The Town Drunk's Defense
Dr. Wilkins tells how Absalom Pease, Pittsfield's best-known drunk, argued his own case before a justice of the peace in the back of a store and beat the constable with logic from the bar stool. He sets that against the old common-law rule that drunkenness is no excuse, and recalls the night Absalom slept curled up against Barnaby the bear. Retired Wilkes County runner Junior Vance tells three new stories of courthouse-bench drunks, a jar-for-fee lawyer and an alibi that was too good. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and strikes down the black-coffee and burning-proof myths at the 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! Settle your great stinking carcass down. That's no revenue man out there, that's the widow Hutchins' goat, and you already ate the goat's husband. Lie down, you four-hundred-pound sack of bad decisions. Lie DOWN.
♦ Bear grumbles, chain drags across frozen ground, heavy thud of a bear dropping onto his haunches
Wilkins: There. He's sulking. He sulks like a deacon who got short-changed in the collection plate.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then settling under
Wilkins: Good evening, you sinners, sots, and sober hypocrites. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I'm Dr. George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, coin-stamper, and twice a guest of the Merrimack County sheriff. Tonight's topic is near and dear to every tavern in the Suncook Valley. It's the Town Drunk's Defense, and it concerns the finest piece of legal reasoning ever made from a bar stool. Better than anything Daniel Webster said sober. A word first, from the gentleman who keeps the lamps lit.
♪ Quick bright banjo sting
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♪ Sting resolves into a slow fiddle drone
Wilkins: Now, before anybody writes to the Concord paper, let me say the same thing I say every week. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and everything on this program is for history and education only. I say it with my hand on my heart and my other hand on a jar, like any honest New Englander.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle swells briefly
Wilkins: Segment the first. The law and the lush.
♪ Low mountain fiddle, mournful, under
Wilkins: Every town in New England has a town drunk, and any town that says it hasn't got one is lying, or else the town drunk is the one saying it. Pittsfield's was Absalom Pease. Absalom didn't drink like a fish. A fish has the decency to come up for air. Absalom drank the way the Suncook runs in April: steady, brown, and rising, and anything in his way ended up in somebody's cellar.
Wilkins: But before I tell you how Absalom beat the law, you have to know what the law was. Sir Matthew Hale, that grim old English judge, wrote that a man who makes himself drunk is a kind of voluntary madman. He picked up his madness by the neck at the tavern, so he gets no pity for it in the dock. William Blackstone, whose Commentaries every country lawyer in New Hampshire keeps by the spittoon, went further. He said the law treats drunkenness as an aggravation of the offense and not an excuse. You can't use one sin to pay for another. Blackstone said drunkenness is an aggravation and not an excuse, which tells you Blackstone never met my brother-in-law, who is both.
Wilkins: So a drunk in 1865 doesn't get to stand up and say the liquor did it. Hang a drunk man and a sober man for the same killing and they hang just as high. The drunk only sways a little more on the way up. And it's not hangings we're talking about tonight anyway. It's the little sins. Drunk in the highway. Drunk and disorderly. Drunk and singing 'Old Hundred' at two in the morning in the key of a gut-shot moose. In this valley those go before the justice of the peace. He's not some robed lord in a marble hall. He's a storekeeper with a commission in his drawer, and he holds court in the back room between the molasses barrel and the codfish, with the cat sleeping on the docket.
Wilkins: If a man can't pay the fine he sits in the lockup. If he keeps on not paying, sooner or later he lands on the town's pauper roll. In plenty of New England towns the poor used to be bid off at public vendue, like a heifer at a fair. Whoever asked the town the least to board the wretch got him. A drunk on that list went for about the price of a good dog, and a lot less than a good hog, because a hog at least turns into bacon.
Wilkins: There was the other road out too. Back in 1840 six drunks were sitting in Chase's Tavern in Baltimore, sopping wet with whiskey, and they swore off it. They called themselves the Washingtonians, and they went around the country standing on platforms telling every filthy detail of their drinking. The puking, the beatings, the snakes crawling up the bedpost in the delirium tremens. Folks paid good money to hear it. You can't drink yourself rich, but you could quit and talk yourself rich. And I'll say this plainly, because I'm a medical man of sorts: the shakes are no joke. A heavy drinker who stops cold can take fits and die of it, and a man in that state needs a doctor, not a sermon.
