The Deputies' Revenge
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells about the January night in 1865 when the Merrimack County deputies came back for revenge. They drugged Barnaby with laudanum bread, and a lantern dropped near a leaking still joint nearly burned Fort Wilkins to the ground. The history segment covers the informer's 'moiety' reward and why copper got so dear in wartime, and Wilkilkesboro runner Junior Vance tells new stories about revenue agents who tried to get even with him. In Segment 4, Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's call about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, then strikes a coin on his anvil while 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 that hairy carcass down. You ate a whole ham shank at noon, a wheel of Barnstead cheese at three, and a Methodist's umbrella I can't account for. Lie down before I sell you to Concord for a lap robe.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags, heavy body flops onto frozen ground
Wilkins: That's my boy. He's grunting at me like a church deacon who's been told the collection's short.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then settling under
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, sinners, and any revenue man with his ear pressed to the wire. This is Radio Moonshine, and I'm Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and a public nuisance by order of the Merrimack County bench. I'm broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, where the snow lies deep, the copper glows bright, and the bear is spoken for. Tonight's tale is one I've never told on this cylinder: The Deputies' Revenge, the night they came back to settle up and very nearly burned me out of this world and into the next. But first, a word from the people who keep my joints tight.
♪ Brief brass-band flourish
Announcer: A quick word, friends! A leaking still joint is a fuse waiting for a match. Seal yours with Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills, only thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents. Shop hardware at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Flourish ends
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, log shifting in the stove
Wilkins: Now, before I tell you how the deputies got their revenge, you ought to know how a deputy finds a man's still to begin with. He doesn't sniff it out. He hasn't the nose. He gets told. And the man who tells him gets paid.
Wilkins: When Mr. Lincoln's Revenue Act of 1862 came along, Washington carved this whole country into collection districts and put an assessor and a collector in each one. You'll notice they weren't strangers from Philadelphia. They were men from right here, men who'd sat behind you in the meeting-house, men who remembered every time your cow got into their corn. So the tax man came pre-loaded with grudges, the way a musket comes pre-loaded with ball.
Wilkins: And sweeter still for the snitch, the revenue laws let an informer collect a share of whatever fine or forfeiture his tip turned up. They call it a moiety, which is a Latin word for half and a Yankee word for Judas money. So a fellow could tell on his neighbor's copper pot, watch the government seize it, and collect his cut like a gravedigger collecting by the foot.
Wilkins: An informer is a man who'll sell his neighbor for half a fine and then ask to borrow his neighbor's wagon to go collect it. I knew one. More on him shortly. He's a cooper from over Barnstead way, and I'll call him Ebenezer Pike, because the Lord already cursed his true name and I won't pile on.
Wilkins: Now, the second thing you need to understand is copper, and why a sheriff would rather seize my still than my whole liquor stock. Copper went to war, friends. Every bronze twelve-pounder Napoleon that the boys hauled from Antietam to Petersburg ate copper like Barnaby eats deputies. Brass cartridges, percussion caps, the fittings on every gun carriage. Copper went off to war in Mr. Lincoln's cannon, and I've never forgiven the Army of the Potomac for melting down my retirement.
Wilkins: Most of the sheet copper this country had came from the Lake Superior mines up in the Michigan wilderness, on the Keweenaw, where men go down in holes so deep the devil charges them rent. Some came from closer to home, the copper belt of Orange County, Vermont, the Vershire diggings, where the ore comes out green as a drowned man's toes. A sheet of good copper sat on a wagon from the Connecticut River valley down to Concord, then up the turnpike to me. By 1864 the price was so high I was hammering my pots with one eye on the anvil and the other on the door.
Wilkins: So you see how it stood. My still was worth more than my liquor, my liquor was worth more than my good name, and a cooper from Barnstead stood to earn half of all three for one trip to the sheriff's office.
♪ Low fiddle sting, ominous
♦ Wind howling, distant church bell striking eleven
Wilkins: It was January of this year, 1865, the coldest stretch since the Suncook froze to the bottom. The deputies had a debt to settle with me after their earlier misfortunes with my bear, and they'd been nursing it all autumn like a sore tooth. The deputies came for revenge the way a cat comes back for a fish head: slow, sly, and stinking of their last mistake.
