Barnaby the Bear and the Tax Man's Horse: How a Revenue Assessor Lost His Ledger

The Assessor and His Machinery

To understand a tax man's horse, the reader must first understand the tax man. When Mr. Lincoln's Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1862, it did more than lay a duty upon whiskey. It built a whole engine to collect that duty. Every state was split into collection districts, generally lined up with the congressional districts, and an assessor was set over each one, with assistant assessors beneath him. Those assistants were the boots on the road. They went from farm to farm and mill to mill, writing down what a man owned and what trade he worked.

Spirits were not the only thing they wrote down. The Act taxed carriages and gold watches. It taxed gold and silver plate, so a man left six silver spoons by his grandmother would find the government wanting a look at them. It taxed billiard tables, which troubled nobody in Pittsfield, since the only billiards in this town are played when Barnaby knocks a turnip off the woodpile with his nose. It also laid on an income tax of three percent on any income over six hundred dollars. If the Treasury could find my conscience, I expect they would assess that at three percent as well. An assistant assessor counts your spoons the way a widow counts the mourners: slowly and suspiciously, to be certain nobody slipped out before the end.

No railroad runs up the Suncook Valley, though there has been talk of one for years. So an official coming out from Concord, fifteen-odd miles by Chichester or by Epsom, hires a horse and buggy at a Concord livery. Concord builds the finest coaches on earth, but the assessor does not get a Concord coach. He gets whatever the livery man has left in the back stall, and the livery man keeps the nervous ones for government men, because government men do not tip.

Any natural philosopher should note this point. A horse is a prey animal, made to eat grass and to run from whatever eats him, and his nose is a finer instrument than any revenue man's. He can smell a bear long before he sees one. When I was a young man in Barnstead, I watched a pair of bays hauling cordwood scent a sow bear with two cubs. The team went sideways through a rail fence, and the near horse took a split chestnut rail through the breast and had to be finished with an axe. The bear only looked at the wreck and ambled off. The bear need not do a blessed thing. The horse's own terror does all the butchering.

Lady Victoria Comes Up the Turnpike

It was September, after the surrender, a fine warm afternoon with the wind out of the northwest. Remember that wind, for it is a witness. Up the Suncook Turnpike from the Chichester side came a hired buggy with a black oilcloth top. Driving it was an assistant assessor out of the Concord office, whom I shall call Horace Twitchell, because that is near enough to his name and nearer still to his nature. He was a thin, damp sort of man whose collar was so high and stiff that he had to turn his whole body to look at a cow. Beside him sat a leather valise holding his ledger, his inkpot and his dinner. He had come to list my carriage, my gold watch and my alchemical apparatus.

His buggy was drawn by a gray mare from the Concord livery named Lady Victoria. She was tall and high-headed, with all the courage of a queen and all the sense of a royal marriage. She would shy at a butterfly if it came at her from the left.

That same morning Barnaby had spent three hours rolling in my apple pomace, the mashed pulp left after the cider pressing. The September sun had set the whole pile working, so my bear smelled like a wet dog dipped in hard cider and rolled in sin. The northwest wind carried that perfume straight down the turnpike into Lady Victoria's royal nostrils. She smelled him a quarter mile off and began to dance: sideways, backward, eyes rolling white, ears pinned flat. Twitchell, being a city man, wrapped the reins twice around his wrist for a better hold. Any farm boy of seven could have told him what a bolting horse does to a man tied to it, but no farm boy of seven was asked.

They came round the bend below my gate. Barnaby rose on his hind legs, all four hundred pounds and seven feet of him, with pomace in his fur and yellowjackets circling his head like a crown. Then he yawned. Speaking as a dentist, I can tell you Barnaby has a mouth like a Concord jail: forty-two inmates and not one of them reformed.

Lady Victoria went straight up and came down already running. The near wheel struck my stone wall and folded like a hymnbook. The valise flew left and landed within reach of Barnaby's chain. Twitchell flew right, was dragged some twenty feet on his belly, and fetched up face first in the ditch where my hired boy dumps the hog-pen slop. As he landed, his trousers split from belt to bottom like a ripe milkweed pod. Mrs. Tilton across the road said it was the palest moon she ever saw rise at two in the afternoon.

What a Bear Does With a Ledger

A bear does not open a bag. He takes it apart the way the Lord took apart Jericho. Barnaby ate the two boiled eggs shells and all, with the mutton and cheese after them. Then he bit the cork out of the inkpot and licked it clean, and went about with a blue tongue for a week. Next he found the ledger. It was bound with hide glue, which is boiled out of skins and bones and smells to a bear like the finest gravy on God's earth. The first page he ate, entirely, was the Pittsfield page. Two days later I saw it come out the other end, not one figure the better for the journey.

