Letters to Mrs. Wilkins: A Distiller's Wife, Her Kettle and the Bear

A Cedar Box Under the Bed

Mrs. Wilkins has gone to her sister's in Barnstead and will not be home till Thursday. That leaves Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike to me, to Barnaby the black bear on his chain, and to a cedar box tied with blue ribbon that lives under our bed. In it are twenty years of letters to Mrs. Wilkins, from Mrs. Wilkins, and about Mrs. Wilkins. She does not know that I know where she keeps it. I am about to open it in print, and if she reads this, my next feature will come to you from the bottom of the Suncook, written up by a catfish.

Call it the long-suffering wife's side of the business. But a scoundrel with footnotes is still called a scholar, so the history comes first.

Three Cents, Coverture and the Still-Room

When I was a young man a letter was charged by the mile. Concord cost one sum, and Ohio cost you for every rut in the road. Then in 1863, with the war still on, Congress set one rate for the whole Union, three cents the half-ounce from Boston to the Pacific, beginning that July. It now costs the same to insult a brother-in-law in Ohio as one across the road, and I have taken full advantage. There was an older change as well. The man who received a letter used to pay for it, so a man could mail a creditor a fat envelope of nothing and make him pay to open it. From 1855 the sender had to pay ahead, and from 1856 he had to do it with a stamp. My Uncle Ephraim had mailed his debts to other people for thirty years, and the government took away his only hobby.

The wife of a distiller in 1865 stands in a peculiar legal fix. Under the old common-law doctrine of coverture, a woman's legal self is folded into her husband's like a letter into an envelope. She cannot easily hold property apart from him, sign a contract or sue in her own name. The states have chipped at it with married women's property acts, a piece here and a piece there, but the bones still stand. In the eyes of the old law Mrs. Wilkins and I are one person. In this house we settled long ago which one.

The joke is on the lawmakers. Long before any man in a leather apron stood over a whiskey pot, the still belonged to the women. The old English manor houses and the better colonial homes kept a still-room, and it was the housewife's kingdom. There, with a little copper alembic, she drew rose water, mint water and lavender water, cordials for the colic and waters for the complexion. She set it all down in her own hand in a household receipt book and passed the book to her daughters like a family Bible. My wife's grandmother had one, and it sits in that same cedar box without a single line of a man's handwriting in it. When half the men of the Suncook Valley went south with the New Hampshire regiments, the women ran the farms, the shops, the accounts and the mail. The only thread between a soldier in Virginia and a kitchen in Pittsfield was a three-cent letter.

The Lockup, the Kettle and the Peddler

I have twice been a guest of Merrimack County over a misunderstanding about whether whiskey belongs to the man who makes it or the man who taxes it. During the first stay I wrote home from the Concord lockup asking for my good pillow, a jar of the medicinal and her tender sympathies. She answered on the back of a seed bill: “Pillow enclosed. Jar not enclosed, as that is what put you there. Sympathies not enclosed, as I have none to spare.” She added that the bear was eating better than I was, that she had put up nine quarts of applesauce without a single finger stuck in it, and that I needn't hurry home. The postscript read: “Barnaby misses you. He is the only one.”

The second letter is her copy of what she sent the sheriff after his deputies carried off her copper kettle as evidence. It was not my still. It was HER kettle, the good one with the brass bail that she cooks her apple butter in. She informed him it had never held anything stronger than apple butter and, on one bad Christmas, her husband's foot. She asked whether the county wanted it as evidence or as a hat, and promised that if it was not back by Saturday the county would learn the meaning of the word assessment. It came back Friday, polished, carried by the sheriff himself with his hat in his hands. She gave him pie and no fork.

The third letter was written to her sister and mailed back to be kept as a souvenir. Some summers ago a lightning-rod man came up the Turnpike in a painted wagon, with a waxed mustache and checked trousers, smelling of bay rum and bad intentions. I was in the tooth room with a patient. At our pump he offered the Missus a copper rod for the roof, and when she refused he swatted her backside the way a man slaps a mare at auction. She did not scream. She smiled and told him the Doctor kept his purse round back by the woodpile, where Barnaby happens to be chained.

I was elbow-deep in a Gilmanton man's jaw when it began with a bubbling yelp and ended in a howl that cracked like a choirboy's voice. When I came round the corner with my forceps still in hand, the bear was shaking that peddler like a terrier with a rat. He let go only when the trousers did, and he kept the seat of the breeches, a red flannel shirttail and a strip of hide about the size of a Sunday ham slice. I put eleven stitches of waxed silk in the man on my dental chair and charged him a dollar, plus two bits for listening to him holler. Barnaby also ate the tin of snuff from his back pocket and sneezed for a week. They say the man sells his rods in Vermont now and sits on a feather cushion. Her letter ends: “The Doctor did not witness the swat. I did. We are both content.”

