Fort Wilkins After Dark: Night Visitors, a Copper Thief and a Wall of Hats

Good evening, neighbours. I write this by a coal-oil lantern hung on a nail outside my window, with a jar filling drop by drop at my elbow and Barnaby, my four-hundred-pound sack of grievances, sulking on his chain beneath the sill like a jilted schoolmaster. Tonight's subject is one I have long been saving: Fort Wilkins after dark. I mean to tell who came up the Suncook Valley Turnpike after sundown, who left in a hurry, and who forgot his hat.

I keep a ledger of night visitors the way a parson keeps a ledger of sins. It has more entries than anybody is comfortable with, and nobody ever pays up. On my back wall, above the slack tub, hang eleven hats on eleven pegs. Every one has a story, and not one owner has ever come back to claim his property.

Why We Call It Moonshine

The Treasury men of Washington would have you think we Yankee and mountain folk invented the word to spite them. Not so. The English were saying moonshine for smuggled spirits long before any of us were born, for the plain reason that smuggling is done by moonlight. Nobody rows French brandy onto a Kentish beach at high noon with a brass band.

Every distiller ought to know the tale out of Wiltshire. One moonlit night some village men had sunk kegs of smuggled brandy in the pond to hide them from the excisemen, and they were out with hay rakes fishing them back up when the King's riders came along the lane. The riders asked what in thunder they were about. The chief of the villagers pointed at the moon floating round and yellow on the water and said, 'We be raking out that great cheese, sir.' The excisemen laughed themselves sick at the simple bumpkins and rode on. The villagers raked up every keg, and to this day Wiltshire men are called Moonrakers. The excisemen laughed at them for raking the cheese, and the Moonrakers laughed all the way to the tavern with the brandy. That tells you who the real cheese was.

Burning Fluid and the Deadly Lamps

Darkness at a working still-house is not all romance and moonbeams. Darkness means light, light means fire, and fire around spirit vapour is how a man becomes a cautionary sermon. When I was younger and better-looking, a country house was lit by tallow, by whale oil if you were rich, and by a devilish brew called camphene if you were cheap. Camphene is distilled turpentine. Mixed with alcohol, the peddlers called it burning fluid. It burned bright and white and cost next to nothing. It was like a mother-in-law: bright, warm, and liable to blow up the whole house at supper.

I have seen what it does. A woman in Barnstead, God rest her, went to refill a lamp still warm from use. The vapour caught off the wick and the can went off in her hands like a Fourth of July petard. The burning fluid ran down her apron in a blue-and-yellow sheet and stuck to her. She ran for the dooryard, which is the worst thing you can do, because running feeds the fire, and her husband rolled her in the snowbank. When I helped dress her hands, the skin came off with the bandages like the peel off a boiled pear. She lived, but she never touched a lamp again. The newspapers of those years were full of such deaths, and most folks blamed carelessness. It was the fuel.

Then in 1859 a fellow named Drake punched a well at Titusville in Pennsylvania and struck rock oil. Inside of a few years every peddler on the turnpike was selling kerosene, or coal oil as they called it, and it is a far gentler fuel. Mark this, though: the history of moonshine is the history of men working at night beside a fire, and a good many of them never lived to tell their grandchildren about it.

The Ledger and the Wall of Hats

Here are some entries from the ledger. One November near midnight a Concord lawyer arrived in a silk stovepipe hat. He said he had come about a molar, but he had no bad molar. What he had was a dry throat and a wife who counted the jars in his cellar. When he heard a horse on the road he went out by the window. The horse turned out to be his own, which had untied itself and wandered off. Barnaby got to the hat first, and there is a bite out of the crown the shape of a half moon. His reputation has a bite out of it too, though only the hat's was Barnaby's doing.

Another entry is a tin peddler from over Gilmanton way, in a wool slouch hat, who tried to sell me a copper kettle that was really brass with a copper wash on it. I sounded it with my hammer. Copper rings like a church bell, and this one gave a dull, cheap clank. It was a liar's kettle. He left without the kettle, without his hat, and with one fewer front tooth, which I took off his bill as a professional courtesy.

The worst confession on the wall is a brown beaver hat with the nap worn off. It was a February night with a hard moon and a snow crust a dog could walk on, and past two in the morning I was asleep in my chair with my boots in the oven. In the shed lay two coils of new copper worm, worth more than any horse in Pittsfield. A fellow I will call Mr. Ezra crept up out of the alders with a gunny sack. He knew about the bear, but he had a theory, as fools often do: bears sleep all winter. Barnaby does sleep in winter, mostly, but he sleeps the way a judge sleeps through a trial, with one ear open for anything that smells like dinner. Mr. Ezra's coat pockets were stuffed with salt pork.