I brought Twitchell a horse blanket for his dignity and a jar for his nerves, and he took both. No horse in Pittsfield would come up my road that week for love or oats, so he walked the fifteen miles to Concord in thin city boots. The farm wives of Chichester came to their doors to stare at the blanket. A yellow dog barked at the back of him for four miles, and a tavern keeper charged him extra for the smell. He limped into the livery after dark to find Lady Victoria calm in her stall eating oats, with the buggy standing on three wheels, and the livery man charged him for the missing one.

Since that day, the Concord office sends word ahead by the post: 'Dr. Wilkins: An officer of the United States will call upon you Thursday next. Kindly secure the bear.' I write back, 'Bear secured. Whiskey not.' A red flannel on my gatepost shows Barnaby is on the short chain. The livery now charges a dollar extra for the Pittsfield trip and sends Moses, a deaf old brown plow gelding with a head cold eleven months of the year. That is livestock diplomacy. The bear bit nobody. The horse did the arguing, and the government learned some manners.

Guinea Hens, Persimmons and an Informing Mule

Miss Clara Higgins, an herbalist down from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, told me the mountain folk keep livestock that will testify for them, since they cannot afford lawyers. Her great-grandmother in Patrick County kept a flock of guinea hens called the Tattletale Choir. When a gauger rode up the creek after the surrender, thirty guineas let go at once. His bay backed him slowly into the creek like a couple at a cotillion, and the old woman charged him a nickel for watering his horse.

Her Uncle Absalom planted a double row of persimmons down his lane. One October a federal assessor's gray gelding stopped under the first tree and ate for three hours, with his face puckered by the tannin in the green fruit. In three hours a mountain family can hide a still, a mash barrel, two jugs and a whole cousin. Absalom then billed the United States for fruit damages. Miss Higgins warned that too many persimmons can ball up in a horse's gut and kill him, and her uncle always led the gelding off before it came to that. The gentleman is the one who stops the joke before the horse dies.

Not every animal took the mountain side. A gauger once borrowed the very mule that had hauled corn to her grandmother's still-house twice a week for four years, and the mule carried him straight to the door and sat down to wait for his corn. The grandmother kept a pan of sorghum boiling twenty feet off for just such a day. She walked him past the copper pot as if it were a washtub, glued his mouth shut with hot molasses, and sent him home with a jar for his wife and a different mule.

The Mash, the Fire and the Cuts

The law of this land says no man makes distilled spirits for drinking without the government's permit. What follows is history and learning, offered as an old smith tells how swords were forged. Pour it into your understanding, not your cup.

Cracked corn is cooked in scalding water until it is as thick as porridge. Then malted barley or rye is stirred in, and the whole is held near a hundred and fifty degrees by the glass for an hour or so, until the ferment in the malt turns the starch to sugar. Cool it to blood-warm before pitching the yeast, or you will have made a very expensive bowl of mush. It will work four days to a week, and when the cap falls and the hissing stops, the yeast has eaten its fill. The old Kentucky men stir in backset, a share of the soured spent liquid from the last run, to keep out the wild bacteria. That is the whole of sour mash.

Charge the pot no more than three-quarters full, or it will puke over into the arm and worm and make a cannon of your copper. I once saw a lid blown through a shingle roof in Gilmanton. Keep the fire low. Alcohol vapour is heavier than air, so it creeps along the floor toward any flame and burns back along its own trail. Keep air moving, keep your jars well back from the fire, and never walk off from a running still.

Now to the experiment proper. Methanol boils at about a hundred forty-eight degrees, ethyl spirit at about a hundred seventy-three, and water at two hundred twelve. The foreshots come first and are never drunk. I discard at least half a pint for every five gallons of wash, and more is no sin. A fruit mash yields more wood spirit than corn does, on account of its pectin. After the foreshots come the heads, which smell of varnish. The hearts that follow are sweet and smell of the grain. Last come the tails, oily and smelling of wet dog and regret. Catch the run in a long row of small numbered jars and smell every one. Your nose is the magistrate. As for the copper, the work is done where the vapour touches it, in the helmet, the arm and the worm, for that is where the sulfur is left behind. A copper bottom with a tin arm is a steeple with no preacher.

Ashes, Shavings and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, sent word north to ask: '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?' There is not. Hickory ash makes the strongest lye in the woods. Putting it in the keg does not clean the spirit. It puts lye into it, and lye can burn a man's throat. Red oak is so open in the pore that no cooper will make a whiskey barrel of it. Its shavings lend some tannin and colour, but colour is not cleanliness, and painting a privy does not make it a parlor. Some old-timers did drip their finished liquor through charcoal afterward, but that is a filter, a different thing entirely. The only cure for bad heads is in your jars and your nose.

The blue-flame test fares no better on my anvil. Good spirit burns pale blue, but so does methanol, which is so faint in daylight that it can scarcely be seen. A jar of foreshots can win the tavern's applause and then blind the man who drinks it. A blue flame proves only that your liquor burns. So does a Baptist's temper, and nobody calls that safe to drink. Make your cuts. And remember that of the bear, the horse and the tax man on the Suncook Turnpike, only the bear kept his dignity and his dinner.