chair with my boots in the oven. Out in the shed I have two coils of new copper worm, worth more than any horse in Pittsfield. A fellow I will call Mr. Ezra, because his family is a good one and the sin was his alone, comes creeping up out of the alders with a gunny sack. Now he knew about the bear. Everybody knew about the bear. But he had a theory, as fools often do. He reckoned bears sleep all winter, so a February bear was no more trouble than a buffalo robe.
Wilkins: Barnaby does sleep in winter, mostly. But he sleeps the way a judge sleeps through a trial, one ear open for anything that smells like dinner. And Mr. Ezra had stuffed his coat pockets with salt pork to eat on the walk home.
♦ Crunch of boots on snow crust, slow, then stopping
Wilkins: He got his sack half full. Then he backed out of the shed doorway, right over the chain. First thing I heard was the chain going tight. It sings when it goes tight, a sound like a fiddle string about to snap. Second thing I heard was Mr. Ezra, and I have pulled teeth from grown men with nothing but a pair of forceps and a prayer, and I never heard a noise like that one. It started out a man's holler and went up to a sound like a gate hinge in a gale.
♦ Chain snapping taut, a bear's rumbling roar, fabric ripping
Wilkins: Barnaby had him by the seat. Not the leg, not the arm, the seat. Took the breeches, the drawers, and a good mouthful of what was in them, and shook him the way a terrier shakes a rat. You could hear the cloth tearing a foot at a time, and the salt pork fell out of his pockets and went everywhere, and the bear could not decide whether to finish the man or the pork. Praise God and pork prices, he chose the pork.
♦ Bear snuffling and chewing wetly; a man whimpering
Wilkins: By the time I got out there in my stocking feet with the lantern, Mr. Ezra was hanging on the woodpile with nothing on below the waist but a crust of snow and a good deal of blood, steaming in the cold like a boiled pudding. That thief came with a whole pair of breeches and left with a pair of bloomers and a draft. And Barnaby, I swear it, Barnaby spat out the seat of the man's trousers the way a Concord alderman spits out an honest vote: quickly and with great distaste.
Wilkins: I hauled him inside and laid him face-down on my dentist's chair. I stitched his backside with horsehair thread and a curved needle by coal-oil light, which was the first time that chair ever saw the far end of a patient. Eleven stitches. He bit clean through a leather strap. I poured spirit over the wound, and the language that followed would have blistered the paint off a Portsmouth schooner. In the morning he walked home to his mother, very carefully and in a borrowed petticoat. His beaver hat is on my wall. His copper worm is still in my shed. And that is the last time anybody stole from Fort Wilkins in the wintertime.
♪ Banjo breakdown kicks back in, then settles under
Wilkins: Now I have a guest who knows a thing or two about the dark, and about leaving places in a hurry. From North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, down in Wilkes County where the Brushy Mountains roll, a hauler of the mountain article, Mr. Junior Vance. Junior, welcome to the fort. Mind the bear.
Junior: Doc, I been minding that bear since I come up the road. He looked at me like I was a ham sandwich somebody forgot to finish.
Wilkins: He looks at everybody that way. It is the only compliment he knows. Junior, tonight is about the dark and about hats. Tell me you have a hat story.
Junior: Doc, I got the hat story. My mama sewed my name inside every hat I ever owned, J-U-N-I-O-R, red thread, big as a hymnal, because I lost hats like other boys lose teeth. One night we're loading at a spot up a logging road. No moon, darker'n the inside of a cow. Somebody hollers that the law's coming, and we scatter like quail. I'm halfway to Statesville before I reach up and find my head's bare.
Wilkins: And your name sitting back there in the mud like a calling card.
Junior: Like a signed confession, Doc. So I park, walk four miles back through the briars, creep up on that spot, and there sits a revenue agent, back against a stump, sound asleep. He's waiting on us to come back, see. And he's wearing my hat. He'd got cold and put it on.
Wilkins: Wearing it! With your mother's red thread an inch from his scalp.
