The Cellar Door That Wouldn't Stay Shut
Every night at midnight the bulkhead door under the Fort Wilkins still-house bangs open. Dr. Wilkins weighs three explanations: the ghost of a drowned tin peddler, an old unpaid debt, and a plain draft. Along the way he covers colonial New England cider brandy and freeze-jacked applejack, tells how Barnaby dealt with a Concord bill collector, and gets cellar, haint and debt stories from Wilkes County runner Junior Vance. Wilkins finds the real answer in how a still-house fire pulls air, teaches the cuts for apple brandy, explains the blue-flame and bead myths, and answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's voicemail on hickory ashes and red oak shavings by tracing the custom back to the mash tub.
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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
♦ A heavy plank door creaks open somewhere beneath the floorboards and slams against a granite wall
Wilkins: Barnaby! Barnaby, you four-hundred-pound sack of fleas and wind, settle down. That's the cellar door, not the Second Coming and not your supper. Lie down. Lie DOWN, I say. There. He's rolled onto the woodpile and broke wind loud enough to rattle the window glass, which is how a bear says 'yes, sir.'
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, sinners, and the three deacons I know are listening with the curtains drawn. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, your tooth-puller, your blacksmith, and, should the sheriff be listening, your humble maker of tooth tonic and nothing stronger. Tonight's matter has cost me four nights of sleep, one good tin lantern, and the last rag of my reputation as a man who fears nothing on God's earth. I call it The Cellar Door That Wouldn't Stay Shut.
♦ The cellar door bangs again below, followed by a low moan of wind
Wilkins: You hear it? There she goes, midnight on the nose, as regular as a Methodist's bowels after a church supper. Before we go down those cellar steps together, a word from the good people who keep copper in this fort.
♪ Brief tin-whistle flourish
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, is hand-built of heavy pure copper, and it's waiting for you right now at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com, or step into the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28!
♪ Theme swells and fades under
♪ Slow, creaking fiddle bridge, minor key
Wilkins: Segment the first. Let me tell you about my cellar. I dug it under the still-house in the spring of '58 with two Barnstead boys who worked for cider and quit the day the cider ran out, which was a Tuesday. Dry-laid granite walls, a packed clay floor, and on the north side a bulkhead. For you foreigners over in Vermont, a bulkhead is what a Yankee calls the slanted outside door that opens down into a cellar. Mine is two-inch oak plank, hung on strap hinges I forged myself on that anvil you'll hear later, with an iron hasp and a white-oak peg as thick as a deacon's thumb.
♦ Wax crackle; a lantern handle squeaks
Wilkins: Four nights back I was snug in my nightshirt with a jar of the medicinal at my elbow, and at midnight comes BANG. I take the lantern down the inside stair and there's the bulkhead flung wide open, the peg lying on the floor, and snow blowing in over my cider barrels like flour off a miller's apron. I shut her and peg her. One o'clock, BANG. So I wedge a stick of rock maple cordwood against her. In the morning the cordwood is lying on the clay and the door is swinging in the wind like a tavern sign, and Barnaby is staring at it through the window with his ears flat, which I had never once seen that bear do for any sheriff alive.
Wilkins: Pittsfield has three opinions on the matter, and Pittsfield has never in its history agreed on anything but the price of rum. The ladies down at the store say it's a haunting, and they name the ghost: Hosea Drake, the tin peddler. Hosea came up the turnpike every fall with a cart full of dippers and nutmeg graters, and the autumn of '59 I pulled four of his rotten teeth and made him an upper plate of carved hippopotamus ivory. He walked off owing me three dollars and forty cents and that plate. Come March he tried to cut across the ice on Berry Pond after his hat blew off, and the ice did what March ice does to a man with a full cart and an empty head. They found him in April with the hat still in his fist, which proves a peddler will hang on to anything he didn't pay for. The pickerel had been at him all winter, and I'll spare you the particulars except to say his face had more holes in it than his accounts, and I got my plate back. I would have settled for the plate anyway, because at least the plate smiled at me.
