The War Ends and the Deputies Stay
The guns go quiet at Appomattox, but the federal assessors, collectors and county deputies keep on coming up the Suncook Valley Turnpike, and Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains why the two-dollar whiskey tax outlived the war it was meant to pay for. He tells how Barnaby ate a gauging rod and a deputy's tent. Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins brings new mountain stories of 'blockade' whiskey, bugle signals, a fake grave and a persimmon that tied up a revenue man's tongue, then stays on to talk about fruit brandy and why freezing it does not make it safe. In the last segment Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and he knocks down the blue-flame test.
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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 carcass. That is not a deputy, it is the wind in the hemlocks, and the wind pays no taxes either, so you two ought to get along. Lie down. LIE DOWN, you four-hundred-pound sack of bad decisions.
♦ Heavy bear huff, chain links dragging across frozen ground, then silence
Wilkins: There. Now he's chewing his own chain like a widow chewing on a grudge. Good bear. Wretched bear. Smells like a tannery that died.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swells and fades under
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners and you poor souls from Concord. 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 pull teeth, I shoe horses, I strike my name onto coin, and now and then I improve the water of the Suncook by means I won't describe to a grand jury. Tonight's sermon is a sad one with a mean joke inside it. We call it The War Ends and the Deputies Stay. The guns have stopped and the boys are walking home, and the tax collector is still sitting on my woodpile like a crow that pays no board. First, a quick word from the gentleman who keeps the lamp oil burning.
♪ Brief brassy patent-medicine flourish
Announcer: A quick word, friends! A leaky joint wastes good spirit and can start a fire. Seal your rig tight with Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills, just thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents. Shop hardware at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Flourish ends
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Now. Segment the First. April of this year, sixty-five. Word came up the turnpike from Concord that General Lee had given up his sword at Appomattox Court House. The Pittsfield church bell rang so long and so hard the sexton dislocated his shoulder, and I set it for him on the meetinghouse steps for a shilling and a hymnal. Folks wept. Folks fired muskets into the air. Old Deacon somebody got drunk enough to kiss his own mule and was forgiven by both parties. And days later the black crepe went up, because Mr. Lincoln had been shot dead in a theater. A nation does not often get its best news and its worst news inside one week.
Wilkins: But here is my point, and listen close. Every jug-maker from the Suncook to the Pemigewasset said the same thing that spring: the war is done, so the war tax will be done too. The two-dollar levy on every gallon will wither like a dead man's thumbnail, and we will go back to minding our own pots.
♦ Wilkins spits into a brass spittoon, a clean ring
Wilkins: Friends, the war is over, but a tax collector is like a tick on a hound. The hunt ends and he stays on for supper. Washington came out of the war owing something near two and three-quarter thousand million dollars. Say that number to a Pittsfield farmer and he will sit down in the mud and cry. And a government that owes that much does not let go of a good tax. Washington plans to collect it one jar at a time from the Suncook Valley.
Wilkins: So the machine stays. There is a federal collector for the district and a federal assessor for the district, and under them come the assistant assessors, a little swarm of them crawling town to town with ledgers and pencils and that squint a man gets from reading other men's business. A lawful distiller has to register, give bond, keep his books open, and let these fellows poke around his still-house like a doctor examining a prize bull. An assistant assessor is a man too dull to be a lawyer and too proud to be a pig, so the government split the difference.
Wilkins: Now the arithmetic. A gallon of good spirit costs a careful man a fraction of a dollar to make. Grain, wood, water, sweat, and maybe a jar for the neighbor so he doesn't remember you. And the tax on that gallon is two whole dollars. Two dollars! A two-dollar tax on a quarter-dollar spirit makes a moonshiner of every honest man and an honest man of nobody. It pays so well to dodge that the receipts Washington actually collects on spirits come up short of what the Treasury men figured. Every one of them looks surprised. I am not. Put a ham on a low shelf and tell the dog it's taxed, and see how much ham you have in the morning.
Wilkins: And there is something worse than the assessor, which is the informer. The revenue laws can pay a man who reports his neighbor a share of the fines and the property seized. So the fellow you lent your ox to in the drought of sixty-four is now counting your woodsmoke from his attic window and figuring what he'll buy with your misery. I have pulled teeth from informers. I do it slower.
