Church Bells and Hangovers
Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins takes on the Sunday morning problem. He covers the colonial tithingman's staff, rum-soaked ordination feasts, applejack's apple palsy, and why a bronze church bell sounds worse after a Saturday drunk. He tells the story of the Sabbath raid where Barnaby took a Sunday ham's worth out of a revenue man, and Wilkes County runner Junior Vance tells new stories about hauling during the doxology, a revival preacher's sick list, his Aunt Ocie's buttermilk cure and a church deacon pushing his loaded coupe. In the call-in segment Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, explaining lye chemistry and why red oak leaks, and he knocks down the blue-flame myth between strikes of 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 that carcass down and quit rattling the chain like a Methodist circuit rider's tin cup. Tomorrow is the Lord's Day. When that meetinghouse bell starts bawling across the Suncook at half past nine you'll wish you'd slept tonight, same as every sinner in this valley.
♦ Barnaby grunts once, low and offended, chain drops into the dirt
Wilkins: There. He sulks like a deacon caught at a card table.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners and revenue men alike. You're listening to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, Dr. George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, and twice the guest of the Merrimack County sheriff. It's Saturday night, the drip is steady, the bear is sulking, and tonight's subject is one every man in this valley knows in his skull. We are calling it Church Bells and Hangovers, or the Sunday Morning Problem.
♪ Theme fades under crackle
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Fort Wilkins Two-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still is pure spun copper, small enough for the parlor table and handsome enough for the parson's wife's rosewater. See it today at moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a log settles in the stove
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. Let me start with the bell, because I am a metal man and the bell is the villain of every Sunday morning in New England. A church bell is not copper. If it were pure copper it would go bonk like a dropped kettle and nobody would wake up. Bell metal is bronze, about four parts copper to one part tin. The tin makes it hard and brittle and makes it ring. Paul Revere, the midnight rider himself, cast several hundred of those bells with his sons at their foundry, and half the steeples in New England have one of his bronze throats hanging in them.
Wilkins: A church bell is four parts copper and one part tin, and a hungover man is four parts regret and one part Saturday. Both of them ring loudest at half past nine on the Lord's Day.
Wilkins: Now here is the Sunday problem in plain Yankee terms. Saturday is payday at the cotton mill on the Suncook. Saturday night the money turns into cider, rum and whatever runs out of a worm in a hemlock gully. Sunday morning the bell goes BONG. To a sober man that's a call to worship. To a man who drank his wages, it's a blacksmith's sledge on the inside of his skull, and I know because I am a blacksmith and I have been that man.
♦ Distant church bell tolls three times, slow and heavy
Wilkins: Hear that? Somewhere in this valley a mill hand just pulled the quilt over his face and promised God things he won't remember by Tuesday.
Wilkins: Our grandfathers had it worse. The old colony meetinghouses had no stove. You sat on a plank pew in January with your breath freezing in your beard, the parson preached two hours on predestination, and walking the aisle was the tithingman. He was a town officer whose whole job was keeping order in meeting. Tradition says his staff had a fox tail or feather on one end and a hard wooden knob on the other. The feather was for tickling a drowsy goodwife awake. The knob was for the men. Picture a farmer who spent Saturday night with a jug of hard cider, snoring through the sermon. Down comes the knob on his skull, crack, like a mallet on a frozen squash. He jerks up, bites his own tongue, and bleeds into his Sunday collar in front of the whole parish. The tithingman's knob has knocked more sin out of Merrimack County than any sermon ever preached in it.
Wilkins: Then there were the Lord's Day laws. Colony law forbade ordinary labor, sport and needless travel on the Sabbath, and taverns were not to serve townsfolk during meeting. Did it stop anybody? It only moved the drinking to Saturday night and made Sunday morning bloodier.
Wilkins: And don't let anyone tell you the church was always dry. In the last century, when a new minister was ordained, the parish threw a feast, and the tavern bills for those ordinations were a scandal: rum, punch, cider, wine, and flip made with a red-hot loggerhead plunged into the mug so it hissed and foamed. The temperance people waved those old bills around for years afterward. The parish rum bill for one ordination would have floated a whaling ship out of New Bedford, and the new parson was the only sober man there, because somebody had to remember the hymns.