♦ Barnaby snorts outside, chain rattles once
Wilkins: Now, Absalom Pease. One fine morning in October, Constable Hezekiah Grubb finds Absalom flat on his back in the middle of the turnpike, right in front of the meeting house. His hat's full of rainwater, there's a dead chicken on his chest (nobody ever learned whose), and he's singing to the chicken. Grubb hauls him before Squire Tobias Mudgett, who sits as justice of the peace in the back of his store. The complaint is read out: one Absalom Pease, found lying drunk in the public highway, against the peace and dignity of the State.
Wilkins: Absalom stands up, or near enough. He's leaning on a pickle barrel like it's the bar of the Supreme Court. And he says, so help me, every word: Your Honor, I was not lying in the highway. The highway was lying under me, and I ask this court which of us was the more horizontal.
♦ Wilkins slaps the workbench, laughing
Wilkins: And he isn't through. He puts it to the court in three heads, like a Congregational sermon. First head: the complaint names the wrong defendant. I wasn't drunk in the road, my trousers were drunk in the road, and I just happened to be inside them. Arrest the trousers. Squire Mudgett tells him to sit down. He does not sit down.
Wilkins: Second head, and this is the stroke of genius. He says: Your Honor, under the law of 1855 no man in New Hampshire may sell liquor except the town liquor agent, and only for medicinal, mechanical, and chemical purposes. That part is true, friends. The town agent was the only legal seller of spirits in the whole state. So, says Absalom, every drop in me came, at least on paper, from the town of Pittsfield, as medicine. If I am medicated, I am a patient, not a drunk. If I am drunk, then the town of Pittsfield is my bartender, and I move that the selectmen be arrested as accessories.
Wilkins: The store went quiet. Two selectmen were standing right there buying lamp oil, and one of them dropped his can.
Wilkins: Third head. Absalom calls Constable Grubb as his witness. He says: Constable, how did you know I was drunk? Grubb says, I smelled it on you. Absalom says, And how does a sober, upright officer of the law know what whiskey smells like? Grubb goes red as a boiled lobster. Absalom leans across the pickle barrel and sniffs him. Like a hound at a gopher hole. Then he turns to the Squire and says: Your Honor, I submit the constable is the only man in this room with liquor on his breath and a badge on his chest, and only one of the two has been earned.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a long pause
Wilkins: Squire Mudgett laughed so hard he cracked the slat of his chair. He fined Absalom one dollar and costs, as the law demanded. Then he fined himself one dollar for laughing in his own court, and he made Grubb chip in a dollar for coming to work smelling like Absalom. Three dollars into the town treasury, and every one of them got spent at the town agent's that very afternoon. That, my friends, is the greatest legal argument ever made from a bar stool, and the stool was a pickle barrel.
Wilkins: There's a second chapter, and it's ugly, so put down your supper. That January it got to twenty below. Absalom had been thrown out of every barn in the valley, so he crawled into the only warm place left in Pittsfield, which was Barnaby's lean-to right outside this window. He crawled in under that bear and wrapped himself around Barnaby like a baby around a featherbed, and he slept there all night.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, as if remembering
Wilkins: Morning comes and I look out. Barnaby is licking Absalom's face. Have you ever seen a bear's tongue up close? It's like a wet saddle blanket studded with burdocks, and it smells like a dead muskrat that's been drinking. Barnaby licked off the man's left eyebrow, then his right, then most of his mustache, and then the remains of a pickled-egg supper Absalom had lost down his own front the night before. Every lick sounded like a boot pulling out of spring mud. Absalom opens one eye, feels that tongue go up his face, and says, 'Martha, you've let yourself go.'
Wilkins: Then Constable Grubb shows up to collect him for another dollar. He reaches into that lean-to and Barnaby takes hold of his boot. Grubb pulls, the bear pulls, and Grubb's foot comes out of the boot with a pop like a cork from a jug of hard cider. He took a stocking and a strip of skin with him. Barnaby ate that boot right there, nails, heel, and all, crunching away like a boy with a mouthful of rock candy. A week later I raked out the bear's leavings and counted twenty-two boot nails and a heel. I've had worse-made boots come out of a Concord cobbler's shop. Grubb walked home one boot short, cussing the whole length of the turnpike, and Absalom slept till noon.
♪ Banjo flourish, transition
Wilkins: Segment the second. Outlaws, runners, and liars on oath.