♦ Wax crackle, distant rooster
Wilkins: Now the boys are coming home. We've no railroad to Pittsfield yet, though the gentlemen keep promising one, so the lads ride the cars as far as Concord and then come the last miles by stage or on their own blistered feet up the turnpike. Some come home whole. Some come home with an empty sleeve pinned up. Some don't come home, and their mothers keep a lamp in the window anyway. I'll not joke about that. The men who did come back learned things in the camps: how to cook anything that holds still, how to scrounge a copper kettle off a burned plantation, and how to hate a man with a ledger. The government has trained up a whole army of first-class tax dodgers, and now it wants to know why its receipts are short.
Wilkins: Which brings me to July, and to Mr. Thaddeus Pruitt, assistant assessor, out of Concord. A narrow man. He had a neck like a goose that had been pulled through a knothole and a mustache that looked as if it had died up there and nobody had the heart to bury it. He comes up the turnpike in a hired gig with a gauging rod. That is a long, skinny measuring stick with a brass ferrule on the end, for sounding the depth of a vessel and figuring how many gallons she'll hold. He knocks at my door and announces he has come to measure my capacity. I told him three different widows had already tried and none of them filed a report.
♦ Barnaby grunting, chain clinking
Wilkins: I take him round to the still-house, which I told him was a smoke-house for hams. He doesn't believe me, the suspicious little parsnip, and he sees the shine of copper through the log window. Instead of asking to come in like a Christian, he pokes that gauging rod through the window to tap my pot and hear how hollow she rings. Gentlemen, that is Barnaby's window. It has been Barnaby's window since before the war. The bear considers anything that comes through it to be a gift from Providence.
♦ Sharp bear roar, wood splintering, a man shrieking
Wilkins: Barnaby clamped down on that rod like it was the last ham bone in New England. Pruitt, God help him, would not let go of government property, so the bear took the rod and the man's sleeve and a fair strip of the hide off his forearm along with it. It made a sound like tearing a wet bedsheet down the middle. And Pruitt hollered in a key I had heard only from the mill whistle down on the Suncook and a tomcat that fell into a cider press. He went white, then green, then a sort of Concord gray, and he sat down in the dooryard in a puddle that was not entirely rainwater.
Wilkins: Now, I am a physician of the jaw, and a jaw and an arm are only a few feet apart. So I sat him on my chopping block, washed the meat with clean water, and sewed him shut with silk thread and a darning needle while he chewed a leather strap and called me names his mother never taught him. Nine stitches, neat as a sampler. I charged him a dollar for the stitching, and he wrote it down in his ledger as tax collected. As far as I know, that is the only revenue Washington has ever got out of Fort Wilkins.
Wilkins: And the gauging rod? Barnaby ate it. Splintered the hickory and swallowed the brass ferrule whole, and I worried for three days. On the Thursday that ferrule came out the far end of the bear, polished brighter than a deacon's conscience. I rinsed it in the creek, set it on the anvil, and stamped it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on brass, a high ringing note
Wilkins: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. A man must sign his work, and a bear's work deserves a witness. It hangs over my door on a nail. Pruitt has never come back to fetch it.
♪ Banjo sting, fiddle slides into a slower minor tune
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Segment the Second. Legends, outlaws, and the fools who chase them. Since the peace came, the county has decided Fort Wilkins needs watching, so this summer they posted Deputy Orrin Fogg. Fogg is built like a rain barrel that learned to walk, and he has the curiosity of a fence post. He pitched a canvas tent in the hayfield across the turnpike and set there day and night with a spyglass, watching my chimney for the telltale smoke.
Wilkins: Well, I'm a hospitable man. Every afternoon I sent my hired boy across the road with a pie. Apple, mince, blueberry, a rhubarb that would make a Baptist dance. Fogg ate thirty-one of my pies in three weeks and never found the still, which makes him the best-fed failure in Merrimack County. He got so fat his gun belt went the way of the Confederacy. It surrendered.
Wilkins: The twenty-second night, Barnaby slipped his collar. I won't say how. I will say that a chain doesn't open itself, and I'll leave it at that before the sheriff. That bear went across the turnpike in the moonlight like a black cloud with a stomach. He could smell three weeks of pie crumbs in that tent. He took the whole canvas down with one swipe and ate a good part of it, pegs and all. Fogg woke up flat on his back in his drawers, with four hundred pounds of bear standing over him licking a blueberry pie tin clean off the man's chest. Slow licks. Wet. That tongue is the size and texture of a horse blanket, and it smells like a dead woodchuck kept in a warm cellar.