Wilkins: Now to the drink that built the New England hangover: cider. Every farm in the Suncook Valley had an orchard, every cellar had barrels, and the children drank it hard by the time they could hold a mug. The worst of it was applejack. You set a barrel of hard cider out in a January night, the water freezes to ice on top, you knock out the ice, and what's left is stronger. That's called jacking it. But freezing takes out nothing except water. Every sour, oily, wicked thing in that cider stays and gets stronger along with the spirit. The old folks called the headache that came of it the apple palsy: the hands shake, the eyes water, the skull feels a size too small. Applejack is cider that has had the water frozen out and the Devil left in.
Wilkins: The morning cure was always the same. Hair of the dog that bit you. That saying is centuries old. It comes from an ancient belief that if a mad dog bit you, you laid a hair of that same dog on the wound. Hair of the dog is sound medicine if the dog is small. If it was a bear that bit you, you take your hair of the dog and your last rites together.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, chain clinks
Wilkins: He knows I'm talking about him.
Wilkins: Here's the honest physick of it, from a man who has studied bodies with forceps and furnace. Strong drink makes a man pass more water than he puts in. He wakes dried out like a salt cod on a Gloucester rack, with his brain shrunk up in his skull like a walnut in its shell. Water before bed and water at dawn is the only cure I'll swear to. The rest is the cut, and we'll get to the cut in the copper segment.
♪ Short banjo sting
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Legends, outlaws, and the Sabbath raid on Fort Wilkins. The revenue men in Concord got clever one year. They decided that Dr. Wilkins, being a respectable tooth-puller with a pew to rent, must be in meeting Sunday morning like every other Christian. So they'd come at half past ten, while the parson was halfway through his seventhly, and find my still-house empty.
Wilkins: The flaw in the plan is that I have not rented a pew since a deacon told me my bear smelled up the hitching rail.
Wilkins: So I'm in the still-house in my shirtsleeves, minding the worm, and I hear a man creeping through the alders, stepping like a cat on a hot stove lid. Barnaby heard him first. Barnaby doesn't growl. He goes quiet, and a quiet bear is the worst sound in Merrimack County.
♦ Underbrush crackling, a man's nervous breathing
Wilkins: This fellow had a warrant in his breast pocket and Sunday broadcloth on his back, figuring to look like a churchgoer if anybody saw him. He stepped one foot over the reach of that chain. Barnaby got hold of his coattails in his teeth and shook him the way a terrier shakes a barn rat. Broadcloth tore with a sound like a mainsail splitting in a gale. The coattails went. The braces went. Then Barnaby took his second bite, square into the meat of the man's left hindquarter, a mouthful about the size of a Sunday ham. The noise it made was a wet boot pulled out of April mud. Then came the scream, and I'll tell you true, the man hit a note the meetinghouse choir has been reaching for since 1789.
♦ Ripping cloth, a bellow, a high wail, chain snapping taut
Wilkins: Then Barnaby sat on him, four hundred pounds of bear square on a revenue man's chest, and licked the molasses out of his whiskers, because the fool had eaten a gingerbread on the walk out. I came out with a ham bone, the only legal tender that bear accepts, swapped it for the gentleman, and dragged him into my operating chair, the same one I pull molars in.
Wilkins: That revenue man came to Fort Wilkins with a warrant in his breast pocket and left with a draft blowing where his breeches used to be. I cleaned the wound with spirit off the hearts jar, and he hollered. I sewed his hindquarter shut with horsehair and charged him a dollar, and he complained about that too. I told him I had stitched shut better rumps than his on horses with better manners. He never served that warrant. A man can't serve a paper when he can't sit a horse.
Wilkins: Now my other Sunday story, and this one's tender. The deacon of the meetinghouse came to me one Monday with his face as red as a boiled lobster, holding out his hand. In it were six large copper cents from Sunday's collection plate, and on every one was my own punch mark, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., struck right through Lady Liberty's forehead. He demanded to know who in the parish was paying the Lord in moonshine change. I told him the Lord keeps His own accounts and I don't interfere with His bookkeeping. Then I sold him a jar for his wife's nerves.
Wilkins: And one more, about the sexton who rings that bell you heard earlier. I won't say his name, because he's dead and ringing in a better steeple now. He was my most faithful customer. The whole town could tell how he'd spent his Saturday by the Sunday bell. A sober Sunday sounded BONG, BONG, BONG. A rye-whiskey Sunday sounded BONG-BONG, nothing, BONG, and then a long sorrowful BWONNNG as he hung off the rope like a ham in a smokehouse. The sexton rang the bell so crooked one Sunday that half the town went to a funeral and the other half went to a fire.