Wilkins: They knew they couldn't get past Barnaby with pistols. A bear that size takes a pistol ball the way you'd take a horsefly. So they worked out cleverness, which on a deputy sits about as natural as a saddle on a hog. Somebody went to the druggist in Concord, bought a bottle of laudanum, which any grandmother can buy for her nerves, and soaked a whole loaf of molasses bread in it. Then, near midnight, they came up the back pasture by Catamount Hill and tossed that loaf over the woodpile.
♦ Bear snuffling, wet chewing, contented grunt
Wilkins: Barnaby ate the entire loaf. Never even chewed it proper. Barnaby ate a whole loaf of laudanum bread and slept like a Congregationalist through the second half of a sermon, flat on his back, paws in the air, snoring loud enough to rattle the shutters on the cotton mill.
Wilkins: There were four of them. A deputy I'll call Hollis Twombly led them, a man with a neck like a stovepipe and a brain to match. Then two hired men from the mill, and Ebenezer Pike himself, come to make sure he got his moiety. They pried my still-house door with a crowbar and went in with a tin lantern.
Wilkins: Now, I'd been running that afternoon, and I confess, to my shame, I'd sealed the joint at the head with flour paste, the old rye-flour slobber my grandfather used. A still sealed with flour paste is a pie crust with ambitions, and like every pie crust I ever met, it burst at the worst moment. The pot was still warm from the run, the paste had cracked, and a thin breath of spirit vapor was weeping out and settling low along the floorboards, the way it always does, because alcohol vapor is heavier than air and lies in the low places like a sleeping dog.
Wilkins: And what does Hollis Twombly do? He sets that lantern right down on the floor so he can use both hands to pry my worm off the barrel.
♦ Soft whump of ignition, crackling flames rising
Wilkins: Friends, it didn't go off like gunpowder. It went whump, quiet as a feather pillow, and then there was a blue sheet of fire running across the floor like spilled milk, licking the bottom of the mash barrels, climbing the pine wall. That still-house floor caught fire like a Methodist revival: one spark, a lot of hollering, and everybody running for the water.
Wilkins: I was asleep in the house, and what woke me wasn't the fire. It was Barnaby.
♦ Enraged bear roar, chain snapping taut, wood splintering
Wilkins: The smoke had roused him, and he came up out of that opium sleep with a headache like a tax assessor's, and he settled it the same way: by taking a piece out of whoever was nearest. That happened to be Deputy Twombly, who came out the still-house door backwards and bent over, coughing.
Wilkins: I'll tell you exactly how it sounded, because I've pulled four thousand teeth and I know my noises. It was the sound of a wet bedsheet ripped off a line in a gale, then a sort of pop, like a cork leaving a jug of hard cider, and then a scream that went up two octaves and stayed there. Barnaby had Twombly by the seat of his wool britches, and the britches didn't hold, and neither did a fair helping of what was in them. The bear sat back on his haunches chewing thoughtfully, with a mouthful of blue county wool and Hollis Twombly's dignity, and spat out a brass button that I've kept on my watch chain ever since.
Wilkins: Deputy Twombly lost the seat of his britches and a fair slab of what was in them, and to this day he takes his supper standing up like a horse.
Wilkins: Now here's the turn. A burning building doesn't care who's the outlaw. I came out in my nightshirt and boots, and there was my still-house going up, four men hollering, a bear grinding wool, and Ebenezer Pike trying to make off with my second-best copper pot while it burned his fingers. I had him drop it, and I put every one of them to work. Buckets from the mill pond, snow by the shovelful, wet feed sacks to beat out the floor. Hollis Twombly carried a bucket in the brigade for the very man he came to arrest, bleeding from the hindquarters the whole way, and I believe that's the only honest labor the county ever got out of him.
Wilkins: We saved the pot, the worm, the house, and Barnaby. We lost the back wall, three barrels of mash, and every last stitch of Twombly's trousers. The sheriff called that raid 'justice delayed,' and I call it 'carpentry required.'
