Church Bells and Hangovers: The Sunday Morning Problem in Old New England

It is Saturday night at Fort Wilkins, on the Suncook Valley Turnpike in Pittsfield, Merrimack County. The drip runs steady into the jar, and Barnaby the black bear sulks at the end of his chain like a deacon caught at a card table. Tomorrow is the Lord's Day, and at half past nine the meetinghouse bell will start bawling across the Suncook. Every man in this valley knows what that bell does to his skull. I call it the Sunday Morning Problem. Being a tooth-puller, blacksmith and distiller, and twice the guest of the county sheriff, I mean to study it the way a natural philosopher studies anything: by the metal, by the history, and by the run.

The Bell Is the Villain, and the Bell Is Bronze

I am a metal man, so I begin with the bell. A church bell is not copper. If it were pure copper it would go bonk like a dropped kettle and nobody would wake. Bell metal is bronze, about four parts copper to one part tin. The tin makes it hard and brittle, and the tin makes it ring. Paul Revere, the midnight rider himself, cast several hundred such bells with his sons at their foundry, and half the steeples in New England have one of his bronze throats hanging in them. A church bell is four parts copper and one part tin, and a hungover man is four parts regret and one part Saturday. Both ring loudest at half past nine on the Lord's Day.

Saturday is payday at the cotton mill on the Suncook, and by Saturday night the wages have turned into cider, rum, and whatever runs out of a worm in a hemlock gully. On Sunday morning the bell goes BONG. To a sober man it is a call to worship. To a man who drank his wages it is a blacksmith's sledge on the inside of his skull. I know, because I am a blacksmith and I have been that man.

Tithingmen, Sabbath Laws and Ordination Rum

Our grandfathers had it worse. The old colony meetinghouses had no stove. A man sat on a plank pew in January with his breath freezing in his beard while the parson preached two hours on predestination. Walking the aisle was the tithingman, a town officer whose whole job was keeping order in meeting. Tradition says his staff had a fox tail or a feather at one end and a hard wooden knob at the other. The feather was for tickling a drowsy goodwife awake. The knob was for the men. Picture a farmer who spent Saturday night with a jug of hard cider, snoring through the sermon. Down comes the knob on his skull like a mallet on a frozen squash. He jerks up, bites his own tongue, and bleeds into his Sunday collar before the whole parish. That knob has knocked more sin out of Merrimack County than any sermon ever preached in it.

Colony law forbade ordinary labor, sport and needless travel on the Sabbath, and taverns were not to serve townsfolk during meeting. None of it stopped anybody. It only moved the drinking to Saturday night and made Sunday morning bloodier. Nor was the church always dry. In the last century, when a new minister was ordained, the parish threw a feast. The tavern bills ran to rum, punch, cider, wine, and flip, made by plunging a red-hot loggerhead into the mug so it hissed and foamed. Those bills were a scandal, and the temperance people waved them about for years after. The rum bill for one ordination would have floated a whaling ship out of New Bedford, and the new parson was the only sober man in the room, since somebody had to remember the hymns.

Applejack and the Apple Palsy

The drink that built the New England hangover is cider. Every farm in the Suncook Valley had an orchard, every cellar had barrels, and children drank it hard as soon as they could hold a mug. The worst of it was applejack. Set a barrel of hard cider out on a January night and the water freezes to ice on top. Knock out the ice and what remains is stronger. That is called jacking it. But mark the chemistry: freezing removes nothing except water. Every sour, oily, wicked thing in that cider stays behind and grows stronger along with the spirit. The old folks called the headache that followed the apple palsy. The hands shake, the eyes water, and the skull feels a size too small. Applejack is cider with the water frozen out and the Devil left in.

The morning cure was always hair of the dog that bit you. The saying is centuries old, from an ancient belief that if a mad dog bit you, you laid a hair of that same dog on the wound. It is sound medicine if the dog is small. If a bear bit you, take your hair of the dog and your last rites together. The honest physick, from a man who has studied bodies with forceps and furnace, is that strong drink makes a man pass more water than he takes in. He wakes dried out like a salt cod on a Gloucester rack, his brain shrunk in his skull like a walnut in its shell. Water before bed and water at dawn is the only cure I will swear to. The rest is the cut.