♦ Bear snuffling, a tin pan clattering, a man whimpering
Wilkins: Fogg did not fire his pistol. Fogg did not read the bear his rights. Fogg got up and ran to Epsom in his drawers, in the dark, six miles if it's a step, and his drawers were not in good order when he got there. The Epsom selectmen still argue over whether to fine him or frame him. Barnaby came home at dawn burping canvas and chewing a tent peg like a cigar.
Wilkins: Now, I promised you a guest, and she's come all the way from the Blue Ridge of Virginia. It's a hard journey and a long one, and I've hardly met a Southerner since the shooting stopped who didn't mean to throw something at me. She knows the mountain herbs, she knows the slang for every jar from Maryland to the Smokies, and she's sharp enough to shave with. Miss Clara Higgins, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Clara: Well, thank you, Doctor. I've been at your table an hour and I've already seen a bear, a darnin' needle and a brass thing you stamped your name on after it come out of an animal. Back home we'd call this place a sight. We might call it worse, but my mama raised me to be kind to Yankees, same as you're kind to a dog that can't help where he was born.
Wilkins: Oh, she's going to be trouble. Barnaby, she's going to be trouble.
♦ Bear grunt
Clara: Your bear agrees with me. He's got better sense than his keeper.
Wilkins: Tell me, Miss Clara, the war is over in Virginia too. Did your revenue men pack up and go home?
Clara: Lord, no. They come thicker than chiggers in July. For four years we had Confederate officers hunting stills for the army's grain, and now we've got Federal men hunting stills for the Federal tax. The only difference is the color of the coat and how bad the boots smell. And here's a word you can carry home, Doctor. Up our way they've taken to calling the stuff 'blockade.' Blockade whiskey. And the men who make it are 'blockaders.' Folks who spent four years watching the Yankee ships run the Southern coast decided that running from the revenue was the same game in the hills.
Wilkins: Blockaders. I like that. I've been running a blockade on Concord for years and never had a name for it.
Clara: Well, now you do. I'll charge you a jar for it later.
Wilkins: Tell me about your people coming home.
Clara: My great-uncle Absalom rode with the cavalry, and he walked home from Appomattox. Walked! His horse was so poor the Yankees let him keep it, and he still walked so the horse wouldn't die under him. He had his parole paper in his hat and pretty near nothing on his feet. And the very first thing he done, before he kissed his wife, before he ate, was take a spade down to the hog lot. Back in sixty-one, when the Confederate officers went around taking every copper kettle for the army, he'd buried his still cap under the hogs. Four years of hogs, Doctor.
Wilkins: Ah. Hogs root.
Clara: Hogs root like sin. They'd found that cap and rolled it and stomped it and done every unholy thing a hog does to a thing he can't eat. When Absalom dug it up it was dented all over and green as a frog, and it smelled exactly like four years of hog. He held it up in the sunlight and said, 'Well, honey, I reckon you saw some fighting too.' Then he sat down in the mud and cried, and Aunt Hettie said it was the only time she ever saw him cry over anything that wasn't a horse.
Wilkins: A man and his copper. I'd have wept too. Then I'd have taken a mallet to it.
Clara: Oh, he did, for a week. You could hear him clear across the ridge, bang, bang, cussing every hog that ever lived. Grandmama said the hogs knew. They kept to the far end of the lot all summer.
Wilkins: Did he keep anything else from the army?
Clara: His bugle. A cavalry bugle. And he made it the hollow's alarm. One call meant a revenue man coming up the creek road. Two calls meant the circuit preacher.
Wilkins: And which one cleared the hollow faster?
Clara: The preacher, every time. A revenue man takes your whiskey. A circuit preacher takes a collection, a confession, your best chair, and the last of the pie, and he stays three days. Folks'd hear two calls and you'd see men go out windows like a covey of quail, still in their nightshirts, and the women hiding the good ham.
Wilkins: The preacher took a collection, a confession and the last of the pie, and the revenue man only ever wanted the whiskey. Miss Clara, I believe we worship at the same church.
Clara: We worship at the same still, Doctor, and don't you go telling my mama.
♦ Wax crackle, fiddle plucks a few notes
Wilkins: You've got a story about a grave. I can see it in your eye. You've the eye of a woman who's buried something besides a husband.
