Apple Brandy Cuts, Camp Meeting History and the Bear Who Got Baptized

In every tavern from Barnstead to Chichester I am asked for the same tale: the summer my four-hundred-pound bear went to a revival, sat on the mourners' bench, and got himself saved, or so the preacher swore in every pulpit between Pittsfield and the sea. I set it down here for the reader who keeps his own copper. As with most foolishness, there is a lesson about the still folded inside it.

Cane Ridge, Pledge Cards and the Legal Mile

The camp meeting was born at Cane Ridge, in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in August of 1801. Bourbon County, mark you. The Lord has a sense of humour. Somewhere between ten and twenty thousand souls came out of the woods to that meeting. They shouted and wept, they fell down jerking like hooked trout, and some barked like dogs. A camp meeting is the only place a man can get religion, sunstroke and a bastard in the same week. The circuit riders carried the pattern to every crossroads in the Republic.

New Hampshire knows the fever well. Benjamin Randall organized the Free Will Baptists at New Durham in 1780. In 1862, with the war raging, the Methodists laid out a proper camp ground at Epping and called it Hedding, with tents and cottages in rows like an army that marches only toward the dinner table.

The temperance men came in alongside the shouting. The American Temperance Society was founded at Boston in 1826. Every revival ended at a table of pledge cards, and by the first frost every pledge card had become kindling in some farmer's stove. Many a state forbade the sale of spirits within a certain distance of a religious meeting, a mile as a rule. Wherever the law draws a line, a Yankee sets up his wagon one step past it.

In New England, what those wagons sold was most often the fruit of the apple. Our grandfathers avoided water, since water gave a man the flux. Cider was the table drink of every farm in the Suncook Valley, and a family laid down ten, twenty, thirty barrels against the winter. For more kick, the farmer made cider brandy. There are two ways to make it, and one of them can hurt you. The lazy way is freeze-jacking: set the hard cider out on a January night and pull off the ice. But freezing removes only water. Every drop of wood spirit and fusel oil stays behind in that little puddle, crowded together like Methodists at a free supper. That is why jacked cider gives a man a headache like a mule shod his skull from the inside. The still is the honest way, for a still lets you cut those devils off and throw them away.

Elder Fogg Pitches His Tent

In August of 1864, when the tar was bleeding out of the bridge planks over the Suncook, an itinerant came up the turnpike in a yellow-wheeled wagon. He was Elder Obadiah Fogg. He claimed ordination from three churches and had been thrown out of two. He was a stringy, crow-faced article with a beard down to his third waistcoat button, and he kept it glossed with molasses and bear grease. That alone should have warned him what the Lord had in store.

He rented Jeremiah Cram's back hayfield, a half mile down the turnpike, and pitched his tent with the open end facing my still-house. His first sermon was called Sodom on the Suncook, and he named me in it as the tooth-drawing Pharaoh of Pittsfield. It was the best free advertising I ever had. Half his congregation walked up the turnpike after the benediction to see whether Sodom had a back door. It did, and it was open till midnight.

Barnaby's chain is held by a staple in the north sill log of the still-house. In August that sill dries and shrinks, and I had been meaning to drive the staple deeper about as earnestly as I had been meaning to go to church. On the fourth night the Elder's ladies held a dinner on the grounds: beans in molasses, brown bread, rhubarb pies, maple cream, ham, doughnuts fried in lard, and gingerbread enough to shingle a barn. Then the wind came round out of the south. I heard the sill groan, then a pop, then the chain dragging, and after that I saw only a bear-shaped hole in the moonlight.

A Bear on the Anxious Bench

Barnaby arrived at the altar call, with the fiddler sawing out Come Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy. In he came through the open end of the tent, black as the inside of a Calvinist, trailing six feet of chain. The folk in the back pushed forward to see him, and the folk in the front had their eyes shut in prayer, so he walked up the aisle unmolested and sat down on the anxious bench. That bench was a plank on two sawhorses, and it broke with a crack like a musket. Pinned beneath it lay Amos Peaslee, a drover who had come forward to repent of selling a Loudon man a horse with a painted glass eye. Amos cracked two ribs and found the Lord on the spot, sincere as any man ever was, for he could see Him from there.

Next Barnaby put his whole face into the rhubarb pie on Mrs. Hepzibah Tuttle's lap and ate crust, plate and a fair bit of apron. Then he caught the smell of gingerbread crumbs in the coat of Thaddeus Pruitt, a paid informer for the revenue assessors who had been writing down the name of every man who walked toward my still-house. Pruitt ran, and a man who runs from a bear has made himself into dessert. Barnaby caught him at the tent flap and tore off coat, trouser seat, and a strip of hindquarter the size of a pocket Testament. Pruitt ran the half mile to the tavern with his backside open to the stars, and he left the notebook behind in Barnaby's jaws. Barnaby ate it, every name. He is the only revenue clerk I ever hired, and he works for gingerbread.

Fogg saw his chance. He roared that the beast was humbled, though Barnaby was only rolling in the straw to scratch his fleas. Then he laid hands on the bear's head, and the bear licked the molasses out of his beard from chin to eyebrows. Fogg cried out that it was tongues of fire, and the whole tent went to its knees. I arrived with a lantern and a ham bone to find the congregation of Merrimack County praying over my bear.