Wilkins: The second opinion is the debt. Old men at the gristmill say a cellar door won't stay shut on a house that owes, because the debt wants out. The third opinion belongs to my own good sense, which says it's a draft. We'll judge all three tonight. But first you ought to know why a Yankee digs a cellar at all, and the answer is one word: cider.
♪ Gentle banjo under
Wilkins: Since before this town was incorporated in 1782, and the mills went up along the Suncook River, the New England farmer has drunk cider the way a fish drinks pond. Hard cider at breakfast, at noon, and at haying. Babies were weaned on it. Old John Adams himself wrote of taking a tankard of hard cider of a morning, and look how well he turned out: a President, and cross as a wet cat every day of his life. Come October every farm on this turnpike ran its press and put barrels in the cellar by the dozen. A dug cellar is a godsend because the earth around it keeps it cool and steady the year through, never baking and seldom freezing. Cider ferments slow and sweet down there, and apples and turnips keep till April.
Wilkins: Now a farmer with forty barrels of hard cider and a long winter starts to think, and a thinking farmer is a dangerous animal. One sort hauled his cider to a copper pot still and ran it into cider brandy. The lazier sort, and that's most of Merrimack County, made applejack by jacking it. You set a barrel out on a January night at twenty below. Come morning there's a crust of ice, which is mostly water. You pull it off, and again the next night, and what's left at the heart of the barrel is a dark, strong, apple-smelling liquor that would take paint off a hearse.
♦ Wilkins sets a jar down hard on a plank table
Wilkins: Here's the hitch, and mark it well. Freezing takes nothing bad out. The pot still lets a man throw away his foreshots and heads, but a frozen barrel keeps every drop of what the cider made, the methanol and the fusel oils included, and only squeezes it closer together. That is why old-timers called the after-effect apple palsy. I've treated men in my dentist's chair who came in for a molar and confessed to a jug of jacked cider the night before. Their hands shook so bad I had to have them sit on them, and one fellow's head ached so fierce he asked me to pull the whole skull and leave the teeth. Freeze-jacked applejack is the only drink in New England that gives you the headache before you've done swallowing.
Wilkins: So that's my cellar: forty barrels of good cider, a pot still overhead, and a door that bangs at midnight like a creditor's fist. Hold on to that word, creditor.
♪ Fiddle sting
♪ Rowdy mountain fiddle reel, then down under
Wilkins: Segment the second, on legends, outlaws, and the debts that follow a man down the cellar stairs. I'll confess I have owed money in my day. A blacksmith, dentist, and distiller is three trades, and three trades means three sets of creditors, and I have outrun or outlived most of them. In the summer of '61 a Concord lumber merchant swore I owed him twelve dollars for the hemlock in this fort. I swore the hemlock was so full of knots it would have been robbery to pay him for the holes. He sent a collector up the turnpike, a man named Crabb, in a stovepipe hat and a long black coat, with a ledger under his arm and a face like a pickled beet.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, chain clinks as if he remembers
Wilkins: Barnaby remembers him. Mr. Crabb didn't knock at my door. He walked around back to look in the still-house window, to catch me at something taxable, and he stepped one boot over Barnaby's chain. Now Barnaby was napping, and a napping bear wakes up the way a powder keg does. There came a sound like a wet bedsheet tearing in half, and Mr. Crabb's coattails, and a good portion of what the coattails had been covering, went into that bear's mouth. Crabb went straight up in the air hollering a note no church choir in New Hampshire could reach. He came down with his trousers in two flags and a bite in his hind end the size of a pie plate. Barnaby shook his head like a dog with a rat, there went Crabb's hat, and there went his ledger, and that bear sat down and chewed the ledger to pulp. I watched the page with my name on it go down that black throat, the only time a debt of mine was ever settled by digestion. Crabb came for twelve dollars and left eight pounds lighter in the hindquarters, which I called a fair discount. I stitched him up myself on the chopping block with a darning needle and a jar of the medicinal, half for the wound and half for my nerves, and I didn't charge him. The lumber merchant never wrote again. He says the hemlock was a gift. I say Barnaby is the finest accountant in Merrimack County.