He backed out of the shed doorway right over the chain. Barnaby took him by the seat, breeches, drawers and a good mouthful besides, and shook him the way a terrier shakes a rat. The pork scattered everywhere, and praise God and pork prices, the bear chose the pork. I found the man hanging on the woodpile, steaming in the cold like a boiled pudding. I laid him face-down in my dentist's chair and stitched his backside by coal-oil light with horsehair thread. It took eleven stitches, and he bit clean through a leather strap. In the morning he walked home to his mother, very carefully, in a borrowed petticoat. His copper worm is still in my shed.

A Wilkes County Runner in the Dark

Mr. Junior Vance of North Wilkesboro, a hauler of the mountain article from the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina, knows the dark well. His mother sewed his name in red thread inside every hat he owned. One moonless night he was loading up a logging road, 'darker'n the inside of a cow' as he put it, when somebody hollered that the law was coming. He was halfway to Statesville before he found his head bare. He walked four miles back through the briars and found a revenue agent asleep against a stump, wearing Junior's hat against the cold. Junior lifted it off as gently as a biscuit off a hot pan and set the agent's own hat back on his head. The man woke next morning none the wiser.

His people signalled with a hoot owl: two hoots meant come ahead and one meant stay put. That worked for two years, until a real barred owl on a fence post gave two hoots and Junior rolled straight into three agents. An owl is the worst lookout God ever made. He sits up all night, sees everything, and says the same word no matter what happens. Afterwards a cousin carried a rusty gate hinge from a hog pen, because no bird in North Carolina squeals like that. Another night a possum rode to Charlotte curled in the straw among the jars, played dead in the buyer's lap, and hissed when he poked it. On moonlit nights Junior steered by a farmer's whitewashed fence, near a mile of it. On his thirteenth run the whitewash ran out two-thirds of the way down, and he mowed down about forty rows of corn. The farmer looked at his corn and said only, 'I reckon I'll buy more whitewash.'

Running the Copper After Sundown

First, the law: making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. What follows is history and education, the way a man tells you how the old forges worked.

The work begins days before the run, with the mash. Cooked grain or crushed fruit is set with water and yeast somewhere warm and airy until the bubbling stops and the sweetness is gone off the tongue. The still only concentrates what the yeast already made, and a sour, dirty wash makes sour, dirty spirit. Why run at night? The old answer is to hide the smoke, but the distiller's answer is cold. The colder the water in the worm tub, the better the worm condenses. On a November night my tub stays cold for hours, while in August at noon you will be hauling buckets till your arms fall off.

Then there is the light. Spirit vapour is half again as heavy as air. If a joint weeps, the vapour sinks to the floor and creeps along like invisible molasses, looking for a low flame. So my lantern hangs high, outside, behind glass. The firebox is walled off. A bucket of sand and a wet horse blanket wait by the door, because water thrown on burning spirit only floats the fire around. And I never leave a running still.

Bring the pot up slow, like a slow sunrise. Rush it and the run pukes foam into your pipes and blows the cap. When the first drops come, catch them in a row of small jars numbered in chalk, two dozen or more. The old men call this jarring off. Pour out the foreshots, all of them. The heads smell of varnish or glue and go out too, for they carry the harsh, poisonous stuff that blinds men. The hearts smell sweet and clean. The tails turn flat and oily, like a wet dog in a cellar, and are set aside to run again. At three in the morning a man's judgment is about as reliable as a Gilmanton horse trade, so wait for daylight and smell each jar with a clear head. Afterwards, scrub the copper while it is warm. Last of all, put out the fire and check the coals once more, because more still-houses burned down after the run than during it.

Ashes, Red Oak and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro wrote that his uncle swears the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Take the ashes first. Run water through hardwood ashes in an ash hopper and you get lye, a caustic alkali that is good for soap and hominy. In a thump keg, any fat in the wash turns to soap and foams. The froth can choke your worm and blow the cap to the rafters, and it removes not one drop of heads.

Red oak is half right, and half right is how most good lies get started. Oak gives colour, tannin and vanilla sweetness. But red oak lacks the tyloses that plug white oak's pores, and it is so open in the grain that a man can blow bubbles through a stick of it. Shavings of it will tint raw spirit amber so that it looks old, but they will not make it safe. Colour is a costume, not a cure. The blue flame proves nothing either, because methanol burns blue as well. Keep the ashes for soap, keep the oak for barrels, and keep your heads on the ground where they belong. Keep your copper clean and your fire low, and keep your hat on your head.