♪ Driving fiddle reel, under
Wilkins: In this business a jar of whiskey spends as much time in a courtroom as it does in a cellar. Over in Barnstead they tell of a funeral in the first year of Mr. Lincoln's tax. The coffin was carried so careful, and the procession sang so loud, that nobody but the gravedigger noticed it sloshed. There was rye in there, not a corpse. They buried a coffin so full of rye that the pallbearers asked for the wake to be held first. As for me, every time the county drags me in, I take a punch and a bag of copper cents. If I'm going to sit there all morning I might as well do some honest work.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. The magistrate can keep his gavel. I've got a louder one. Now, tonight's guest knows a thing or two about the inside of a county courthouse. He hauled whiskey out of the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina, and his people have been dodging the law since before the law had a name. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, Junior Vance.
Junior: Thank you, Doc. I've got to tell you, I've been in some rough places, but this is the first time a bear ever growled at me through a window before I got my hat off.
Wilkins: He growls at everybody. He's a Democrat. Junior, we've been talking about drunks in court. You have a few in your country, I'd wager.
Junior: Doc, the courthouse in Wilkesboro had a bench out front, and the same man sat on it every day God sent. Uncle Pink Sparks. No kin to me, everybody called him Uncle. Pink was drunk by nine in the morning, but he was the most useful man in the county. He'd give anybody an alibi for a dollar. You got caught hauling, you went out front, slipped Pink a dollar, and Pink walked in and swore on the Bible you'd been setting with him all night, playing checkers and talking scripture.
Wilkins: A dollar! That's one dollar above the sheriff's going rate.
Junior: Yes sir, and Pink was more reliable. Well, one Monday two different boys got took on the same Saturday night. One was caught at Elkin and the other was clean down past Statesville, forty mile apart. Both of them paid Pink a dollar. Pink walks in and swears the first boy was with him all night at Elkin. Then the second case is called, and Pink, without batting an eye, swears the second boy was with him all night down below Statesville. The judge leans over the bench and says, Mr. Sparks, you've just testified you were in two places forty miles apart on the same night. How do you explain that? And Pink scratches himself, real thoughtful, and says, Judge, that's how good the liquor was.
♦ Wilkins wheezes laughing, chair creaks
Wilkins: God bless the man. Did the judge throw him in?
Junior: Judge throwed both of them boys out for wasting his morning. Then he asked Pink, private, where he could get some of that liquor.
Wilkins: Now that's justice. Did you ever stand in front of the bench yourself, Junior?
Junior: Once, Doc, and I had me a lawyer named Lester Combs. Lester was the best trial lawyer in three counties, and he was drunk from the time he put on his collar to the time he lost it. He had a jar in his briefcase and called it his law library. The whole case hung on the deputy's word about what time he seen me pass the church. Lester gets up, sways a little, and asks the deputy to take out his pocket watch. Then he spends forty-five minutes cross-examining that watch. Where'd you buy it, when'd you wind it last, was it running fast, had it ever been dropped in a creek, did your granddaddy own it, and was your granddaddy an honest man. By the end of it that deputy didn't know if it was Tuesday or Easter.
Wilkins: He put the watch on trial.
Junior: Put it on trial and convicted it. The jury was out about as long as it takes to roll a cigarette. Not guilty. Lester shook my hand, steady as a preacher, and said, Junior, my fee's six jars. I said, Lester, that's robbery. He said, Then argue with me, and every time I argued he went up a jar.
Wilkins: A lawyer paid in jars is the only lawyer whose fee goes down the more you argue with it, because sooner or later he drinks his own retainer. Now give me one more, Junior. Give me the best bar-stool defense you ever heard, made by a man with no lawyer at all.
Junior: That would be a fella from up toward Moravian Falls, and I'll not say his name, because his grandbabies go to church. A deputy pulls him over one night with a trunk full of half-gallons, and he's drunk as a boiled owl, and the deputy says, Son, what's in the trunk? And he says, Officer, I am too drunk to know what's in that trunk. So if I don't know it's there, I can't have put it there. And if I didn't put it there, it must be the car's.
Wilkins: The car's!
Junior: The car's whiskey, he says. You want to arrest somebody, arrest the Ford. And Doc, that deputy was tired and it was cold and it was almost Christmas. He looked at that man, he looked at that Ford, and he wrote the ticket up on the car. Impounded the car and let the man walk home. That Ford sat in county impound for three months like a jailed Baptist, not a drop on its breath and guilty as sin.
