A Pittsfield Funeral: The Wake, the Tall Tales, and the Missing Jug
Dr. G. G. Wilkins describes a Suncook Valley wake for old Asa Pettigrew, a Pittsfield cooper. He covers New England's habit of drinking at funerals, the coins laid on the eyes, the tolling bell, and the young embalming trade that followed the war. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells about the copper ice-casket he built for a July burying, the cracked church-bell clapper he sleeved overnight, and the coffin plate a drunk engraver got wrong, then gives the last clue to where Wilkins's best jug went. In the mailbag, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro asks whether hickory ashes and red oak shavings clean up a thump keg, and Wilkins answers him with lye, tannin and an anvil strike. He also knocks down the old blue-flame test before the jug turns up in the last place anyone wanted to look.
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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 down, you four-hundred-pound fur carpet. This is a house of mourning this week, and you're out there grunting like a deacon who's been told the collection plate's light. Lie DOWN. ...There. He's grieving too, friends. Barnaby grieves the way any Christian does: by eating everything on the sideboard and then lying down to cry about it.
♦ Bear grunt, chain drags across log sill, then silence
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, and welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, Merrimack County, where the river runs cold, the copper runs bright, and the gossip runs faster than both. I'm your host, Dr. George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, stamper of coins and occasional guest of the county jail. Tonight we're wearing a black armband. Old Asa Pettigrew, cooper of this town, maker of barrels, hater of Methodists and owner of the worst singing voice ever to crack a hymnal, has gone to his reward. We waked him, we buried him, and somewhere in between some low, thieving, grave-robbing son of a she-goat walked off with the best jug I ever drew off a still. Tonight you'll hear about the wake, the stories, and the missing jug. Before we lay the dead to rest, a word from the man who keeps my lamp oil paid.
♪ Brief banjo flourish
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, hand-built of heavy-gauge pure copper and fit for an emperor's laboratory! For essential oils, herbal tinctures, and proper distillation demonstrations, see moonshinestill.com today!
♪ Theme swells and fades under
♪ Slow fiddle dirge, mournful and a little drunk
Wilkins: Segment one. The history of the New England funeral and the bottle that always came to it. People today talk as if a wake with liquor at it is some Irish invention got off a boat at Boston. Bunk. Your Puritan great-great-grandfather, who'd whip a boy for whistling on the Sabbath, buried his own mother with a hogshead of rum standing by the grave. Funeral bills in old New England listed the coffin, the gloves, the gravedigger, and the rum, all on the same page in the same ink, and nobody blushed. The minister drank. The bearers drank. The sexton drank double, because he had to fill the hole afterward. Then along came the temperance societies of the thirties and forties, sour-faced as a pickled beet, and the funeral bottle was one of the first things they went after. They didn't stop the drinking, mind. They moved it to the woodshed.
♦ Wax crackle; a chair creaks
Wilkins: Now, Asa. Asa Pettigrew was so tight with a dollar he died in the morning to save the price of supper. He went in July, God help us, the hottest week this valley's had since the British burned Washington. In Pittsfield, when a man dies, three things happen. First, the bell at the meeting house tolls once for every year of his age, and every farmer between here and Barnstead puts down his scythe to count. Seventy-three strokes. You could hear old women all down the turnpike: 'Seventy-one, seventy-two, seventy-three. That's Asa. Good.' Second, the women stop the clocks, cover the looking glass, and lay him on a cooling board in the front parlor. Third, somebody puts coins on his eyes to keep the lids shut until he stiffens. That somebody was me. I laid two of my own counterstamped large cents on him, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., one on each eyelid.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That makes Asa Pettigrew the first man in Merrimack County to meet his Maker wearing my advertising. If St. Peter needs a molar pulled, he knows where to write.