Wilkins: But that is not the debt the gristmill men meant. In the hard winter of '64, a young runner who carried jugs over the Gilmanton hills for me, and I'll not name him for his mother still lives, came pounding on my bulkhead at three in the morning with two county deputies a half-mile behind him. I put him down in the cellar among the cider barrels and pegged the door. The deputies came in, poked around the still-house, sniffed my worm tub, and left with nothing but a cold. In the morning the boy shook my hand and swore he'd pay me back the seven dollars in jugs he'd dropped in a snowbank. Then he went west for the silver in Nevada, and I never saw him again. Seven dollars. So you see, the gristmill men have a point. My cellar has had a ghost who owed me and a runner who owed me, and the door has banged for both of them.
Wilkins: Speaking of men who left in a hurry, I've a guest tonight who knows cellars, back roads, and debts better than any parson knows sin. He comes to us down a long and crackling line from the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina, the hardest-driving runner those hills ever turned loose. Mister Junior Vance, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
♦ Wax crackle; distant line hum
Junior: Well, Doc, thank you kindly. I heard that bear from here. Sounds like a sawmill with a bellyache.
Wilkins: He's digesting a lumber collector from four years back. They stay with him. Now Junior, I'm told you've had a cellar door of your own that wouldn't stay put.
Junior: Lord, have I. We kept a stash shed down below Moravian Falls with a little root cellar dug under it and a plank door on top, slanted, about like yours. We'd keep the jugs down there in the cool till the run. And every night, buddy, that door'd flop open. Flop. Middle of the night. My cousin Dewey swore up and down it was a haint, said an old woman got buried in that hillside back in the war and wanted her sugar back, on account of we kept the sugar sacks down there too.
Wilkins: A ghost with a sweet tooth. I've pulled the teeth of a few living women with that complaint.
Junior: So Dewey wouldn't go near it after dark. Carried a Bible in one pocket and a pint in the other, and you know which one got opened. Finally one night I set up there with a lantern and a shotgun to see what kinda ghost it was. Long about midnight that door starts lifting, slow, an inch, two inches. My hair's standing up like a wet cat's. And out pokes this pink nose. Then another one. A mama possum and seven babies had got into a fifty-pound sack of sugar down there and was living like kings. Fattest possums in North Carolina. And she'd shove that door up with her snout every night to go out and hunt, and the babies would follow her out in a line like a Sunday school.
Wilkins: So your haint had a pouch.
Junior: Had a pouch and a sugar habit. Dewey never did admit it. He told it at every funeral after that like he'd fought off a ghost single-handed.
Wilkins: I'll say this for your possums, Junior. They were the only honest tenants in Wilkes County, because at least they paid in sugar they stole off somebody else.
Junior: That's about how the economy worked up there, Doc.
Wilkins: Now I'm told you've been on the wrong side of a cellar door, too.
Junior: Oh, don't bring that up. All right. There was a farm up toward Traphill had a smokehouse with a trapdoor in the floor, and under it a little dug hole where we'd stack jugs for pickup. Forty jugs that night. I climb down in there to count 'em, and a big gust comes through the smokehouse, catches that trapdoor, and BAM, sucks it right shut over me. And the latch was on top.
Wilkins: The wind does love a closed space. I'll have more to say on that in a bit.
Junior: Pitch black. Smells like forty years of ham fat and creek water. And then I hear something sliding across the jugs. Shhhhhhh. A blacksnake, Doc, five foot if he was an inch, and he'd decided my pant leg was the warmest place in the county. I stood dead still from about ten at night till near daylight with that snake wrapped around my shin like a garter on a dance-hall girl.
Wilkins: Junior, a man with a five-foot snake in his trousers usually charges admission.
Junior: [laughing] Not that night he didn't. Come morning, my cousin Lonnie comes in and I hear him walking around up there, and I holler, Lonnie, let me out! And he gets down on his knees and talks through the floorboards, and he says, Junior, you still owe me two dollars from that poker game in Elkin. And I says, Lonnie, I've got a snake on my leg. And he says, then you'll want to settle up quick. That son of a gun made me poke two dollar bills up through the crack in the floorboards before he'd lift that door.