♦ Church bell rings irregularly, a dull off-beat clang
Wilkins: Speaking of Sunday mornings and the men who've fought them, I have a guest tonight who came a long and peculiar road to this log cabin, all the way from the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina. He's a hauler of spirits down mountain roads, and he looks at a Sabbath morning the way a fox looks at a hen house. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, Junior Vance.
Junior: Thank you, Doc. I'll say this for your bear, he looked at me like I was Sunday dinner and he hadn't said grace yet.
Wilkins: He says grace over everybody, Junior. It's short and it's mostly teeth. Now, tonight is Sunday morning. When was the safest hour to haul a load in Wilkes County?
Junior: Eleven o'clock on Sunday, Doc, and I'll tell you why. The county's chief deputy sang bass in the Baptist choir. Big old boy with a voice down in his boots like a bullfrog in a rain barrel. He never missed service, not once in nine years. His mama would've skinned him. So every Sunday when that church started up the doxology, Praise God from whom all blessings flow, I'd have the coupe loaded down to the springs coming off the Brushies. I knew to the minute. Long-meter doxology, then the offering, then the sermon, and that preacher never went under forty minutes. I had an hour and ten minutes of the Lord's own protection.
Wilkins: Junior, a deputy who never misses the doxology is the most predictable thing in Creation after the sunrise and the tax bill.
Junior: And one Sunday the preacher got sick and they let out early. I come around a curve and there's the deputy standing in the churchyard in his Sunday suit, holding a covered dish of deviled eggs. He looked at me, I looked at him, and he looked down at them eggs. I believe that man chose the eggs, Doc. I've thanked the Lord for deviled eggs every day since.
♦ Wilkins slaps the table, laughing
Wilkins: The Lord provides, and sometimes He provides through a chicken. Now tell me about the preachers. A runner must have met a few.
Junior: Doc, we had a revival come through every August. Big canvas tent in a hayfield, sawdust on the ground, lanterns hanging off the poles, and a traveling preacher with a voice like a sawmill. Every night he'd preach on the wages of sin, and liquor was the main wage. He'd pound that pulpit and holler about the serpent in the jar till the old women fainted in the sawdust.
Wilkins: And after dark?
Junior: After dark he come up the hollow to my uncle's place with a flour sack. Says, brother, I need two jars, for the sick. Well, next night it's four jars for the sick. By Friday it's a dozen. That revival lasted two weeks, and by the end that man's sick list was longer than the Book of Numbers. My uncle finally asked him who all was sick. The preacher just looked at him real sad and said, son, the whole world is sick.
Wilkins: That preacher's sick list grew so fast you'd think the Lord sent a plague and he was the only one with the medicine. I respect the man, Junior. Most parsons only take your money. He took your money and drank the evidence.
Junior: He bought, Doc. Every jar. I'll give him that.
Wilkins: Then tell me about your own Sunday mornings, because a man who hauls on Saturday night wakes up on Sunday like a dropped plate.
Junior: My Aunt Ocie had me sorted out. If I come home at four in the morning, she'd be setting in the kitchen in the dark waiting. She didn't holler. She'd hand me a quart of cold buttermilk straight out of the springhouse with a spoon of sorghum stirred in, and I had to drink every drop with her watching. Then she'd march me down to the spring and make me stick my whole head under that water, cold enough to stop a clock. Then came the sassafras. She'd crush the root and rub it on my neck and wrists and behind my ears, because she said I wasn't setting in her pew smelling like a still-house fire.
Wilkins: Did it work?
Junior: I smelled like a root beer stand and I felt like a mule had kicked me. But I was in that pew at eleven sharp, sitting two rows behind the singing deputy, and he never suspected a thing, because no outlaw ever smelled that much like a candy store.
Wilkins: Your Aunt Ocie was a physician of the first rank. She knew a man needs water, a little sweetening and a cold shock. Half the doctors in Concord still don't know that, and the other half drink.
Junior: One more, Doc, if you've got time.
Wilkins: I've got a full jar and a sleeping bear. Go on.