Junior: Snoring like a sawmill. So I lift my hat off his head real easy, like taking a biscuit off a hot pan, and his own hat was laying right there in his lap. I put his hat on his head, just so, and I walk off. He woke up the next morning in his own hat and never knew a thing.
Wilkins: Junior, a man who can swap hats with a sleeping revenue agent could pick a dentist's pocket while the dentist was pulling his tooth. I am going to count my forceps after this program.
Junior: Count 'em twice, Doc.
Wilkins: Now in the dark, a man needs signals. Up here we used a lantern hung in a particular window, or a cowbell from the pasture. What did your people use?
Junior: Hoot owl. Two hoots meant come ahead, one hoot meant stay put. Worked fine for two years. Then one night I'm sitting on a full load at the top of a hill, lights off, waiting on the all-clear, and I hear it. Hoo-hoo. Two hoots. So I roll on down the hill, easy as Sunday, and right into the arms of three agents and a parked truck across the road.
Wilkins: Your lookout turned traitor?
Junior: My lookout was sound asleep in a ditch, Doc. That was a real barred owl. Fella with feathers, sitting on a fence post, just making conversation.
Wilkins: An owl is the worst lookout God ever made: he sits up all night, sees everything, and says the same word no matter what happens.
Junior: That's the truth. I talked my way out of that one somehow, a long story with a lot of lying in it. But after that we quit the owl. My cousin took a rusty gate hinge off his granddaddy's hog pen and carried it in his coat pocket. Swing it back and forth, it makes a squeal like a stuck pig. Ain't no bird in North Carolina makes that noise.
Wilkins: A rusty hinge for a password. That is honest Yankee ingenuity and I am ashamed a Carolinian thought of it first. Did any other night visitors come along for the ride?
Junior: Doc, there was a possum. We're loading jars in the dark, and something crawls in amongst 'em and curls up in the straw. Nobody sees it. I drive the whole way down to Charlotte, curves and all, and that possum never stirs. Fella I'm delivering to reaches in to count the jars, and out comes this gray thing with a tail like a wet rope. It falls over in his lap, stiff as a board, tongue out, playing dead.
Wilkins: Possums do that. They'll play dead at a funeral and outlast the mourners.
Junior: So he pokes it, Doc. Pokes it with one finger. And that dead possum opens its mouth, fifty teeth if it's got one, and hisses at him like a tea kettle. That man went backwards over a chair. He said he wasn't paying for no possum. I said the possum come free. He said that's why he wasn't paying for it.
Wilkins: That possum rode to Charlotte for free, played dead to dodge the bill, and still did better business than half the merchants on the turnpike. One more, Junior. How does a man see the road on a black night when he dare not show a light?
Junior: Moon if you can get it. On a moon night I'd run with the lights plumb off. There was one stretch where a farmer had whitewashed his whole fence along the road, near a mile of it, white as a bedsheet. You could steer by it like a railroad. I run that fence a dozen times.
Wilkins: And the thirteenth time?
Junior: Thirteenth time the farmer had run short of whitewash about two-thirds of the way down. Fence just went dark. I went off into his cornfield and mowed down about forty rows before I stopped. Next morning he come out, looked at his corn, looked at me, and said, 'I reckon I'll buy more whitewash.'
Wilkins: Steering by a whitewashed fence works fine right up until the farmer turns Baptist about his paint money. Junior Vance, of Wilkes County, North Carolina, you are welcome at Fort Wilkins any night of the year, and your hat is welcome on my wall any time you care to leave it.
Junior: Doc, my mama'd come up here and fetch it herself. You don't want that. She's meaner than the bear.
Wilkins: Then she is welcome too, but she sits on the far side of the stove. Thank you, Junior.
♦ Bear grunt from outside, approving or hungry, hard to say
♪ Banjo breakdown swells and ends on a bright chord
♪ Brassy medicine-show fanfare, tambourine shaking
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♪ Fanfare finishes with a cymbal crash
♪ Slow parlor banjo, thoughtful, under
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. Tonight I will tell you how a careful distiller runs his still after dark, because the night changes things. Some of them help and some will kill you. First the law: making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and what I tell you tonight is history and education, the way a man tells you how the old forges worked.