Wilkins: There it is. The debt wanted out, and so did you.
Junior: I didn't play cards with Lonnie for eleven years. And I'll tell you the blacksnake come out of there looking happier than I did.
Wilkins: Speaking of debts, did you ever get stiffed on a load?
Junior: Doc, there was a fella down in Charlotte, big talker with a gold tooth and a white suit, owed me sixty dollars for a run. Kept putting me off. Next week, Junior. Next week. Finally I show up at his place and he says, Junior, I ain't got the cash, but I got something better. Takes me out back, and there sits a church pew. Solid mahogany, ten foot long, came outta some church that burned. He says, that's worth a hundred dollars to the right man.
Wilkins: And you were not the right man.
Junior: I was the only man there, which made me the right man. So I tied that pew on the roof and drove it home up the mountain with the ends hanging out both sides like a bird's wings. Every curve, that thing'd groan like a preacher at a tent meeting. I set it on my front porch, and it sat there thirty years. My mama called it the Pew of Unpaid Accounts. Anybody owed me money had to sit on it while they explained.
Wilkins: I may build one myself. Barnaby could sit at the end of it as a deacon. Now Junior, before I let you go: ever see a true haint on those mountain roads?
Junior: One time I thought I had. There was a switchback up on the Brushies where every night, long about one in the morning, a light'd come bobbing out of the laurel. Just floating. Boys called it the Brushy Light, and they'd swear a revenue man died up there and was still hunting stills. Fellas would take the long way round thirty miles just to miss it. One night I'm coming through hot and that light steps right out in the road, and I put both feet on the brake, and there stands a little old man about ninety with a lantern, in his long johns. He says, son, you seen a red cow?
Wilkins: The ghost was hunting beef.
Junior: Every night for two years. His cow had wandered off and he just never quit looking. So me and the boys passed the hat, every runner on that mountain, and we bought that old man a red cow and tied her to his porch with a bow on her. After that the Brushy Light went out for good. Best money I ever spent, and the only time I ever paid a debt I didn't owe.
Wilkins: Junior Vance, that's a better piece of Christian charity than I've seen out of any pulpit in Merrimack County. Thank you for sitting at my fire.
Junior: Thank you, Doc. Mind that cellar, and tell that bear I said goodnight.
♦ Barnaby grunts once, as if in reply
Wilkins: He says goodnight and he wants your ham. We'll be right back.
♪ Bright, brassy patent-medicine-show fanfare with a snare roll
Announcer: Step right up, friends, and lend me your ears! Is your old still pitted, patched, and puckered like a deacon's lips? Does it scorch, sputter, and leave you a run that tastes like a burnt boot? Then hear me now! If you appreciate authentic American craftsmanship, look no further than Moonshine Stills, proud home of the Flame-Flow still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! Engineered from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, the cleanest copper money can buy, with precision-machined brass unions that seal tight without a smear of lead! The Flame-Flow is designed to maximize convective circulation, so heat rolls even and gentle through the whole charge, delivering unmatched purity for essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations! Handcrafted, handsome, and built to outlast your grandchildren, all for just eight hundred ninety-nine dollars! Don't wait! Order direct at moonshinestill.com, that's https://moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still, or stop by the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, and lay your own hand on the copper! Once more, friends: moonshinestill.com, the Flame-Flow still, eight ninety-nine. Get yours today!
♪ Fanfare button, then fades
♪ Low, warm banjo picking
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. And here, friends, is where I solved my cellar door, so pay attention. Junior said the wind sucked that trapdoor shut on him, and he was dead right that air moves in closed places with a will of its own. Every night this week I fired my still at about ten o'clock. By midnight the still-house is hot as a Baptist hell, the hot air goes roaring up my chimney and out the roof cracks, and air has to come from somewhere to take its place. Where does it come from? Up out of that cool cellar, through every crack, and the bulkhead door is the biggest crack I own. It pulls and it pulls, and my peg had worn loose in its hole, so every night that draft worked it free like a tongue working at a loose tooth, until the door flew open and banged. Barnaby wasn't afraid of a ghost. He was annoyed by the noise, which is what any sensible creature feels about wind.
