Brandywine, the Pittsfield Foxhound Who Hated the Tax Man

I have kept this story of Fort Wilkins back for a good while, because it still makes my eyes wet and my backside clench. It concerns a hound: a lop-eared, flea-bitten, piss-proud Suncook foxhound named Brandywine, the dog who hated the tax man. Barnaby, my bear, who lies chained by the log window with the manners of a Concord legislator and the breath of a Dover tannery, comes into it as well. He always does.

The Man in the Plain Coat

To understand why a dog would hate a tax man, you must first understand the tax man, and that is harder, for there is not much to him. In the summer of 1862 Mr. Lincoln's Congress passed the Revenue Act, and with it built a new beast called the Bureau of Internal Revenue. They carved the country into collection districts, set a collector and an assessor over each, and hired a swarm of assistant assessors whose whole reason for being on God's green earth was to walk up your lane and write down everything you owned, did and earned.

They taxed everything in New Hampshire but the weather, and only because the assessor could find no column for it. Three cents on the dollar for any man earning over six hundred a year, five cents for the fat cats over ten thousand. A man must buy a federal license to sell liquor, a license to distill it, and licenses for half the trades in the Valley. I paid for the privilege of pulling teeth, as if the screaming were not tax enough.

These men wore no uniform, no badge, no brass eagle. The assessor came to Pittsfield with no uniform, no badge and no friends, so he was half right about how to dress. He looked like a cattle buyer from Epsom until he unbuckled his satchel and drew out that long thin ledger and his inkhorn. Treasury ink has a smell: iron gall and gum and something sour, like a bank vault that has been pickling. A man cannot smell it. A hound can.

Set alongside this the wool boom of the war years. When Southern cotton stopped coming north, every mill from Lowell to Suncook hollered for wool, and every hill farmer bought sheep, on the Catamount slopes, on Berry Pond Road, in places God never meant a sheep to stand. Where there are sheep there are curs that kill them, thirty ewes of a morning with their throats opened like a mail sack. So the State and the towns taxed the dogs and paid the sheep farmers out of the dog money. My whiskey taxed, my income taxed, my dentistry taxed, and then my dog. A hound is the only citizen in Merrimack County who pays his taxes by being alive and does not complain. Brandywine complained. He complained with his teeth.

A Hound Won at High-Low-Jack

Brandywine came to Fort Wilkins in the fall of '62. I won him at high-low-jack from a Barnstead peddler named Otis, who had marked cards and a cheating heart, and I came out ahead because the cards were marked wrong. Otis put up the dog against a jar of my double-run and wept harder over the jar than the dog. Brandywine was red and white, with ears so long he tripped on them going downhill, a voice like a church organ with a cracked bellows, and a nose that could have found Judas in a crowd of apostles.

Within a week I saw it. A farmer, a drover, a Free Will Baptist with a pamphlet might come up my lane, and the dog would sniff his boots and go back to licking himself. But one October afternoon a stranger came up from the Concord road, and Brandywine rose off the woodpile with every hair on his back standing like a hog bristle brush. That dog could smell government ink at forty rods.

Eleven Stitches and a Brass Button

The man was Ephraim Pettengill, assistant assessor for our division, a Concord man with a Concord tailor: black broadcloth frock coat, velvet collar, brass buttons polished every morning with spit and pride, and a waxed mustache like two commas that had lost their sentence. He came up my lane on a spring day in '63 to take my income return and examine my manufacturing apparatus. I was telling him the copper in back was for boiling dental instruments when Brandywine came round the still-house. I had chained Barnaby, as always. I had not chained the dog. Nobody chains a hound. I learned better.

A barking dog is a dog making conversation. Brandywine came low and silent across the dooryard like a sin across a Sunday, and set his teeth in the tails of that frock coat. The man ran, and a running man pulling against a forty-pound hound is a contest of broadcloth. The broadcloth lost. Then the dog went back for the trousers and took a fair bite out of the left cheek of Mr. Pettengill's federal backside. His ledger flew one way, his inkhorn the other, and Treasury ink spattered my anvil.

Then Pettengill ran the wrong way, toward the log window and Barnaby. The bear does not like being woken, least of all by a bleeding man smelling of bay rum and fright. He rose to the full stretch of his chain and with one swipe took the velvet collar clean off, and three brass buttons went pinging across the yard like grapeshot. Pettengill went up my sugar maple faster than federal money ever left Washington, stripped to his drawers and half a waistcoat.