Wilkins: When the smoke cleared, I brought Hollis inside, laid him belly-down on my dentist's chair, poured spirit on his wound to clean it, gave him a strap of leather to bite, and stitched his backside closed with silk dental thread. I stitched the deputy's backside with dental silk and charged him the full rate, because a hole is a hole, whether it's in your gum or under your galluses. He paid me with the county's own copper cents, and I stamped every one of them on the anvil before he left, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and handed one back to him as his receipt. He keeps it, I'm told. A man likes a souvenir of the night he lost his seat in Merrimack County.
♪ Banjo transition, jaunty
Wilkins: Now, I have a guest tonight. His drawl comes all the way from the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina, and his tales come from a century not yet born, which is a trick of the wire I won't pretend to understand. Don't ask me how the cylinder catches him, I only pull the teeth around here. Mr. Junior Vance of Wilkes County, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Junior: Doc, I'm obliged. Smells like burnt pine and bear in here, which, I'll be honest, reminds me of my first wife's kitchen.
Wilkins: Ha! Junior, tonight's about revenge. The law hates nothing more than being made a fool, and you made fools of them for a living. Did they ever come back to get even?
Junior: Lord, Doc, they came back like a bad rash. There was one federal man we called Possum, 'cause he'd lay real still and play dead in the bushes waiting on you. I'd left him in a mud puddle one Saturday, and he swore up and down I'd pay. So come Monday he's set up behind the feed store in Wilkesboro with a borrowed bloodhound, mean old dog named Judge, gonna have Judge sniff my trunk.
Wilkins: A dog on the government payroll. I'd trust it further than the men.
Junior: Well, Judge comes up, takes one big sniff of that mash-soaked burlap in my trunk, and sneezes three times like he's been snuffing pepper. Then his nose goes up, and he catches Miss Ida Pruitt's peach pie going by in a basket on her way to the church supper. And that hound turns and follows that pie clean down Main Street, drags Possum behind him on the leash like a sled. Last I saw, Possum was eating pie in the fellowship hall, and Judge was asleep under the pulpit.
Wilkins: Junior's bloodhound picked peach pie over the law, and I count that the soundest judgment ever shown by any officer of the government. Did Possum quit after that?
Junior: Quit? Doc, he got serious. Few weeks later they borrowed a log truck from a sawmill and parked it slap across the road at the Brushy Mountain gap, middle of the night, no lights. They figured I'd come round that curve at a good clip, see the logs, and pile into it, and they'd pick up what was left with a mop.
Wilkins: A barricade. Same as the rebels did at the stone wall.
Junior: Except my uncle Dewey was a step ahead. Months before, he'd gone up and down that road with a bucket of whitewash and painted every fence post along the ditch on the right-hand side. Folks thought he'd gone pious. So I come up on that gap, see the shine of a chrome bumper in the moonlight, kill my headlights, and drop two wheels in the ditch. Then I just steered post to post, white, white, white, like counting sheep, all the way around that log truck. Weeds slapping the windows, rocks banging the oil pan. Come out the other side, flipped my lights back on, and blew my horn twice so Possum'd know it was me.
Wilkins: Whitewashing fence posts so a man can drive blind. Junior, that's alchemy. I've seen worse sense win a seat in the legislature.
Junior: Now, they did catch me once, Doc, I'll own it. They seized one of my coupes off my cousin's barn lot. And Possum, he wanted to rub it in, so he drove it off himself. Thing is, that car had springs set to carry a full load of jars in the back. You run it empty, it's stiff as a church pew. It bucks.
Wilkins: Like a mule with a burr under the blanket.
Junior: Just like it. Possum hits the first washboard stretch, the back end jumps, he jerks the wheel, and that car hops the shoulder and lands nose-first in Reddies River. Water to the windows. He climbed out the window soaked to the drawers, and the government had to auction it off for scrap. I bought it back at that auction for less than the price of the tires, drove it home, and put it right back to work.