Wilkins: A ghost that only comes out when the still is fired is no ghost. It's a drunk with good timing.
♦ Wax crackle; a fire door swings open, coals hiss
Wilkins: Now, since every barrel in that cellar is cider, I'll tell you how a careful man of this valley turns cider into apple brandy, and why it wants more care than corn. First comes the law of the land, which I respect the way Barnaby respects a salt lick, with much licking and no promises: making spirit to drink without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and what I tell you is history and learning, nothing more.
Wilkins: Step one is the cider. Press sound apples, never rotten ones, and let the juice ferment out cool and clean in the cellar for some weeks till it's dry and still. Keep your barrels clean and your bungs tight against fruit flies, because a cider that's gone to vinegar makes a brandy that smells like a pickle works. Step two, the charge. Fill your copper pot no more than about three parts full and leave headroom, because a pot filled to the brim will puke wash up the cap arm and foul the worm. Step three, the fire, and this is the heart of the craft. Bring her up slow. When she starts to run, turn your fire down to a gentle, steady heat. Here's why. Methanol, the wood spirit, boils at around a hundred forty-eight degrees by the Fahrenheit scale, good spirit near a hundred seventy-three, and water at two hundred twelve. A slow, honest fire spreads them out so you can tell one from the next. A hot fire flings them all together like a barroom brawl, and then there's no sorting the saint from the sinner.
Wilkins: Step four, the cuts. Catch your run in a long row of small jars, never one big crock, so you can judge as you go. The first that drips off is the foreshots, and with cider you throw away more of it than you'd like, because apples make more wood spirit than corn ever will. The pectin in the skins and the pulp breaks down in the fermenting and lets methanol loose. Foreshots go in the dirt, never in a mouth, never as a liniment for a toothache, though I've had fools in my chair ask. After them come the heads. They smell sharp, like nail varnish, cleaning fluid, or a green apple with a grudge. Set them aside, not in your drinking jars. Then the hearts come sweet and round, with the smell of a baked apple in a good woman's oven. Keep those. As she runs on, the spirit turns oily, flat, and a little like wet cardboard. Those are the tails. Set them aside, and many a careful man runs them again with the next charge.
Wilkins: Step five, the fire hazard, and I'll be as serious as an undertaker on payday. Alcohol vapor burns. If your pot leaks at a joint, or your worm runs warm and sends vapor out the end instead of liquid, and that vapor meets an open flame, you'll lose your eyebrows, your still-house, and maybe your life. Keep your joints tight and your worm tub cold, never leave a running still alone, and keep a pail of water and a sack of sand by the door. I've seen a Barnstead still-house go up in nine minutes flat, and the owner came out with his beard on fire, roaring like Barnaby with a bee in his nose. He lived, but he looked like a singed hog the rest of his days and spent them explaining it to the Methodists.
Wilkins: And all of it is why copper. It carries heat even and gentle, it beats into shape under a hammer, and a clean copper pot hands you a spirit far sweeter than iron or tin ever did. So I oiled those hinges, planed the bulkhead true, drove a new white-oak peg, and cut a little vent hole high in the still-house wall so the fire can draw its air from there and not from my cellar. The door has stayed shut two nights running.
♦ Silence, then a gentle creak, but no bang
Wilkins: Mostly shut.
♪ Banjo turnaround
♪ Comic tuba-and-fiddle stinger
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the mailbag. We've a telegraph cylinder recording here from down South. Let's give it a turn on the machine.