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Then comes the sitting up. Somebody sits with the dead all night. Partly that's respect. Partly it's to keep the cats off him, because a cat will go after a dead man's face the way a revenue man goes after a widow's savings: no shame and no hesitation. And partly it's the old fear that he isn't truly dead. Every grandmother in this valley has a story about the man who sat up in his coffin. Well, I'll tell you mine. By the second night, July heat, Asa started to swell. The ice was going fast. And at about two in the morning, with the Widow Pettigrew dozing in the rocker and me in the corner with a tin cup of medicinal tooth comfort, Asa made a noise. A long, low, wet sigh from the south end of the corpse, like a bellows with consumption. The widow came out of that rocker so fast she left her bonnet behind, and I spilled a good gill of the hearts down my shirtfront, which is the real tragedy of this story.
♦ Fiddle plucks a sour note
Wilkins: That's just gas, friends. The dead are full of it, same as the living, same as the legislature. But by the third day that parlor had a stink that could take the varnish off a pew and the faith out of a Baptist. You could have hung a ham in there and cured it in an afternoon.
♦ Wax crackle; distant bear grunt
Wilkins: Now I'll speak serious for a moment, because this year serious has earned it. This spring the whole Union buried Mr. Lincoln. They embalmed him, the way they've been embalming the boys who came home from Virginia in pine boxes on the cars, and carried him sixteen hundred miles by funeral train, Washington to Springfield, Illinois, with folks standing along the tracks at midnight holding lanterns and their hats. I won't joke about that burying. I'll only say that the embalming trade grew up in this war, out of families who wanted their sons home, whatever it cost. Before that, all a country family had was ice, a cool cellar, and a prayer. Up here we still mostly rely on the ice and the prayer, and the prayer's been melting faster than the ice.
♪ Dirge rises, then cuts to a jaunty banjo
Wilkins: So here's the scene. Thursday, the day before the burying. The whole town's in Asa's parlor: deacons, cousins, a dozen coopers who all owed him money, and a widow who's buried two husbands already and keeps her mourning dress in mothballs between engagements. I'd brought my best: a two-gallon stoneware jug of double-run rye, cut by my own hand, hearts and nothing but the hearts. I set it down in that parlor, turned around to pull a toothache out of Deacon Hobart's nephew, and when I turned back, the jug was GONE. Vanished like a sheriff at a barn-raising. And that's where we leave the mystery until after we've talked to a man who was in the room.
♪ Banjo transition, quick and rough
Wilkins: Segment two: legends, outlaws, and people who should have known better. Before my guest comes in, I'll tell you how the Merrimack County deputies paid their respects. On burying day, Friday morning, the procession was forming up: coffin on the wagon, bell tolling, widow in black looking like a crow that's just inherited a cornfield. Up the turnpike trots a young deputy on a borrowed mare, waving a paper. A warrant. For me. At a funeral. I've been arrested twice by the Merrimack sheriff and I bear the office no grudge. A man has to make a living, even a useless one. But a warrant served over a dead man's coffin is lower than a snake's belly in a wagon rut.
♦ Chain clinks, bear grunts low and long
Wilkins: I'd brought Barnaby along on his long chain to stand guard over the funeral ham, since bears and Pettigrews had always got on. That boy got down off his horse and came at me with his paper, and Barnaby stood up. All seven feet. When a black bear stands up, friends, it makes a sound in its throat like a millstone grinding wet corn, and the whole crowd went quiet as the corpse. The deputy turned and ran, and Barnaby went after him. Took the whole seat out of that boy's britches in one swipe. It tore like canvas sail ripping in a gale, and his drawers flapped behind him like a surrender flag. The boy ran straight for the burying ground, saw the only hole in the county, and dove into Asa's open grave.
♦ Hollow thud, a muffled yelp
Wilkins: Six feet down, in the mud. It was the first time in his life that deputy had been six feet under and closer to Heaven than he'd ever get standing up. Barnaby didn't follow. He's no fool. He sat down on the edge of that grave with the funeral ham between his paws and ate it, bone and all. You could hear the bone go, crack, crunch, slurp, ham fat running down his chin and dripping into the grave on the deputy's hat, and him looking down the whole while like a bishop at a hanging. The boy stayed down there till dark. The sexton came round at dusk, didn't see him, and threw in the first shovelful, and I've never heard a man argue so eloquently with a spade. We had to postpone Asa a day, and that made it four days in July, and we'll speak no more of the parlor.