Junior: Sunday morning, I'm coming through Wilkesboro with a full load, a hundred and twenty jars in the trunk and in the back seat under a quilt. Right in front of the biggest church in town, just as the people are going in, the motor coughs twice and dies dead in the road. I'm sitting there sweating through my shirt. Here come three deacons in black suits with their hats on, and the first one leans in the window and says, son, you got car trouble? I said yes sir, I'm trying to get home to my family. He says, well, we'll help you. Those three deacons got behind that coupe and pushed it a quarter mile, all the way to the filling station. Every bump in the road, the jars went clink-clink-clink under the quilt. And the head deacon says, sounds like your wife packed you a picnic. I said yes sir, she's a fine woman. I didn't have a wife. I had a hundred and twenty jars.
♦ Wilkins wheezing laughter, a tin cup set down hard
Wilkins: Three deacons pushing a load of corn liquor to the filling station is the finest act of Christian charity I've ever heard of, and the only one I'd put my name to. Junior Vance, from the Brushy Mountains, you're welcome at Fort Wilkins any Sabbath of the year. Mind the bear on your way out.
Junior: Doc, I'll be minding that bear till the day I die.
♪ Fiddle sting, bright and quick
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♪ Banjo flourish
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, the slow drip into the jar returns
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the craft. Here's the hard truth I promised you. Most of a Sunday morning headache is made in the still-house, by a careless man with a greedy hand, before the drinker ever lifts the cup. First the law, so the county can't say I didn't. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and what I tell you tonight is history and instruction, not an invitation.
Wilkins: Now let's walk it through, cider brandy the old New England way, since this whole valley runs on apples. Step one: grind and press your apples and catch the juice in a clean oak cask. Step two: let it work. Wild yeast on the skins will do it, or you can add a cake of brewer's yeast, but keep the cask in a cellar that's cool but not freezing. Inside of one to three weeks the bubbling stops and you have hard cider. Rack it off the muddy lees at the bottom, because those lees scorch in the pot and taste like a burned barn.
Wilkins: Step three is the stripping run. Charge the copper pot no more than three-quarters full, bring it up slow, and run it fast to pull the spirit out of the cider. What comes off is weak and cloudy, and we call it low wines. Step four is the spirit run, and that is where honor lives. Charge the low wines back into a clean pot and keep your fire LOW. A hot fire smears every part of the run into the next like a drunk painter's palette.
Wilkins: Now the cuts, and listen close, because this is where men go blind and graveyards fill. Apples, pears and all fruit carry pectin, the stuff that sets a jelly. In fermenting, pectin breaks down into more wood spirit, methanol, than a grain mash ever makes. So the fruit man has to be more careful than the corn man, not less. The first drops are the foreshots. They smell sharp and hot, like varnish and green apples, and they go on the ground, or into the lamp, but never into a mouth. Throw away a good quarter-pint or more for every five gallons you started with, and more for fruit. When in doubt, throw out more. It's cheaper than a coffin.
Wilkins: Next come the heads, still sharp and solvent-smelling but sweetening. They're kept out of the drinking jar too. Then the hearts arrive, clean and sweet and smelling like the orchard in September. That's your spirit. Then the strength starts to fall, and here's tonight's lesson. The tails come in oily and heavy, smelling like wet wool and boiled oats, with a slick on top of the water if you add a splash. That's fusel oil, the heavy alcohols the chemists named this half-century, amyl alcohol among them. The greedy man lets the tails run into the hearts to make his jar fuller, and that's the man who gave you your Sunday. Tails will give you a headache that walks into Monday wearing your own boots.
Wilkins: So collect the run in many small jars, numbered in order, a dozen or two of them. Leave them loosely covered overnight and let the sharp vapors air off. In the morning, smell each one in order and choose which to blend. The nose decides, not the purse.
Wilkins: Now for copper's part. When yeast is stressed by too hot a cellar or a mash with nothing to feed on, it throws off sulfur stink, the rotten-egg reek of hydrogen sulfide. Copper grabs that sulfur, but here's the trick most men miss: copper does its best work where the hot VAPOR touches it, in the helmet, the neck and the line running to the worm. That's why a smith who builds a copper pot with an iron or tin head has wasted his money. A good still has copper all along the vapor's road. Feed your yeast well, keep your cellar mild, and copper will finish what you started.