The Sabbath Raid on Fort Wilkins

One year the revenue men in Concord grew clever. They reasoned that Dr. Wilkins, a respectable tooth-puller with a pew to rent, would be in meeting on Sunday like every other Christian. So they would come at half past ten, while the parson was halfway through his seventhly, and find my still-house empty. The flaw in the plan was that I have not rented a pew since a deacon told me my bear smelled up the hitching rail.

So I was in the still-house in my shirtsleeves, minding the worm, when a man came creeping through the alders. Barnaby heard him first. Barnaby does not growl. He goes quiet, and a quiet bear is the worst sound in Merrimack County. The fellow wore Sunday broadcloth to pass for a churchgoer and carried a warrant in his breast pocket. He set one foot inside the reach of the chain. Barnaby took his coattails in his teeth and shook him as a terrier shakes a barn rat. The broadcloth tore like a mainsail splitting in a gale. The coattails went, then the braces, and then Barnaby's second bite took a mouthful about the size of a Sunday ham out of the man's left hindquarter. It sounded like a wet boot pulled out of April mud, and the scream hit a note our choir has been reaching for since 1789. Then four hundred pounds of bear sat on the revenue man's chest and licked the molasses from his whiskers, for the fool had eaten a gingerbread on the walk out.

I came out with a ham bone, the only legal tender that bear accepts, swapped it for the gentleman, and put him in my operating chair, the same one I pull molars in. I cleaned the wound with spirit off the hearts jar, and he hollered. I sewed him shut with horsehair and charged him a dollar, and he complained about that too. I told him I had stitched better rumps than his on horses with better manners. He never served that warrant. A man cannot serve a paper when he cannot sit a horse.

There are gentler Sunday tales. One Monday the deacon came to me red as a boiled lobster, holding six large copper cents from the collection plate, every one struck through Lady Liberty's forehead with my own punch mark, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. I told him the Lord keeps His own accounts, and then I sold him a jar for his wife's nerves. And there was the sexton, my most faithful customer, now dead and ringing in a better steeple. A sober Sunday sounded BONG, BONG, BONG. A rye-whiskey Sunday sounded BONG-BONG, nothing, BONG, and then a long sorrowful BWONNNG as he hung off the rope like a ham in a smokehouse. One Sunday he rang so crooked that half the town went to a funeral and the other half went to a fire.

Junior Vance and the Lord's Own Hour

From the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina came Junior Vance, a hauler of spirits down mountain roads, and he looks at a Sabbath morning the way a fox looks at a hen house. In Wilkes County the safest hour to haul was eleven on Sunday. The county's chief deputy sang bass in the Baptist choir and had not missed a service in nine years, for his mama would have skinned him. When the doxology started, Junior had his coupe loaded down to the springs. Doxology, offering, then a sermon that never ran under forty minutes made an hour and ten minutes of the Lord's own protection. Once the preacher fell sick and the church let out early. Junior came round a curve and found the deputy in the churchyard holding a covered dish of deviled eggs. The deputy looked at Junior, then down at the eggs, and chose the eggs.

Every August a revival tent rose in a hayfield, with sawdust underfoot and a traveling preacher who thundered against the serpent in the jar. After dark that same preacher climbed the hollow to Junior's uncle's place with a flour sack: two jars for the sick, then four, then a dozen by Friday. When the uncle finally asked who all was sick, Junior reports, the preacher looked at him sadly and said, "son, the whole world is sick."

Junior's own Sunday mornings belonged to his Aunt Ocie. When he came home at four in the morning she would be waiting in the dark kitchen with a quart of cold springhouse buttermilk and a spoon of sorghum stirred in. After that she put his whole head under the spring, and then she rubbed crushed sassafras root on his neck, wrists and ears so he would not sit in her pew smelling like a still-house fire. He was in that pew at eleven sharp, two rows behind the singing deputy. Aunt Ocie knew what a body wants: water, a little sweetening and a cold shock. And once, in front of the biggest church in Wilkesboro, Junior's coupe died with a hundred and twenty jars under a quilt. Three deacons in black suits pushed it a quarter mile to the filling station, the jars clinking at every bump, and the head deacon remarked that his wife had packed him a fine picnic. Junior had no wife. He had a hundred and twenty jars.