Wilkins: Junior, that is Absalom Pease's trousers defense, word for word, and three counties and a hundred years apart.
Junior: A drunk's the same everywhere, Doc. He'll take the one fool argument a sober man's too proud to make, and half the time it works.
Wilkins: Junior Vance, of the Brushy Mountains, ladies and gentlemen. Stay a spell and don't step over the chain.
Junior: Doc, I'll stay right here by the stove where the bear can't get at me.
♦ Barnaby grunts loudly, chain clanks taut
Junior: He heard that.
Wilkins: He hears everything. He's the only honest clerk in the county. Now a word from our patron.
♪ Brassy patent-medicine wagon fanfare, tambourine shake
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♪ Fanfare ends with a cymbal crash and a single banjo pluck
Wilkins: The bear is chained. Mostly.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft, or how to make a liquor good enough to stand trial.
♪ Slow, warm fiddle, under
Wilkins: You heard Junior. Sooner or later a jar ends up in a courtroom, and when it does I want it to be the best-made jar on the evidence table. Let me take you through it the way I'd teach a young smith. Remember, now: this is history and learning, and making spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law.
Wilkins: First, the mash. Take about eight pounds of cracked corn to five gallons of clean water. Bring it up nearly to a boil and hold it there, stirring, till it goes thick as wallpaper paste. That's the starch breaking open. Let it cool till you can just bear a finger in it, about a hundred and fifty degrees by the glass, then stir in about two pounds of crushed malted barley. Raw corn starch is no use to the yeast. The malt carries the ferments, what the chemists call enzymes, and they turn that starch into sugar. Hold it warm an hour or two and it'll go from paste to sweet gruel. Barnaby will smell it from the lean-to and cry like a widow. Then cool it to blood-warm or a little below and pitch your yeast. Let it work five to seven days in a warm room with air moving through it, because a fermenting mash breathes out a gas that will kill a man who sits too long over it in a shut cellar. When the bubbling quits and it tastes sour-dry instead of sweet, you have your wash. It's thin and weak, a little stronger than beer.
Wilkins: Second, the still. Copper. Always copper, and clean copper. The sulfur stinks a mash makes, the rotten egg and the boiled cabbage, take hold on bright copper and stay behind on the metal. A pot still kept by a lazy man is a lot like a lazy man: it gets louder, greener, and worse-smelling as the day goes on. Scrub it after every run and keep the green crust out of your product. Joints are silver-soldered or properly fitted, never lead. Lead in a still is a slow hanging.
Wilkins: Third, the fire, and this is where men die. The vapor coming off a still will burn, and a leak near an open flame will take your still house and your eyebrows with it. Barnaby has already done that to Absalom for free. Keep your heat low and steady, keep air moving, keep no flame near where the spirit runs out, and never, ever walk away from a running still to go see a man about a horse. Keep a bucket of water and a wet sack handy.
Wilkins: Fourth, and the one that matters most: the cuts. I don't run into one big jug. I run into a row of small jars, numbered one to twenty, lined up on the bench like jurors. The first spirit to come over is the foreshots. It's sharp, it stinks of solvent, and it carries the worst of the methanol, the wood spirit, the stuff that blinds and kills. It goes on the ground, never in a glass, and I throw out a generous measure of it, more than I think I need. After that come the heads, still hot and harsh, smelling like a new varnish. Set them aside. Don't drink them. Then the hearts come, sweet and clean, and you can smell the corn in them. That's what you keep. Last come the tails, oily, wet-dog and cardboard. Set those aside, and the old-timers would run them again with the next batch.
Wilkins: Here's the trick with the numbered jars. Let them sit overnight with a cloth over them, and in the morning walk down the line like a magistrate. Smell each one. Judge each one. You'll find the place where the heads give way to the hearts, and the place where the hearts give way to the tails, and you make your cuts honest at those lines. A man who lumps the whole run into one jug and hopes for the best is like a court that tries the whole tavern for one broken window.
♦ Slow drip of distillate into a glass jar
Wilkins: That drip is a heart, by the sound of it. A heart drips sweeter than a head. Don't ask me how I know. Twenty years of listening.
♪ Banjo transition
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, mail, and the hard truth of the anvil. We've got a voice on the wax tonight, folks. A listener from Junior's own country rang through to the call-in line and left word on the cylinder. Roll it.