♦ Bear grunt; wax crackle
Wilkins: Now. A man who saw all of this, who built half of what went into that burying and was the last to lay eyes on my jug, is a third-generation coppersmith and the finest hand with a planishing hammer in the Suncook Valley. Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister. Silas, welcome to the fort.
Silas: Evening, Doc. Thank you kindly. I'll say first I had nothing to do with that jug, and I'll say it again under oath if it comes to that.
Wilkins: That's precisely what a guilty man says, Silas. Sit down. Tell the folks what the Widow Pettigrew asked you to build.
Silas: Well, the trouble was the heat. Asa died Tuesday, and the widow knew he'd keep about as well as a mackerel on a stove lid. She'd seen one of those patent corpse coolers advertised in a Boston paper, a metal box you pack with ice and lay the departed in, and she came to my shop Tuesday noon and said, Silas, I want one by tonight, copper, and I'll not pay Boston prices. So I sat up all afternoon with a sheet of copper and built it: a lined box with a tray under the body for the ice and a brass drain cock at the foot to let off the melt.
Wilkins: A drain cock. On a corpse. Only a coppersmith would think of that.
Silas: A box full of melting ice has to drain somewhere, Doc. The fault wasn't in the drain cock. The fault was nobody set a bucket under it. That melt ran out of the cock, through the parlor carpet, through a gap in the floorboards, and down into the cellar, where it dripped straight into a crock of the widow's bread-and-butter pickles. Three days of it. The cellar cat drank out of that crock every night and got fat, and the widow served those pickles at the funeral supper.
Wilkins: Lord Almighty. Pickled in Asa.
Silas: I didn't tell her, Doc, and I'll thank you not to.
Wilkins: Silas, she's listening to this program right now with a fireplace poker in her hand. Go on. The bell. Tell them about the bell.
Silas: Wednesday evening the sexton came running over. He'd tolled for a drowned boy up toward Barnstead the week before and cracked the clapper, a hairline right through the shank, and he said, if I toll Asa seventy-three strokes on this, the clapper will come flying out through the louvers and kill a cow. The bell's bronze, but the clapper's iron, and there was no time to forge a new one. So I fit a sleeve over the crack, a collar of heavy copper heated cherry and shrunk on so tight it squeaked as it cooled. I didn't solder it. You don't trust a bell to solder.
Wilkins: And it held.
Silas: It held. But that copper collar added some weight and dulled the strike a little, so the bell rang a hair flat. Every stroke of seventy-three came out a hair under the note, and you could see the choir wincing all the way down the pews.
Wilkins: And the widow?
Silas: The widow stood on the meeting-house step, listened, and said, Well, that suits him. He sang flat in that choir forty years, and I'd not want him going out any different.
Wilkins: That's a Pittsfield woman for you: tender as a turnip. All right, Silas, the coffin plate. I've heard rumors.
Silas: The family ordered an engraved plate from a man in Concord: name, dates, all of it. It came up Thursday on the stage, the widow unwrapped it in front of the whole parlor, and it said, plain as Scripture, ASS PETTIGREW. He'd left the A out of Asa and hadn't noticed for the whiskey on his breath.
Wilkins: That engraver was so drunk he couldn't have spelled 'cat' if you'd spotted him the C and the T.
Silas: The widow said, without a flicker, Well, it isn't wrong, but it's not for the box. So I went back to the shop, cut a new plate from a scrap of twenty-four-ounce sheet, planished it smooth, and hand-chased the letters by lamplight till after two in the morning. A-S-A. I checked it four times. The bad one's nailed above my forge to this day. Every apprentice I take on hears the same sermon: you don't drink on the job, and if you must, don't engrave.