Wilkins: Step one happens days before the night of the run. The mash. Cooked grain or crushed fruit with water and yeast, set somewhere warm and airy until the bubbling stops and the sweetness is gone off the tongue. That is your wash, weak as small beer. The still only concentrates what the yeast already made. A sour, dirty wash makes sour, dirty spirit, and no amount of copper or cleverness will save it.
Wilkins: Step two. Why run at night? The old answer is to hide the smoke. But a distiller's answer is cold. The worm, the coiled copper pipe that turns vapor back to liquid, sits in a tub of water, and the colder that water, the better it condenses. On a November night with the creek near ice, my worm tub stays cold for hours, and nothing escapes uncondensed. In August at noon you will be hauling buckets till your arms fall off.
Wilkins: Step three is the light. I promised I would tell you why my lantern hangs outside the window. Spirit vapor is heavier than the air, half again as heavy. If a joint weeps or a cap lifts, the vapor does not rise politely to the rafters. It sinks to the floor and creeps along like spilled molasses you cannot see, looking for a low flame. A lantern on the floor, a pipe knocked out against a boot, a spark from the firebox door. Spirit vapor sinks to the floor like a guilty deacon, and like the deacon it goes looking for the nearest flame. So the light hangs high and outside behind glass. My firebox is walled off. There is a bucket of sand and a wet horse blanket by the door, because water thrown on burning spirit only floats the fire around. And I never leave a running still. Not for the privy, not for the bear, not for the Second Coming.
Wilkins: Step four. Bring her up slow. A low fire, patience, a pot that warms like a slow sunrise. Rush it and the run puke up foam into your pipes and blows the cap, and then you are in the dark with boiling mash on the floor and hot vapor in your face.
♦ Slow drip into glass, a jar set down on wood, another picked up
Wilkins: Step five, and this is the heart of the night's work. When the first drops come, I do not catch them in one big crock. I catch the run in a row of small jars, numbered with chalk, one after the next, two dozen or more. The old men call it jarring off. The first little bit is the foreshots, and I pour it out on the ground, all of it, no exceptions, no matter how much it hurts the miser in me. Then come the heads, and they smell sharp, like varnish or glue or a cabinetmaker's pot. Those are thrown out too. Foreshots and heads carry the harsh, poisonous stuff, the kind that blinds men. Then the smell turns sweet and clean, and those are the hearts. Later it goes flat and oily and smells like a wet dog in a cellar, or porridge left out overnight. Those are the tails, set aside to run again.
Wilkins: Why jars? Because at three in the morning, by lantern light, with a sore back and a bear moaning outside the window, a man's judgment is about as reliable as a Gilmanton horse trade. With numbered jars I can wait for daylight, smell each one with a clear head, and draw my lines honest. Jarring off is the only time a moonshiner takes his time, so it is the only time he is right.
Wilkins: Step six. Clean your copper before you sleep, while it is warm and the residue is soft. Scrub the pot, rinse the worm, and leave her bright. Copper is your ally, but only if you treat her like a lady and not like a fence post.
Wilkins: And step seven, the one every greenhorn skips: put out the fire, check the floor, and look at the coals one more time before you shut the door. More still-houses burned down after the run than during it.
♪ Banjo fades
♪ Jaunty fiddle reel, under
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the mail. Tonight we have a call on the line, all the way from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Junior's country. Let us hear it.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle intensifies, a hiss, then a faint distant voice
Wilkins: This is Cletus Miller, called Rabbit by those who have seen him run from a church social. Go ahead, Rabbit.
♦ Distant scratchy recording, voice tinny and far away
Wilkins: Rabbit asks it so: Alchemist, my uncle swears the old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Crackle fades; the drip resumes
Wilkins: Rabbit, I will give you the true answer and I will give it with a hammer.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. One more cent for the counter jar, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., struck while the question is hot. Now let us take your uncle's two remedies one at a time, starting with the ashes. Every grandmother in New Hampshire knows what hardwood ashes are good for. You pack them in a barrel called an ash hopper, run water through, and what drips out the bottom is lye, potash. With lye and kitchen grease you make soft soap. With lye and dried corn you make hominy. That is what wood ash does: it is a caustic alkali.