I left him up there long enough for a reasonable man to reconsider his line of work. Then I laid him face down in my operating chair, poured clean spirit over the bite, and put eleven stitches in him with silk thread and a curved needle while he bit a leather strap. I charged the standard tooth-pulling rate, since I was extracting a dog from his trousers. He never came back. His report, I have it from a clerk who drinks, read: Apparatus, not examined. Dogs, one, hostile. Bears, one, more hostile. Brandywine kept one of the brass buttons in his jowl like a plug of tobacco for the rest of his life.

Dogs of the Brushy Mountains

A Yankee believes a dog story only if a stranger swears to it, so I was glad of a visit from Junior Vance, a runner out of the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina. His granny kept a one-eyed brindle Plott hound she named Sheriff out of pure spite. Sheriff would not hunt nor rise for a dropped biscuit, but when revenue men were about he lay flat across the road below Moravian Falls and would not budge, and Junior learned to turn around. The one time he pressed on in his mind, there were two revenue men at the creek ford with a lantern and a pile of fence rails. Another agent tried to win the dog with a fried pork chop; Sheriff ate it, bone and all, then lifted his leg and filled the man's oversized hat near about a quart.

Junior's cousin Pruitt sent a soft-mouthed pointer named Dolly through the laurel with a pint in a wool sock, until she laid it on the doorstep of the hard-shell Brother Hollis. The sock came home empty with a note of thanks for his rheumatism, saying Thursdays suited him fine. He took delivery every Thursday for four years and preached the hottest temperance sermons in the Brushy Mountains.

A Nose Like a Hound at the Worm

Brandywine taught me something of the craft. A dog does not read a hydrometer; he trusts his nose. I must say plainly that making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law, and what follows is history and instruction only. Nor should any man set a dog on another; it is cruel to the dog and dangerous to the man.

Cook cracked corn in water till it gelatinizes, thick as a Boston pudding, then stir in malted barley once you can hold your hand in it, so the malt turns starch to sugar. Cool further, pitch your yeast, and ferment warm and covered with the air able to escape. A starving, overheated, crowded yeast belches sulfur, much as most of a bear's bad temper comes from being woken. Copper does its work where hot vapour touches it, in the dome, the lyne arm and the worm, seizing those sulfur compounds. An iron pot with a copper worm is half a still. Keep the copper bright and clean.

Run on a low, steady fire and never leave the still alone. Alcohol vapour is heavier than air and creeps along the floor like a cat to a cream pan; I saw a still-house in Gilmanton go up like a Fourth of July rocket. Throw away the foreshots, a few ounces for every five gallons of wash, and more if in doubt. Then collect in a row of numbered jars, a pint or less each, let them air under a cloth, and go down the row like Brandywine working a fence line. Heads smell of glue pot, green apple and coachmaker's varnish. Hearts are clean and sweet, of corn and warm bread and a little honey. Tails smell of wet dog and sweaty wool socks. Junior gave me the sermon in one line from his granny's daddy: "a greedy man cuts with his wallet and an honest man cuts with his nose."

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Myth of the Bead

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro wrote 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. Red oak's pores run open like a bundle of drinking straws, which is why coopers put liquor in white oak, whose pores are plugged from within. Red oak shavings lend colour and bitter tannin, and the spirit looks aged the way a painted harlot looks young, but they clean out not a drop of heads. Hickory ash in water makes lye, and lye with the fats of the mash makes soap: the cleanest-tasting bellyache in Wilkes County. Nothing tossed in a keg catches methanol. The only cure is the cut.

As for the shake test, I struck it down at my anvil. A big, lasting bead does roughly tell proof, spirit near half alcohol beading big, weak spirit small. But methanol will bead, lead-poisoned spirit will bead, heads will bead as pretty as church-supper lemonade. Your nose, honest cuts, clean copper and no lead solder save a man's eyesight; a bead never did.

Brandywine's Last Watch

Brandywine lived to fourteen, gray in the muzzle and deaf as a selectman at budget time, but he could smell a revenue coat coming up the turnpike to the end. He died asleep on the woodpile in the sun, the brass button in his jowl. I buried him under that woodpile with the button in his teeth, and Barnaby lay by the grave three days and would not eat his ham bone. He is the only Union veteran in Pittsfield who never asked for a pension. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.