Wilkins: Wisdom from the forge. Now, Silas, under the eye of God and Barnaby: the jug. Where did you last see my jug?
Silas: Thursday night, Doc. You'd set it on the sideboard and gone off to pull young Hobart's tooth. The parlor was hot as a smokehouse, and somebody, I didn't see who, said that jug ought to be chilled. They picked it up and set it right on the lid of my ice casket, cold copper over a full load of ice. Best cooler in the county. Then the deacon started praying, and when a deacon prays in Pittsfield every eye shuts, out of reverence or plain exhaustion. That deacon prayed forty minutes, which is twenty minutes longer than Asa spent in church in his whole life and ten minutes longer than the ice lasted. When we opened our eyes, the jug was gone off the lid.
Wilkins: Off the lid of the coffin.
Silas: Off the lid of the coffin, Doc.
Wilkins: Silas McAllister, I believe you've just solved a crime and don't know it yet. Hold that thought, friends, because I'm a showman and I'll milk it. We'll get to the jug before we sign off. Silas, stay on for the copper talk after this.
Silas: I'll stay as long as the coffee does.
♪ Banjo sting
♪ Brassy patent-medicine fanfare, tambourine and cornet
Announcer: Step right up, friends of the Suncook Valley and every valley beyond! Has a cheap, patched-up, pot-metal contraption ever turned your fine herbs into a muddy disappointment? Then hear me: those days are dead and buried, and Asa Pettigrew has more life in him than they do! Moonshine Stills, proud home of the Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, presents its flagship to every lover of real American craftsmanship. Heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, the purest copper a smith can work, bright as a new cent and true as a deacon's oath! Precision-machined brass unions, tight as a widow's purse! A design built to maximize convective circulation, so the heat rolls and the vapor flows clean and steady, delivering unmatched purity for essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations! All for eight hundred and ninety-nine dollars, an heirloom your grandchildren will polish and fight over at your own wake! See it with your own eyes at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, where the bear guards the door and the copper guards your reputation! Or order your setup direct at moonshinestill.com, that's https://moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still. Once more for the folks in the back pew: moonshinestill.com! The Flame-Flow Still: built to outlast the man who owns it!
♪ Fanfare resolves with a cymbal crash
♪ Low forge-bellows rhythm under mountain fiddle
Wilkins: Segment three: copper and the craft. I'll lay it out as plainly as I'd lay out a corpse. Silas is still with us. But first the warning, which the Announcer insists on and I won't argue with: distilling spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against United States law, and everything we say here is for history and education only. Mr. Lincoln's men never forgave me, and I'd not wish them on you.
Silas: Amen.
Wilkins: Now, a run of spirits is a funeral from start to finish, and I'll prove it. First there's the mash, the living body. For a plain corn whiskey in the old style, take a bushel of cracked corn, fifty-six pounds, and cook it in about twenty-five gallons of water at a slow boil for an hour or so, stirring so it doesn't scorch. Scorched mash tastes like a burnt church, and no copper can save it. Let it cool till it's hot enough to sting a finger but not scald it, around a hundred and fifty degrees on a thermometer, if you're modern enough to own one. Then stir in a peck or more of crushed malted barley. The malt is what turns the corn's starch into sugar. Without it you've just made hog porridge. Cover it and let it sit an hour or two. Then cool it to blood-warm, about eighty degrees, pitch your yeast, and leave it in a warm room with good air.
Silas: Good air, Doc. Say it twice.
Wilkins: Good air, good air. A working mash breathes out a gas that'll drop a man in a closed cellar as neatly as Barnaby would. After five days or a week the bubbling quits and the cap falls, and you have a wash. That's your body, ready for the laying out.
Silas: And feed your yeast properly, Doc. That's the part folks skip.
Wilkins: Tell them why.
Silas: Starved yeast or yeast that's been run too hot gets mean, and mean yeast throws off rotten-egg gas, the sulfur stink. You'll smell it on the mash before it ever sees the still. A healthy ferment, kept warm but not hot, gives you a lot less of it to fight later.