Wilkins: So put ashes into a thump keg and what have you got? Lye water boiling under a head of spirit vapor. Any fat or oil in the wash meets that lye and starts turning to soap, and soap foams. A foaming thump keg can push froth up the line and choke your worm, and I have seen a cap blown clear to the rafters that way. What you do not get, not one drop of it, is removal of the poisonous heads. The heads come over first because they boil off first, and the only cure is the one I just told you: pour them on the ground. Lye in a thump keg will not clean your spirit, but it will clean your teeth, your gums, and most of your jaw, and as a dentist I would rather you came to me.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak. Here your uncle is half right, Rabbit, and half right is how most good lies get started. Oak does change spirit. It gives color and a puckery tannin and a bit of vanilla sweetness, and that is why whiskey goes into barrels. But ask any cooper which oak he uses for a tight barrel, and he will spit and say white oak. Red oak is so open in its grain that you can saw off a little stick, put one end in your mouth, and blow bubbles out the other end into a glass of water. White oak has its pores plugged by little growths the woodworkers call tyloses, and red oak has none. A red oak barrel leaks like a Concord politician.
Wilkins: Rabbit, red oak is so leaky you could smoke a stick of it, and I have known Pittsfield men who tried. Red oak shavings in a thump keg will tint the run amber and give it a woody bite, so raw new spirit looks and tastes like it sat in a barrel for a year. That is why the old-timers did it. It made bad whiskey look old. It did not make it safe. Color is a costume, not a cure.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And while I have the hammer warm, here is a myth on the same road. The blue flame. Some fellow pours a spoonful of spirit, sets a match to it, sees a pretty blue flame, and declares it safe. Neighbors, the poisonous wood spirit, methanol, burns with a pale clean blue flame of its own, so faint in daylight you may not see it at all. A blue flame tells you the stuff burns. It does not tell you it is fit to drink. Trusting the blue flame is like trusting a revenue man's smile: it looks pretty and it lies in a low voice. You keep a spirit safe with the jars and your nose and the discipline to throw away what ought to be thrown away. There is no parlor trick for it.
Wilkins: Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, that was a fine question, and your uncle sounds like a man who would be good company and a bad apothecary. Tell him the Alchemist says keep the ashes for soap, keep the oak for barrels, and keep his heads on the ground where they belong. Thank you for calling the fort, Rabbit, and if you are ever up the Suncook road, there is a peg on my wall with your name on it. Just hang onto your hat.
♪ Fiddle reel resolves
♪ Theme returns soft, banjo and fiddle, warm and slow
Wilkins: Well, neighbors, the moon is over the pines and Barnaby has heard his supper bucket rattle, so we must wind this down. Eleven hats on my wall, and every one of them a man who came up this turnpike after dark with a plan and went home without one. My hat wall is the only museum in Merrimack County where every exhibit fled the premises at a dead run. Thanks to Junior Vance, a gentleman thief of hats, and to Rabbit Miller for a fine question.
Wilkins: And a word for those who want to learn the craft right. The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course is open now. Copper, the cuts, the jars, the history, and the safety, everything I have learned at this anvil and this pot over a long and impolite life, taught plain. Proper permits and the law come first, and the course will show you that road too. Ask at the fort or at moonshinestill.com.
Wilkins: One more word from our friends before I put out the lamp.
♪ Quick bright banjo sting
Announcer: A last word, friends! Before the lamp goes out, remember the Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper for tinctures, oils, and demonstrations. Order tonight at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Sting resolves into the closing theme
Wilkins: Barnaby, your supper is coming, you great fur-bottomed extortionist. Neighbors, keep your lamps high and your hats on your heads.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♦ Wax cylinder crackle fades to silence