Ruby Jean of the Brushy Mountains

I am not the only man who married above his station. Junior Vance, a runner of considerable reputation from North Wilkesboro in the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina, came up the long road to tell me about his Ruby Jean. She kept his accounts in pencil in the margins of her Baptist hymnal, coded by hymn number. “Rock of Ages” stood for the buyer in Statesville, and “Amazing Grace, four verses, twice” meant forty dollars in and twenty owed. Revenue men tore up their house three times and never opened the hymnal. When the preacher asked about all the pencil marks, she said she was studying the Lord's arithmetic. She also ran his signals on the clothesline. Red long johns meant revenue men on the ridge, and white pillowcases meant a clean road. Then one March wind blew the neighbor woman's red flannel petticoat in among the pillowcases, and Junior drove four hours the wrong way, hid his load in a hay barn and slept with a mouse in his hat.

Once a buyer paid him partly in cheap rose toilet water, and the crate burst on a washboard road. Ruby Jean put Junior out on the porch for three nights, and even the coonhound wouldn't sleep near him. The best story is from the winter he broke his wrist and a load had to get past a deputy who was watching their road. Ruby Jean got up from supper in her curlers and house slippers, took his keys off the nail and said, “Hold the baby.” She ran the deputy round the Brushies and twice past his own house, then met him in a Pentecostal church lot holding a Bible and told him she was late for prayer meeting. He apologized. Meanwhile the cousin had the real load safe to Charlotte and back. Forty years later, if Junior grows proud at supper, she sets down her fork and says, “Pass the curlers.”

Her Pot and Mine

Mrs. Wilkins makes better spirit of roses than I make spirit of anything. In June she picks the open cabbage roses by the stone wall early in the morning, after the dew dries and before the sun cooks out the scent. She strips the petals, throws away the green and loads them loose into her small copper pot with just enough spring water to cover. With the cap on, the arm into the worm and the worm in the cold tub, she runs it at a slow simmer and never a hard boil, because boiled roses make your parlor smell like a widow's funeral. She stops once about a third of the water has come over. The thin film floating on top is the attar, and her long-necked Florentine flask, with its spout low on the side, lets the water run out underneath while the oil waits above to be spooned off.

Now the law first. Making spirits to drink without a federal permit is against United States law, and what follows is history and education only. In this valley the work went as follows. Cracked corn is cooked soft, cooled to blood-warm, and given malted grain to turn its starch to sugar, then yeast, and left several days in a warm shed until it goes quiet and sour-sweet. That is your wash. You strain it so no solids scorch, strip it fast for cloudy low wines, then run those low wines again slow and low, as gently as she runs her roses. Catch the spirit run in small numbered jars. Methanol boils at about 148 degrees by Mr. Fahrenheit's glass, good ethanol at about 173 and water at 212. Pour out the foreshots, which smell of a cobbler's glue pot, and pour out more of them than your greed wants to. Set the sharp heads apart. Keep the sweet hearts, and return the oily tails to the next run. If you are unsure of a jar, it is not a heart.

Copper is chemistry, not just tradition. The rotten-egg sulfur compounds in a mash react with bright copper, mostly up in the cap, arm and worm, and the darkening you find inside after a run is sulfur that never reached your jar. Scrub the vapor path bright after every run. Seal your joints with rye-flour paste, but never seal the still shut, because it must breathe out freely through the worm or it will burst like a Rebel shell. Never leave it alone with fire under it. If a joint smells of spirit, shut down the heat and mend it before you go on.

Ash, Red Oak and the Blue-Flame Lie

Cletus “Rabbit” Miller of Wilkesboro writes that his uncle swears by hickory ash or red oak shavings in the thump keg to clean out bad heads. The Missus can answer the first half. Rainwater poured through her ash hopper comes out as potash lye, which she boils with tallow to make soap. The old city rectifiers did sometimes add potash or soda when redistilling, because alkali holds sour acids back in the pot. But alkali does not touch methanol, which comes over early because it boils early, and loose lye in a keg can scorch, foam over and splash caustic into your worm. Red oak lacks the little plugs in its pores that make white oak tight, which is why no barrel worth the name is made of it, and its shavings give you raw tannin and a taste like a licked fence post. The verdict is part fact and mostly swamp medicine.

As for dipping a spoon and trusting a blue flame, I struck a coin on the anvil for this myth: FALSE. Methanol burns a pale blue too, and lead hides in solder and scrap without a word. The only honest tests are clean pure copper, proper joints and proper cuts.

The Oldest Letter

The last letter in the box is the oldest. It was written before we married, when I had soot on my face and forceps in my pocket. Her father had called me a menace and a scoundrel, and she agreed with him. She wrote that she would marry me anyhow, on condition that I never once make her bored. I have kept that condition with jail cells, bears, sheriffs and peddlers. To every wife from the Suncook to the Brushies who did the sums, hung the signals and kept the husband humble, these pages are yours.