Wilkins: And when you do have to fight it, copper's the fighting man. Where's the copper doing the most good, Silas?
Silas: In the vapor path. Everybody worships the pot, but the real work happens up in the helmet, the swan neck and the column, wherever hot vapor rubs bright copper. That's where the sulfur gets caught and held back. So keep the inside of your neck clean and bright. If the copper's dull, the sulfur gets past it.
Wilkins: Now the run, and here's the burying. Low fire. Steady fire. You're not smelting iron, you're coaxing a soul out of a corpse. The first drops to come off are the foreshots. That's the devil's portion. It carries the most methanol, the poison that takes your eyesight before it takes your life. You throw that out, every drop. For a small still, the rule I give my apprentices is a gill and a half, call it five ounces, for every five gallons of wash, and if you're in any doubt, pour off more. Nobody ever went blind from wasting a cup of foreshots.
Silas: Into the ground, Doc. Never into a cup, and never into a liniment for your mother's knee.
Wilkins: Then come the heads, the mourners who arrive early and talk too loud: sharp, solventy, smelling like a varnish shop. Those get set aside, never drunk. Then the hearts, the true mourners, the ones who loved the man: sweet, clean, smooth on the tongue. That's your keeper. Last come the tails, the relations who stay too long after the funeral supper, oily, wet-dog smelling, eating the last of the pie. Set them aside to run again. Collect in small jars, one after another, never one big pot, so you can smell and taste your way along and make honest cuts. An honest cut is the whole art. Everything else is just plumbing.
Silas: There's one more thing your listeners ought to hear, Doc, about apple.
Wilkins: Go ahead.
Silas: Folks up here love to run cider and pomace for apple brandy. But fruit carries pectin, and when pectin breaks down it makes methanol. So a fruit mash gives you more poison up front than a corn mash does. Your heads and foreshots have to be generous on a fruit run. Generous. Don't be stingy with the bad stuff.
Wilkins: That's the first time anybody in New Hampshire has said 'don't be stingy.' Silas, you'll be run out of the state. Now, fire. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air. If your still weeps at a joint, that vapor doesn't rise politely and leave by the chimney. It creeps along the floor like a cat after cream until it finds your firebox, and then whoomp, and there's a second funeral in Pittsfield with you as the guest of honor. So: never leave a running still alone, not to pee, not to court, not to watch a deputy in a grave. Keep good air moving, keep a bucket of sand and a wet blanket by the door, and test your joints before you ever light up. And use proper unions or silver solder, never lead.
Silas: Never lead. Not in a joint, not in a worm, not anywhere.
Wilkins: That's the craft. Silas Hacksaw McAllister, thank you, my friend.
Silas: Pleasure, Doc. Give the widow my respects, and keep the pickles off my plate.
♦ Wax crackle; bear grunt
♪ Banjo shuffle, playful
Wilkins: Segment four: myths, slang, and the mailbag. The Rabbit's on the line, folks. A gentleman down the mountains has sent a message cylinder all the way from North Carolina, and we'll crank it up now.
♦ Click of a cylinder machine, hiss, heavy surface 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?