Clara: Now that's mean, and I'm going to tell it anyway. After the war my grandmama had a run of apple brandy she'd made off the old orchard. Good brandy, too, the color of a creek in October. And word was a Federal man was coming up the valley with a deputy and a wagon. Well, she couldn't hide it in the springhouse, they always look there. She couldn't hide it in the barn, they always look there. So she took the boys down to the family burying ground, dug a hole, put the kegs in it, filled it in, and set up a field stone on top. She scratched on it with a nail: 'Uncle Jubal, Gone to Glory, 1863.'
Wilkins: And who was Uncle Jubal?
Clara: Nobody. There never was a Jubal. She made him up out of the air. And here comes the revenue man, all brass buttons, sees fresh dirt in the graveyard. Well, he was a Northern boy and he'd been in the war, and fresh graves weren't nothing strange to him. He walked right up to Uncle Jubal, took his hat off, bowed his head, and prayed. Prayed out loud, Doctor. Asked the Lord to take care of our dear brother Jubal and forgive him his sins. And Grandmama stood there with her apron over her face, and he thought she was weeping, and she was laughing so hard she wet herself a little.
Wilkins: That is the only time a federal man ever wept over whiskey without drinking any of it.
Clara: And when they dug Jubal up that fall, the brandy was the best she ever made. Cool ground, still and dark. Grandmama always said, 'Bury it with respect and it'll rise with honor.' Folks in our hollow still toast Uncle Jubal at Christmas. He's the most beloved man in the county, and he never drew a breath.
Wilkins: You mentioned persimmons in the hallway. Persimmon brandy, I understand, is a Southern wickedness.
Clara: It's a Southern blessing, and you'd know it if your Yankee trees could grow anything but rocks. Now, a persimmon has to be dead ripe, soft as a baby's rump, frost-bit, before it's sweet. A green persimmon will turn your mouth inside out. It's like licking a chalk-dusty blackboard with a mouth full of alum. So one fall a revenue man come up on my cousin Lem's place with a warrant to read, all proper. Lem was sitting under his persimmon tree like a Christian, and he says, 'Sir, you look like you've had a long ride, have a persimmon.' And he handed him a hard green one.
Wilkins: Oh, that's cruel.
Clara: It's mountain hospitality. The man bit it and his whole face drew up like a drawstring purse. His lips went tight, his tongue went dry as a corncob, and he tried to read that warrant out loud and couldn't make a sound but 'thwuh, thwuh, thwuh.' The deputy had to read it, and the deputy couldn't read. So they stood there in the yard twenty minutes, one man who couldn't talk and one man who couldn't read, and Lem whittling. They left. To this day, when a lawman's paper ain't worth a thing, the hollow calls it a 'pucker warrant.'
Wilkins: A deputy's warrant and a green persimmon are alike: both leave your mouth dry and your evening ruined. Miss Clara, don't you go anywhere. After this word from the gentleman in the checkered waistcoat, I want you at the copper with me.
Clara: I'll stay, so long as that bear stays outside.
♦ Bear grunt, chain clink
♪ Upbeat 1860s brass-band patent-medicine flourish, drum roll
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♪ Flourish ends with a cymbal crash
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Segment the Third. Copper and the craft, and alchemy for the honest. Before I begin, the plain truth, which I tell every pupil: making spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and what we tell here is history and instruction, not an invitation. I've been arrested for less. The sheriff and I are on a first-name basis, and both names are rude.
Clara: You said you'd let me talk fruit, Doctor.
Wilkins: I did, God help me. Tell them the first thing.
Clara: The first thing is that fruit ain't grain. An apple, a peach, a persimmon, they're all full of pectin. That's what makes your jelly set. And when fruit ferments, that pectin breaks down and makes more wood spirit than a corn mash ever will. More of the poison, Doctor. My grandmama didn't know the chemistry, but she knew the result. Brandy men in our hollow who got greedy with their cuts went blind, or went crazy, or went in the ground, and some of them got buried for real, not like Jubal.
Wilkins: Which is the whole sermon of the cuts. Let me lay it out step by step, the way I teach it at this bench. Say you mean to run brandy from cider, the old New England way. First you press sound apples, no rot, no mold, and let that juice work in a clean cask somewhere warm and airy until it stops bubbling and goes dry. That takes weeks, not days. Now you have hard cider, a weak wash, a few parts in a hundred spirit.