♦ Phonograph crank winding; needle drops; heavy crackle
Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller: [on scratchy recording] 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 stops
Wilkins: Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro! Junior's neighbor, near enough, and by the sound of you a man whose uncle has opinions. God bless him, every family needs one man who knows everything and none of it right. Let me set this on the anvil.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There's my mark, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., on a fresh large cent. Here's the truth, Rabbit, in three blows. First blow: where the ashes came from. Wood ash is lye and potash, the very stuff your granny boiled with fat to make soap. Back in the old days, when a mash tub went sour, some distillers threw in ash or a little lime to sweeten it and cut the acid before it fermented on. That's a real practice, and it belongs in the mash tub, at the start. Somewhere down the generations it wandered into the thump keg, the way your uncle's stories wander into the second jug.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Second blow: the red oak. Oak shavings in a doubler, or soaked in finished spirit, give you color, a bit of pucker, and a woody flavor, a poor man's barrel-aging done in a hurry. It'll make the liquor look older and taste of the woods. It will not clean it. Rabbit, putting oak shavings in a thump keg to cure bad heads is like putting a Sunday hat on a corpse. It improves the look and does nothing whatever for the condition.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Third blow: what bad heads really are. That sharp, nail-varnish stink comes mostly from a dirty or soured fermentation, which makes those harsh compounds in plenty. You fix it at the beginning, with clean barrels, sound grain or fruit, and a fermentation that isn't left to rot in the heat. Then you fix it at the end, by catching in small jars and throwing out your foreshots and setting aside your heads like an honest man. No ash and no shaving will save a man who won't make his cuts. So your uncle isn't all swamp medicine, Rabbit. He's got the right ingredient in the wrong barrel at the wrong end of the job, which describes most marriages in Merrimack County. Shout-out to you, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and tell your uncle Dr. Wilkins says he's half right, which is more than the Merrimack County bench has ever been.
♦ Barnaby grunts approvingly
Wilkins: Now, two more myths while the anvil's hot. Number one, the blue flame. Some sage at every tavern will pour a spoonful, light it, and say blue means it's pure and safe. Damn foolishness. Methanol, the very poison you're afraid of, burns with a pale blue flame you can barely see. A pretty blue flame proves your liquor burns, and so does a Merrimack County courthouse if you leave a deputy alone with a lamp.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Number two, the bead. A man shakes his jar, watches the bubbles, and says big beads that sit a while mean good, strong liquor. That will give you a rough guess at proof, and I'll grant it that. But a bead can't smell methanol, can't see lead, and can't tell you whether the fool who made it threw out his foreshots. A jar of poison can bead as handsome as a bride's necklace. The only proof of good spirit is honest cuts, clean copper, and a maker you'd trust to pull your own teeth.
♦ Final steel punch clangs on copper coin; coin rings as it drops into a tin cup
Wilkins: And now for the ghost. Last night, for good measure and on the advice of the gristmill men, I took this counterstamped cent and nailed it to the inside of my bulkhead. I said, Hosea Drake, wherever you are, and you too, young fellow out in Nevada, consider it paid in full and the account closed. And the door has not banged since. Whether that was the vent hole or the coin I can't swear in court, and I've sworn in that court twice already. But I paid the ghost with a counterstamped large cent, and it's the first creditor of mine who ever went away satisfied.
♪ Theme returns softly underneath
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Heavy pure copper, honest craftsmanship, and United States Patent 10,561,960. That's the Flame-Flow still. See it at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 or order today at moonshinestill.com. Moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme swells, then settles
Wilkins: Friends, if tonight has got you itching to learn the craft right, how to fire a copper pot gentle, read your jars, and make your cuts like an honest man, then enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you the history, the metallurgy, and the safe and lawful handling of a still, along with every hard lesson I learned from the sheriff, the magistrate, and a bear. The sheriff says I owe the county for two arrests. I say the county owes me for two nights' lodging in a jail that leaked worse than my first worm. Ask for the course at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28.
Wilkins: My thanks to Junior Vance of the Brushy Mountains, to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro and his half-right uncle, to Hosea Drake, may he rest dry at last, and to Barnaby, who has kept watch over this fort four nights running against a door. Remember, friends: every story told here is history and learning, and making spirit to drink without a federal permit is against the law. Now, as always:
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 out under wax cylinder crackle