The Headache Is Made at the Still

Now the hard truth. Most of a Sunday headache is made in the still-house by a greedy hand before the drinker ever lifts the cup. First the law, so the county cannot say I didn't: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and what follows is history and instruction, not an invitation.

For cider brandy the old New England way, grind and press your apples into a clean oak cask and let it work. Wild yeast on the skins will do it, or a cake of brewer's yeast, in a cellar that is cool but not freezing. Within one to three weeks the bubbling stops. Rack the hard cider off the muddy lees, because lees scorch in the pot and taste like a burned barn. For the stripping run, charge the copper pot no more than three-quarters full, bring it up slow, and run it fast. What comes off is weak and cloudy low wines. For the spirit run, charge the low wines into a clean pot and keep the fire LOW, since a hot fire smears every part of the run into the next like a drunk painter's palette.

Fruit carries pectin, and in fermenting the pectin breaks down into more wood spirit, which is methanol, than a grain mash ever makes. So the fruit man must be more careful than the corn man, not less. The foreshots smell sharp, like varnish and green apples. Throw away a good quarter-pint or more for every five gallons you started with, and more for fruit. It is cheaper than a coffin. The heads come next, still solvent-sharp but sweetening, and they stay out of the drinking jar too. Then the hearts arrive, clean and smelling of the orchard in September. As the strength falls, the tails come in oily and heavy, smelling of wet wool and boiled oats, and they leave a slick on a splash of water. That is fusel oil, the heavy alcohols the chemists have named in this half-century, amyl alcohol among them. Tails will give you a headache that walks into Monday wearing your own boots. Collect the run in a dozen or two small jars, numbered in order. Leave them loosely covered overnight, smell each in the morning, and blend by nose, not by purse.

Stressed yeast, from too hot a cellar or a mash with nothing to feed on, throws off the rotten-egg reek of hydrogen sulfide. Copper grabs that sulfur, and it works best where the hot vapour touches it: in the helmet, the neck, and the line to the worm. A smith who builds a copper pot with an iron or tin head has wasted his money. Keep copper along the whole vapour road. And remember that alcohol vapour is heavier than air and creeps along the floorboards toward your firebox like a cat after cream. Keep the still-house open to the breeze, keep the jars well away from flame, never walk off from a running still, and keep a bucket of sand and a wet wool blanket by the door. Barnaby lost a patch of fur to a careless man's fire in 1859. Mind you, Barnaby is a tall tale of the Suncook Valley. Do not chain a bear to your woodshed, for they are wild creatures and will make a widow of you.

Ashes, Red Oak and the Blue Flame

From Wilkesboro, Cletus "Rabbit" Miller sent word that his uncle swears "old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads." The uncle is half a chemist and does not know it. Water poured through wood ash gives lye, or potash. It makes soap out of tallow and lye hominy out of hard corn, and it is caustic enough to blind a man. Methanol and bad heads boil off first whatever ash you add. All the ashes leave is gray, lye-tasting muck and a fine way to scald your hand. Red oak is a cooper's cautionary tale. Its pores run the length of the grain like straws in a broom, and a barrel of it would weep cider across your cellar floor. White oak's pores are plugged, which is why it holds liquor. Red oak shavings only put colour and tannin into raw spirit within the hour, an old trick for making it look aged. They do not clean out heads. They only give them a brown coat.

Last, the blue flame. Light a spoonful, the tavern saying goes, and if it burns blue, it's true. Bosh. A blue flame proves your liquor will burn, and so will a barn. Methanol burns pale blue as well. The spoon cannot tell you whether the heads were thrown away. Only an honest distiller can tell you that. So tomorrow when the bell rings, drink your water, eat your bread, and go to meeting anyway. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.