Wilkins: And fire. Alcohol vapor is heavier than the air. It doesn't rise like smoke. It creeps along the floorboards like a cat after cream, toward your firebox. So keep the still-house open to the breeze, keep your collecting jars well away from any flame, never walk off from a running still, and keep a bucket of sand and a wet wool blanket at the door. I've pulled teeth from men who burned their own still-houses down, and they never smiled right again, mostly because they had no eyebrows.
♦ Barnaby snorts, chain shifts
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. He lost a patch of fur to a careless man's fire in 1859 and he hasn't forgiven anybody holding a match since. Mind you, friends, Barnaby is a tall tale of the Suncook Valley. Don't you chain a bear to your woodshed. They're wild creatures and will make a widow of you.
♪ Low fiddle transition
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths and the listener's line. We have a message on the cylinder tonight, sent all the way up from North Carolina. Crank it up, boy.
♦ Phonograph crank winding, needle scratch, hiss of a recorded message
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?
♦ Needle lifts, crackle
Wilkins: Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, bless you, and bless your uncle too, because he's half a chemist and he doesn't know it. Let me take his medicine apart one ingredient at a time, on the anvil.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: The hickory ashes first. What's in wood ash? Pour water through it in a hopper, the way every New England grandmother did, and what drips out the bottom is lye. Potash. That's what makes soap out of tallow, and what turns hard corn into lye hominy. Lye is caustic as sin. It'll eat the skin off a hand and blind a man who splashes it in his eye. So ashes in hot spirit don't clean anything that matters. Your uncle's methanol and his bad heads boil off first no matter what ash he dumps in. The only cure for bad heads is the cut: throw them out. What ashes do add is a lye-tasting, gray, gritty muck in the bottom of the keg, and a fine way to scald your hand when you clean it out.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings, and here's a cooper's secret. Coopers in this valley won't make a tight barrel out of red oak. Red oak has open pores that run the length of the grain like straws in a broom. You could blow smoke through a stave of it, and a barrel of it would weep cider all over your cellar floor. White oak's pores are naturally plugged, so that's what holds liquor. So what do red oak shavings do in a thump keg? They put color and tannin into the spirit in an hour. That's an old trick for making raw spirit look aged, like a widow dyeing her hair to fool a new beau. It doesn't clean out heads. It only puts a brown coat on them.
Wilkins: Rabbit, red oak in a thump keg is like a Concord alderman in a rowboat: leaks at every pore and colors everything around it brown.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: While I have the punch hot, let me break another old lie that's poisoned more men than the hickory ash ever did. The blue flame. You've heard it in every tavern from here to Portsmouth: pour a spoonful, set a match to it, and if it burns blue, it's true. Bosh. A blue flame proves your liquor is strong enough to burn, and so is a barn, and I wouldn't drink a barn either. Wood spirit, the methanol that blinds and kills, burns with a pale blue flame too. The spoon cannot tell you whether the heads were thrown away. Only an honest distiller can tell you that, and you'd better know him well enough to look him in the eye.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, the coin rings and rolls across the bench
Wilkins: That one's for you, Rabbit. A fresh Wilkins copper, struck while I answered your question. Mind you spend it somewhere it'll embarrass a deacon. Our thanks to Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro and to his uncle, who has good instincts, bad chemistry and, I'll bet, a fine Sunday suit with ash on the sleeves.
♪ Banjo and fiddle swell, then soften
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! For compact copper you'll be proud to own, it's the Fort Wilkins Two-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still, spun from pure copper and riveted by hand. Explore Tabletop Stills at moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, the drip slows
Wilkins: That's the hour, friends. If you'd like to learn this craft the right way, with the cuts, the copper, the fire and the patience, sign on with the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you to read a run with your nose, to number your jars, to keep your vapor road all copper, and to throw out what must be thrown out, so nobody you love wakes up with the apple palsy. My course costs less than one Sunday's worth of shame, and it lasts longer.
Wilkins: To our guest Junior Vance, safe travels down those Brushy Mountain roads, and give my regards to the deputy who sings bass. To Rabbit Miller, spend that copper wisely. To the revenue man with the horsehair stitches, if you're listening, sit on a pillow. Tomorrow when the bell rings, drink your water, eat your bread, and go to meeting anyway. The Lord's seen worse than you, and so has the tithingman.
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 plays out with antique warmth, fading into wax cylinder crackle