Wilkins: Second, you charge the pot. Don't fill her past three-quarters, because a foaming charge will boil up into the cap and puke down the arm, and you'll have dirty cider in your worm and a mess fit to make a hog blush. If there are solids in the pot, pulp or grain, keep the fire gentle or stir it, or it scorches on the bottom and the whole run tastes like a burned church.
Wilkins: Third, the fire. Bring her up slow. A low fire is a patient fire and a patient fire is an honest one. And keep your worm tub full of cold water. If that water runs warm, the vapor slips through without turning to liquid and comes out the end as an invisible ghost of spirit, and a ghost of spirit near a lamp is a funeral with no body to bury.
Clara: And tell them about the floor, Doctor. I didn't believe it till I seen it.
Wilkins: The floor. Spirit vapor is heavier than the air. It doesn't rise like smoke. It slides along the boards and pools in the low places, like a deputy looking for a dropped dime. So a stove or a candle set low in the still-house is sitting in it, waiting for a spark. Keep your fire under the pot and nowhere else. Keep a wet sack and two buckets of water by the door. And never walk off from a running still, not to eat, not to answer the door, not even to see what the bear is murdering. A still left alone is a fire waiting for its chance.
Wilkins: Fourth, the cuts, which are the whole art. The first trickle is the foreshots, sharp, like a solvent, a smell that bites the inside of your nose. Wood spirit rides heavy in there. It goes in the ash bucket, never down a throat, not even a cat's. Then come the heads, still harsh, smelling of varnish and green apples and headache. Those go out too, and with fruit you throw away more than you think you should, and then a little more.
Clara: Grandmama judged it on the back of her hand. Rub a drop on, let it dry, and smell. Foreshots smell like a lamp. Heads smell like a fresh-painted wagon. Hearts smell like the fruit. She never tasted the early jars. Not once. She threw them on the ash heap and said, 'The devil drinks first, and he drinks alone.'
Wilkins: The devil drinks first, and he drinks alone. Your grandmother should've been a Pittsfield selectman. Then the hearts come, sweet and clean and round, smelling of the orchard. That's what you keep. And at the last, the tails, oily and wet-dog dull, like a dishrag left in the sun. Set them aside to run again with the next charge, but they don't belong in your hearts jar.
Wilkins: Now, the copper. You know my religion. Copper is the alchemist's priest. It meets the vapor in the cap and the arm and the worm, and the cleaner its face, the better it does the Lord's work. I've preached on sulfur before and won't wear you out again. Only remember the copper does its best work where the vapor touches it, which is why a cap and worm of good heavy copper are worth more than a pretty copper pot with a cheap tin pipe.
Clara: Can I say my piece about jacking now? Because I've been biting my tongue, and you know that ain't natural for me.
Wilkins: I'd pay money to see you bite your tongue. Go on.
Clara: Some folks, instead of distilling, set their hard cider out in the winter and let it freeze. The water goes to ice, they pull the ice off, and what's left is stronger. Applejack, they call it. They think since they never lit a fire, it's gentle and safe. But freezing don't throw anything out except water. Every drop of wood spirit and every drop of that fusel oil that was in the cider is still in there, only more of it per swallow. There ain't no cuts in a frozen barrel, Doctor. It's all heads, hearts and tails stirred up together like a church supper.
Wilkins: Freezing your cider to make it stronger is like freezing a skunk to make it smell sweeter. It just keeps the stink till spring. Well said, Miss Clara. Folks, that's the whole craft: sound fruit, clean cask, gentle fire, cold worm, bright copper, and an honest hand on the cuts. The rest is boasting.
♪ Fiddle reel, quick and bright, then fades
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Segment the Fourth. Myths, slang, and the listener line. We've a cylinder recorded off the listener line, come all the way from the Carolina mountains. Miss Clara, stay and listen, this one's from your neck of the woods.
Clara: Wilkesboro? I'll bet it's Wilkesboro. Them boys can't keep their mouths shut or their stills hid.
Wilkins: Let's roll the cylinder.
♦ Cylinder needle drop, heavier crackle, distant tinny voice
Wilkins: The caller says: '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?' That's Cletus Miller, called Rabbit, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina.
♦ Needle lifts, crackle stops
Wilkins: Rabbit, it's swamp medicine, and I'll tell you why from two new directions, because your uncle's idea has two heads, like a calf at the Grange fair.