Wilkins: A revenue man driving a runner's car is like a parson riding a bull at the fair: the beast knows it, the crowd knows it, and the creek's waiting either way. Junior, the worst revenge isn't from the law, though. It's from your own kind. Did you ever have an Ebenezer Pike?
Junior: Had one named Lonnie, a runner from over the ridge. Times got lean, and he went and sold me out for the reward money. Told 'em where I loaded. I didn't fight him. Fighting's for fools. I took a pencil and drew a real careful map of Lonnie's own still, every rock and stump and spring, and mailed it to the revenue office in a church envelope, signed 'A Concerned Baptist.' Week later they busted him up good, and you know who got the reward for that tip?
Wilkins: Don't tell me.
Junior: The Baptist church. They put a new roof on with it. Lonnie still sings in the choir under it.
Wilkins: Junior Vance, you've got more Yankee in you than half of Concord. Thank you, sir. Stay a while and warm your boots by the stove, but mind the bear, he's off his feed tonight.
Junior: Doc, after what he did to that deputy, I'll sit on the far side of the stove with my back to the wall.
♪ Brass-band fanfare, patent-medicine wagon style
Announcer: Step right up, friends! You heard the Doctor. One cracked seal, one lantern on the floor, and a man's whole livelihood nearly went up the chimney. Are you still trusting your still to flour paste and a prayer? Still cinching a slipping hose clamp and hoping? Stop gambling with fire! Introducing Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills: heavy-gauge ferrules, precision 304 stainless and copper hybrid fittings made to mate with heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper, food-grade PTFE gaskets that won't crack, crumble, or flake into your run, and quick-release stainless wing clamps you can snap tight by hand in seconds. Every piece is pressure-tested and precision-milled for lifetime airtight reliability. No leaks, no weeping vapor, no midnight fires. All for just thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents! Visit the showroom at Fort Wilkins, on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, or order today at moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings. Once more for the folks in the back: moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings! Shop hardware at moonshinestill.com, and seal it right the first time!
♪ Fanfare ends with a cymbal crash
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, hammer tapping copper
Wilkins: That's the very lesson of the raid, friends, and I'll stand behind it. I rebuilt my still-house that spring with stone along the bottom course, and I haven't sealed a joint with slobber since. Let's talk copper and craft, and let's talk it the way a man talks after he's smelled his own walls burning.
Wilkins: First, the fire. Alcohol vapor sinks. It doesn't rise like woodsmoke. It creeps along the floor and pools in the corners and under benches, so your flame must never sit low near your still, and your lantern belongs high on a hook, well away, or better yet outside a window. Keep sand and a wet sack within reach, because spirit fire spreads like gossip and a bucket splashed wrong can carry it further. Never leave a run unattended, not to fetch wood, not to answer the door, and especially not to answer a deputy.
Wilkins: Second, the craft, step by step, the way my father taught me and the way I'll teach my grandson if he'll ever stop eating paste. Your mash is fermented first, grain or fruit, water, and yeast, worked into a weak wash before it ever sees a fire. You strain it clear, because solids on the bottom of the pot will scorch and stink. You charge the pot no more than three-quarters full. Leave headroom, because a boiling wash foams, and if it climbs into the arm, what the old men call puking, you'll send raw mash through your worm and maybe blow your joints. A still sealed with flour paste is a pie crust with ambitions, as I said, and a puking pot is the fork that breaks it.
Wilkins: You bring the heat up slowly. Low fire, patient fire. Now mark the boiling points, which I learned from a chemistry book I stole from a Dartmouth man who'd fallen asleep in my chair. Methanol, the wood spirit that blinds and kills, boils at about a hundred forty-eight degrees by Fahrenheit's scale. Our good grain spirit boils at about a hundred seventy-three, and water at two hundred twelve. So the poison runs early. But hear me now: it doesn't come off clean and all at once. It smears into the early run like jam on a child's face. That's why a careful distiller is generous with his cuts.