Baptism by Partial Immersion

Fogg baptized by full immersion, and he insisted on doing it that same night, so he led a hundred-odd singers down to the horse trough in front of the Pittsfield tavern. The trough was seven feet long and the bear weighed four hundred pounds. Fogg got the front half in and the back half would not follow, so he was forced to sprinkle. That night I watched a man's whole theology drown in a horse trough. He wrote it in his ledger of souls as number four hundred and twelve: one bear, baptized by partial immersion and supplemental sprinkling.

The next morning he came up my lane with an axe to break up my copper. Barnaby was on a new staple by then, driven twice as deep, and when he caught the smell of that molasses beard he remembered it. Fogg went up the sugar maple by my woodpile and stayed there all night, preaching Jonah, Daniel and Revelation down at the bear. At dawn I brought a ham bone for Barnaby and a pint jar of hearts for the Elder, which he said was for communion. He left Pittsfield by noon and later put the story in a tract called The Bear of Pittsfield, A Beast Made Meek. Barnaby stayed saved nine days. On the tenth he broke into Ezra Drake's smokehouse on the Sabbath and ate two hams, a side of bacon and Ezra's best Sunday boots.

Tales from the Blue Ridge

Miss Clara Higgins, an herbalist and student of mountain talk who came up from Lynchburg by the cars, matched me tale for tale. In Botetourt County her granny's circuit rider, Brother Lafe Overstreet, stomped his pulpit plank every time he damned the jug, until one August Sunday he stomped clean through it and smashed the crock he kept hidden underneath. Ever since, folk there say a man smelling of shine at a church picnic has been anointed. In Rockbridge County a peddler named Dabney Shiflett measured the legal mile with a surveyor's chain, sixty-six feet to the chain and eighty chains to the mile, and parked his wagon one mile and one rod from the preaching stand. The preacher simply marched four hundred souls and a pump organ down the road and held the service at Dabney's wagon wheels. The next week Dabney sold the same jugs at Lexington court day as Jordan water, at double the price.

She also gave me her granny's words. Tangle-leg is green corn fresh off the worm. Bust-head is anything claimed to be aged. The jug passed behind the arbor before the altar call she named as follows: 'That's not the Holy Ghost. That's shouting water.'

Apple Brandy and the Honest Cuts

First, plainly: a man who makes spirits for drinking without a license from the federal revenue is breaking the law. What follows is history and instruction. I have been to the county jail twice, and the bread there is stale.

Take sound apples. A bruise will do no harm, but rot brings molds that follow you to the jar. Russets and sharp cider apples give more character than sweet table fruit. Grind to pomace and press. Ferment in clean barrels with the bung loose in a cool cellar for two or three weeks, until the cider is dry and has quit bubbling. If it stinks of rotten eggs, your yeast is starving for nitrogen and throwing off what the chemists call hydrogen sulfide.

Apples are full of pectin, which breaks down into wood spirit, named methyl alcohol by Dumas and Péligot in 1834. Fruit yields more of it than grain does. The amount will not frighten a man who cuts honestly, but it is enough to cripple a man who does not.

For the stripping run, strain the cider off its lees, bring it up slow, and collect everything as low wines. For the spirit run, put the low wines back in the clean pot and run them slow as a Sunday sermon. The foreshots come first, smelling like a cobbler's glue pot. That is where wood spirit is thickest, and they go in the fire bucket and never in a mouth. Next come the heads, smelling of varnish, which you collect in small jars and set apart. When the smell turns to sweet apple blossom and a drop rubbed between your palms feels smooth, you have reached the hearts, which are your brandy. Last come the tails, oily and flat like wet dog, which you save for the next run. When in doubt, throw away more heads, not fewer.

Copper is your ally in this. The sulfur rides up in the vapour, and copper seizes it and holds it as a dark film on the metal. Scrub your pot bright after every run, for a dull pot is a lazy pot. Beware also of fire. Spirit vapour is heavier than air, and from a leaking joint it pours along the floorboards toward your firebox. Keep your joints tight, your fire low, your lantern high, a pail of sand by the door, and never leave a running still. I saw a man in Gilmanton come out of his burning still-house with his eyebrows in one hand and his jar in the other.

The Burning Spoon and the Doubler's Ashes

Elder Fogg would not drink my jar until he had lit a spoonful of it and seen a blue flame. That test is hogwash. Wood spirit burns blue just as good spirit does, and a spoon can find neither wood spirit nor lead. Honest cuts are the only guard against the first, and keeping solder and scrap far from your still is the only guard against the second.

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, sent word that his uncle throws hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg, and he asked: 'Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?' The answer is half. Ash is potash, which is lye. It sweetens some sour acids, but it cannot touch wood spirit, which boils off early, and too much of it makes your run taste of the washtub. Red oak lends some colour and flavour, which is seasoning and not cleaning, like a clean collar on a horse thief. Only the cut buckets can save you from bad heads.

So keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. And if a traveling preacher comes up the turnpike looking for a convert, tell him the bear has been done already, that the job only half took, and that the back half is still a heathen.