♦ Click, then a scratchier wax cylinder hiss, faint wind noise
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?
♦ Click, hiss fades
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Junior, do you know this man?
Junior: Know his uncle, Doc. Not the part about the ashes, but the uncle. He owes my cousin a hog.
Wilkins: Then this one's a family matter. Rabbit, your uncle's not lying. He's half-right, which is more dangerous than lying. Wood ash soaked in water makes lye. That's what your grandmother boiled with fat to make soap, and it's what takes the skin off your knuckles. Lye is an alkali, and it can knock down some of the sour, vinegary bite in a soured charge. So an old-timer threw his ashes in, the stuff tasted a little less like pickle juice, and he decided he'd worked a miracle.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: But mark this. The real danger in bad heads is the methanol, the wood spirit, and lye doesn't touch it. Methanol boils at a lower heat than good spirit, so it comes over heaviest early in the run. The only thing that saves you is throwing away the foreshots and setting the heads aside. And lye splashing around a hot still is caustic. It'll burn your eyes and your hide. Rabbit, putting lye in your thump keg to clean your liquor is like using a wildcat to brush your teeth: something'll come off, but it won't be the trouble.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Oak puts tannin, color, and woody flavor into spirit, the same as a barrel does over time. So the raw stuff turns amber and tastes smoother on the tongue, and a man thinks it's been cleaned. It hasn't been cleaned, it's been dressed up. Red oak shavings in raw liquor are a powdered wig on a hog: it looks like a judge, but it still smells like the sty. Good cuts first. Then, if you want color and flavor, oak can give you those. It can't take away a single thing that'll hurt you.
Junior: Doc, I believe his uncle sold that ash-and-shaving liquor at the church picnic one year. Called it 'Brushy Mountain Purified.'
Wilkins: Then I pray for the congregation. Rabbit, my thanks and a hearty shout from Pittsfield to you and the whole Miller clan in Wilkesboro. Tell your uncle he's welcome at Fort Wilkins any time, but he'll pay his cousin's hog first, and Barnaby gets the bacon.
♦ Barnaby grunts, approving
Wilkins: Since tonight is the Town Drunk's Defense, let me take my punch to two more myths every drunk in New England swears by.
Wilkins: Myth one: black coffee sobers a man. It does not. A man's body clears out liquor at its own steady pace. You can't hurry it with coffee, cold water, a slap, or a sermon. All coffee does is turn a sleepy drunk into a wide-awake one, and a wide-awake drunk is the most dangerous philosopher in New England. I've seen one with four cups of coffee in him argue the Missouri Compromise with a fence post. The fence post won.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Myth two: if it burns, it's good and safe. The English used to wet gunpowder with spirit, and if the powder still lit, the spirit was 'proved.' That's where your word 'proof' comes from. A fine history, but a spirit catching fire only tells you there's strong alcohol in it. It doesn't tell you what kind. Methanol burns beautiful. A jar of foreshots that would blind you will burn just as pretty as the finest hearts. If burning made a thing safe, the Merrimack County courthouse would be the safest building in the state, and I'd volunteer to hold the match.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, the coin rings and rolls across the anvil
Wilkins: That's three cents stamped tonight, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and every one of them truer than the myths.
♪ Bright banjo sting
Announcer: Before you go, friends, a quick word! The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, is pure heavy-gauge electrolytic copper, handcrafted to last for generations. See it at moonshinestill.com, or at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28! That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Sting fades into the theme, slow and warm
Wilkins: Well, that's our evening. Junior Vance, my thanks for Uncle Pink, Lester Combs, and that poor, convicted Ford.
Junior: Doc, it was an honor. You tell Barnaby I said goodnight from a respectful distance.
Wilkins: He'll take it under advisement, like any judge. And friends, if you'd like to learn the craft properly, with your cuts honest, your copper clean, and your eyebrows still on your face, then sign on for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You'll learn mash, metal, fire, and cuts from a man who's been arrested for less. It's history and learning, done right, and within the law.
Wilkins: Absalom Pease died at seventy-one, in his own bed, which surprised the whole town, and he left me his pickle barrel. I keep it by the forge. Whenever the law comes calling, I lean on it and think about the trousers.
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 rises and fades under wax cylinder crackle
♦ Wax cylinder crackle runs out to silence