Wilkins: The first trickle is your foreshots, sharp as a lawyer's tongue, and you pour it on the ground or into the lamp, never into a cup. Then come the heads, still harsh, smelling of glue and fingernail varnish, and they go aside too, never drunk. Then the hearts, sweet and clean, and that's your keeping spirit. Then the tails come on oily and wet-dog smelling, and you set them aside to run again. Foreshots and heads are thrown out, every single run, no matter how short your purse is that week.
Wilkins: Third, keep your copper clean. Copper does its alchemy on the sulfur stink only when its face is bright. After every run I scrub my pot with vinegar and salt, which strips the black tarnish and the dark copper sulfide off as quick as a Concord widow strips a dead man's wallet. Then you rinse it well with clean water, because you don't want vinegar and salt in your next charge. And for the love of Moses, join your copper with sound mechanical fittings or silver solder, never with lead.
Wilkins: And always remember, friends, distilling spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and everything on this program is history and education only. I tell you about my raid. I don't recommend having one.
♪ Fiddle bridge
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, wire relay clicking
Wilkins: Now to the mailbag, or rather the talking wire. Tonight's call came down the line from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Junior's own country. Let's hear it.
♦ Telephone-line hiss, faint click of a recording
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! Rabbit, I salute your uncle's faith and pity his drinkers. Let's take his two ingredients one at a time.
Wilkins: Hickory ash first. What is wood ash? Mostly potash, friend. Your grandmother poured water through ash in a hopper to leach out lye for soap. It's a strong alkali that'll eat the skin off your knuckles. Toss it into a thump keg and you've made a scummy pot of lye water that does nothing to pick out wood spirit. Your uncle's hickory ash would make fine soap, Rabbit, and after a run like his, the drinkers will need it to wash their mouths out.
Wilkins: Now the red oak. Any cooper in Merrimack County will tell you why we make whiskey barrels from white oak and not red. White oak's pores are plugged up inside with little growths called tyloses, so it holds liquor tight. Red oak's pores are open tubes. You can blow smoke clean through a stick of it like a pipe stem. A red oak barrel weeps like a widow at a wake. Red oak shavings in a thump keg is like teaching a sieve to hold water: it'll take the job and do it poorly.
Wilkins: And whatever oak your uncle uses, the flavor oak gives, that vanilla sweetness from toasted wood, comes over months and years in a barrel. Not in the few short minutes the vapor spends bubbling through a keg. So no, Rabbit. Ash and shavings never cleaned a bad head out of anybody's run. Only the cuts do that. Throw out the foreshots, throw out the heads, and keep your hearts honest.
Wilkins: And while I'm on the subject, I'll knock down another old myth for your uncle's benefit. Some fool always sets a spoonful of spirit on fire and says, 'Burns blue, it's safe.'
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Myth! Wood spirit, the methanol, burns with a pale blue flame you can barely see in daylight. A blue flame tells you the stuff burns. It doesn't tell you it's fit to drink. A blue flame proves your spirit burns, the same way a deputy's badge proves he can read: it tells you nothing about what's inside him.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There, Rabbit, I just stamped a fresh large cent with G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and I'm laying it aside with your name chalked on the bench. Thank you for calling, and give your uncle my regards, and tell him to bury the ash in the garden where it'll do some good.
♪ Banjo transition
Wilkins: Well, friends, the fire's down to coals, Junior's dozed off by the stove, and Barnaby's chewing on something blue I'd rather not examine. Before I close, my announcer has one more word.
Announcer: A quick word before goodnight! Don't let one weeping joint be the end of your story. Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets, pressure-tested and airtight, are just thirty-four ninety-five from Moonshine Stills. Visit moonshinestill.com today, that's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme rises softly, parlor banjo and mountain fiddle
Wilkins: If tonight's tale gave you a thirst for learning, the honest, lawful, careful sort, then sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you copper and cuts and fire sense, the history of the trade, and how to keep a still-house standing when the deputies come calling. I'll even throw in a lesson on stitching a backside, at no extra charge. Thanks to Junior Vance of Wilkes County, and to Rabbit Miller for the call. To Deputy Hollis Twombly, wherever you're standing to eat your supper tonight: the stitches come out next Tuesday, and the bill's on the anvil.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme fades into wax cylinder crackle