♦ Cylinder hiss ends with a click
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! A good question from a good county. Rabbit, your uncle isn't a liar. He's a romantic, which is worse, because a liar at least knows he's lying. Let me take the two halves of his medicine one at a time. First the hickory ash. Every New England farm boy knows what wood ash is, because we used to leach it in a barrel and make lye. Potash. Half this state paid its taxes in potash. Lye is caustic, Rabbit. It'll eat the skin off your knuckles and the sight out of your eye. Dump a shovel of ash into a hot thump keg and you get foam, spitting, and a scalding mess. Maybe the alkali knocks the edge off a little sourness. But the poison your uncle wants gone, the methanol, sails right through the ash and doesn't care.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Truth number one, stamped. A hickory ash in a thump keg is like a minister at a wake. It makes a great show of cleansing and leaves everybody exactly as sinful as it found them. Now the red oak shavings, which are more interesting. Oak gives up tannin, color and a woody taste, the same as a barrel. Old-timers did load a thump keg with fruit, or wood, or whatever was handy, to flavor the vapor going through. That part's true. But flavoring isn't cleaning. Red oak shavings in your thumper are like perfume on a hog. The hog smells better, but it's still a hog, and you still shouldn't drink it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Truth number two, stamped. The thump keg doubles your run and strengthens it. It's no undertaker for bad spirit. The only thing that buries the bad heads is the distiller's own hand at the cuts, foreshots poured off and heads set aside, and that's the end of it. And while we're doing myths, Rabbit, here's one your uncle surely believes: the blue flame. You've seen a man pour a spoonful of his liquor, put a match to it, and say, burns blue, it's safe; burns yellow or red, there's lead in it. Hogwash, friends. Hogwash in a silver dish.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: The blue flame tells you one thing only: there's enough alcohol in that spoon to burn. Methanol burns pale blue as well, pretty as a June sky, and it'll blind you. A flame can't find lead, can't measure your cuts, and can't vouch for anybody's character. The blue flame tells you the liquor will burn, and so will the barn, and so will you. It says nothing about whether it'll kill you. Clean copper, honest cuts, proper joints and a nose that's paying attention: that's your test. Rabbit, thank you for writing to Fort Wilkins. Give your uncle my regards, tell him to keep the ash for his soap kettle, and enjoy this as a shout-out from the whole Suncook Valley. Barnaby, say hello to Wilkesboro.
♦ Bear grunt, chain rattle
Wilkins: He says your uncle owes him a ham.
♪ Banjo flourish
Announcer: One more quick word, good people! Before the lamps go out, remember the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, heavy pure copper, built to last a lifetime and then some. Order today at moonshinestill.com, or call at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28!
♪ Theme rises softly underneath
♦ Wax crackle; slow drip into jar
Wilkins: And now, friends, the jug. On Saturday, a day late on account of the deputy, we carried Asa to the burying ground. Six bearers. Barnaby walked behind, chained and solemn, fat with ham. The bell tolled its seventy-three flat strokes. The pallbearers lifted the coffin onto their shoulders, and halfway across the meadow, going down that little dip by the stone wall, the coffin went slosh.
♦ Liquid sloshing in a heavy stoneware jug
Wilkins: Slosh. Six grown men stopped dead. The deacon turned white as a boiled shirt. And the Widow Pettigrew, without turning her head under that black veil, said, Keep walking, boys. He asked for it in his will, and I'll not have him go thirsty where it's warm. During the deacon's forty-minute prayer, with every eye shut, she'd slid my jug off that cold copper lid, opened the casket, and tucked it in the crook of Asa's arm like a newborn. Two gallons of my double-run rye, chilled on Silas's ice and buried with my own counterstamped cents on the dead man's eyes. Asa took my best jug to the grave without paying, which makes him the only customer I ever had who beat me on credit and on a technicality at the same time. And I'll tell you what I told the widow at the graveside: I've pulled teeth from the living and stamped coins for the dead, and the dead complain a good deal less about the bill. She sent me a pie on Monday. Rhubarb. I've not yet worked up the courage to ask where she kept it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Here's to Asa Pettigrew, cooper, flat singer and the best-provisioned dead man in Merrimack County. A New Hampshire Yankee will mourn you for a week, bury you for a dollar, and sue your estate for the lemonade. We loved him anyway.
♪ Parlor banjo and fiddle theme returns, warm and slow
Wilkins: Before I go: if tonight's talk of cuts and copper has you itching to learn proper, not by guessing and not by burying your mistakes, I invite you to the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. It teaches the history, the metallurgy, the safe and lawful handling of a still, and honest cuts from foreshots to tails, all from the man who learned it the hard way so you don't have to. Ask after it at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, or wherever you heard about this program. Thank you to Silas Hacksaw McAllister, to Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, and to the late Asa Pettigrew, who's drinking better tonight than any of us. 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