Wilkins: Take the hickory ashes first. Every farm wife in Pittsfield knows what happens when you soak wood ash in water. You get lye. Lye is what she boils with fat to make soap, and lye will eat the skin off your knuckles if you dawdle. So your uncle is pouring caustic into his doubler and hoping the spirit comes out kinder. It won't. The heads boil off the same as before, and if any of that lye slops over into the spirit he's got soap in his jar, or worse, something that'll blister his gullet from tonsils to tailbone. Rabbit, putting lye in your doubler is like scrubbing your teeth with a fireplace. You'll get clean, but not the way you hoped.
Clara: My granddaddy's cousin tried a dipper of ash-water in his. Said the run foamed up like a mad dog and come out tasting like a wash-day kettle. He sold it anyway, to a man he didn't like.
Wilkins: The true Southern spirit of commerce. Now, the red oak shavings. Here's something for you, Rabbit. Ask any cooper why he won't build a whiskey barrel of red oak. Red oak is porous. The grain is open, full of little pipes, and a barrel of it will weep like a widow at a reading of the will. White oak is tight, so coopers use white oak. Red oak leaks so bad no cooper will make a barrel of it, and your uncle wanted it to fix his whiskey? What red oak shavings in a hot doubler will do is give up tannin and color and a woody bitterness. A man might use it to fool a customer into thinking his spirit's been aged in a cask, and that's a trick older than the Republic. But it doesn't touch the heads. The heads come over in the first part of the run no matter what wood you throw in the keg. The only cure is your own hand on the jar and the nerve to throw out what stinks.
Wilkins: So there's your answer. A tidy bit of folk faith, and it makes no difference to the heads. Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, God bless you and your uncle both, and tell him the Alchemist says to put the ashes on his garden where they belong. A shout from the whole of Fort Wilkins to Wilkes County!
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, a bright ringing strike
Wilkins: That's a large cent for Rabbit, stamped with my name. I'll keep it on the shelf till he comes north to fetch it.
Clara: You'll be waiting a long time, Doctor. Wilkesboro boys don't come north. They think the snow's a Yankee trick.
Wilkins: The snow is a Yankee trick. It's how we keep out the Virginians. Now, one more myth to break before we close, and this one has killed men. The blue flame. Some fool tells you to pour a spoonful of spirit in a dish and set a match to it. If it burns blue, the spirit's pure and safe to drink, and if it burns yellow or red, it's bad. Hogwash! Wood spirit, the very poison we've been throwing out of the foreshots all night, burns with a pale blue flame too, just as pretty as good spirit. So the dish can't tell you which one you've got. All the blue flame proves is that your spirit is strong enough to burn.
♦ Match strike, faint whoosh of a spirit flame
Wilkins: The blue flame proves your spirit will burn. So will a revenue man's wagon, and I never drank one of those either. Make your cuts by the nose and the run and the patience God gave you, not by a parlor trick on a saucer.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. That one's for every man who ever trusted a spoon over his own good sense.
Clara: Doctor, I believe I've learned more in one night at this fort than in a year of revivals, and I've lost a good deal more of my religion.
Wilkins: Then my work is done. Miss Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, the sharpest tongue south of the Potomac and the kindest one north of it tonight. Thank you for coming so far to insult me.
Clara: It was a pleasure, Doctor. A Yankee will sell you his own grandmother and then charge you to haul her, but you're the first one who ever made me laugh while he done it.
♦ Barnaby grunting, chain clinking
Wilkins: One more quick word from our pitchman.
♪ Brief brassy flourish
Announcer: Don't let a slipping clamp or a cracked paste seal start a fire or cost you a single drop! Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets, thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents, pressure-tested and airtight. Shop hardware today at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Flourish ends
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Friends, if you want to learn the honest craft the way I teach it at this bench, with the copper, the fire, the cuts, and the history behind every one, ask after the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You'll learn the right way, you'll learn the lawful way, and you'll learn which end of the bear to stay away from, which is both of them.
Wilkins: The war is over, but the deputies stay. Assessor Pruitt is still in Concord, nursing nine stitches and a grudge. Deputy Fogg is still in Epsom looking for his drawers. And the tax sits on every jar in the land like a fat man on a short bench. The only good use I ever found for a federal warrant was to keep my anvil free of rust. Hold your heads up and your neighbors close, and watch out for informers.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns, warm and slow
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar