Pittsfield Town Drunk Absalom Pease Argues His Own Case Before the Justice

The Law and the Lush

Every town in New England has a town drunk. Any town that says it has none is lying, or else the town drunk is the one doing the talking. Pittsfield's was Absalom Pease. Absalom did not drink like a fish, for a fish has the decency to come up for air. He drank the way the Suncook runs in April: steady, brown, and rising, and anything in his way ended up in somebody's cellar.

Before I tell how Absalom beat the law, the reader must know what the law was. Sir Matthew Hale, that grim old English judge, held that a man who makes himself drunk is a kind of voluntary madman. He picked up his madness by the neck at the tavern, so the dock owes him no pity for it. William Blackstone, whose Commentaries every country lawyer in New Hampshire keeps by the spittoon, went further and called drunkenness an aggravation of the offense and not an excuse. You cannot pay for one sin with another. Plainly Blackstone never met my brother-in-law, who is both.

So a drunk in 1865 may not stand up and say the liquor did it. Hang a drunk man and a sober man for the same killing and they hang just as high; the drunk only sways a little more on the way up. The little sins, though, drunk in the highway, drunk and disorderly, singing 'Old Hundred' at two in the morning in the key of a gut-shot moose, go before the justice of the peace. In this valley he is no robed lord in a marble hall. He is a storekeeper with a commission in his drawer, holding court in the back room between the molasses barrel and the codfish, with the cat asleep on the docket.

A man who cannot pay his fine sits in the lockup. If he keeps on not paying, sooner or later he lands on the pauper roll, and in plenty of New England towns the poor were once bid off at public vendue like a heifer at a fair. Whoever asked the town least to board the wretch got him. A drunk went for about the price of a good dog, and a good deal less than a hog, for a hog at least turns into bacon.

There was another road out. In 1840 six drunks sat in Chase's Tavern in Baltimore, soaked in whiskey, and swore off it. They called themselves the Washingtonians and went about the country telling every filthy detail from the platform: the puking, the beatings, the snakes climbing the bedpost in the delirium tremens. Folks paid good money to hear it. A man cannot drink himself rich, but he could quit and talk himself rich. I will add this soberly, as a medical man of sorts: the shakes are no joke. A heavy drinker who stops cold can take fits and die of them, and a man in that state needs a doctor, not a sermon.

Absalom Pease Before Squire Mudgett

One fine October morning Constable Hezekiah Grubb found Absalom flat on his back in the middle of the turnpike before the meeting house. His hat was full of rainwater, a dead chicken lay on his chest (nobody ever learned whose), and he was singing to it. Grubb hauled him before Squire Tobias Mudgett, who sat as justice in the back of his store, and the complaint was read: one Absalom Pease, found lying drunk in the public highway, against the peace and dignity of the State.

Absalom stood up, or near enough, leaning on a pickle barrel as though it were the bar of the Supreme Court. He told the court he had not been lying in the highway; the highway had been lying under him, and he asked which of the two had been the more horizontal.

He then argued his case under three heads, like a Congregational sermon. First, the complaint named the wrong defendant: his trousers had been drunk in the road, and he merely happened to be inside them. Arrest the trousers. The Squire told him to sit down. He did not sit down.

Second, and here was the stroke of genius: under the law of 1855 no man in New Hampshire might sell liquor but the town liquor agent, and only for medicinal, mechanical, and chemical purposes. That much is true. So, said Absalom, every drop in him had come, on paper at least, from the town of Pittsfield as medicine. If medicated, he was a patient and no drunk. If drunk, the town was his bartender, and he moved that the selectmen be arrested as accessories. Two selectmen stood in the store buying lamp oil at that moment, and one dropped his can.

Third, he called the constable as his own witness and asked how he knew Absalom was drunk. Grubb said he had smelled it. And how, Absalom asked, does a sober, upright officer of the law know what whiskey smells like? Grubb went red as a boiled lobster. Absalom leaned across the pickle barrel, sniffed him like a hound at a gopher hole, and told the Squire that the constable was the only man in the room with liquor on his breath and a badge on his chest, and only one of the two had been earned.

Squire Mudgett laughed till he cracked a slat of his chair. He fined Absalom one dollar and costs, as the law demanded, then fined himself a dollar for laughing in his own court, and made Grubb pay a dollar for coming to work smelling like Absalom. Three dollars went into the town treasury, and every one was spent at the town agent's that afternoon.

A Night with Barnaby

That January it went to twenty below. Absalom had been thrown out of every barn in the valley, so he crawled into the one warm place left in Pittsfield, Barnaby's lean-to outside my window, and curled himself around that bear like a baby around a featherbed for the whole night.

In the morning Barnaby was licking his face. A bear's tongue is a wet saddle blanket studded with burdocks, and it smells like a dead muskrat that has taken to drink. Off came the left eyebrow, then the right, then most of the mustache, then the remains of a pickled-egg supper Absalom had lost down his own front. Absalom opened one eye and said, 'Martha, you've let yourself go.' When Grubb came to collect him for another dollar, Barnaby took hold of his boot, and the constable's foot came out with a pop like a cork from a jug of hard cider. The bear ate the boot, nails, heel, and all. A week later I raked out his leavings and counted twenty-two boot nails and a heel. Grubb walked home one boot short, and Absalom slept till noon.

Liars on Oath

In this trade a jar of whiskey spends as much time in a courtroom as in a cellar. Over in Barnstead they tell of a funeral in the first year of Mr. Lincoln's tax, where the coffin was carried so carefully and the procession sang so loudly that only the gravedigger noticed it sloshed. It held rye, not a corpse. For my part, whenever the county drags me in, I bring a punch and a bag of copper cents and stamp G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. all morning.

Junior Vance, who hauled whiskey out of the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina, brought me news of his own country. Before the Wilkesboro courthouse sat Uncle Pink Sparks, drunk by nine each morning, who would swear any man an alibi for a dollar. One Monday two boys taken the same Saturday night, one at Elkin and one below Statesville, forty miles apart, had both paid him, and Pink swore to both. When the judge asked how he could have been in two places at once, Pink scratched himself and said, "Judge, that's how good the liquor was." The judge threw both cases out and privately asked Pink where he might get some.

Junior's own lawyer, Lester Combs, kept a jar in his briefcase and called it his law library. The case hung on a deputy's word about the hour, so Lester spent forty-five minutes cross-examining the deputy's pocket watch until the poor fellow did not know Tuesday from Easter. The verdict came back not guilty. Lester's fee was six jars, and it rose by one jar for every word of argument. And a man near Moravian Falls, caught with a trunk full of half-gallons, told the deputy he was too drunk to know it was there, so the whiskey must belong to the car. The deputy, cold and tired so near Christmas, wrote up the car, which sat three months in impound. That is Absalom's trousers over again. As Junior put it: "A drunk's the same everywhere, Doc."

A Jar Fit for the Evidence Table

If a jar must stand trial, let it be the best-made on the table. Making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and what follows is history and learning. Take about eight pounds of cracked corn to five gallons of clean water and hold it near a boil, stirring, till it goes thick as wallpaper paste. Cool to about a hundred and fifty degrees and stir in about two pounds of crushed malted barley, whose ferments, the chemists' enzymes, turn starch to sugar. Hold it warm an hour or two, cool it to blood-warm or a little below, and pitch your yeast. Let it work five to seven days in a warm room with air moving, for a working mash breathes out a gas that will kill a man who sits too long over it in a shut cellar. When it tastes sour-dry, you have your wash.

Run it in clean copper, which takes up the rotten-egg sulfur stinks; scrub it after every run and keep out the green crust. Joints must be silver-soldered or properly fitted, never lead, for lead in a still is a slow hanging. The vapour will burn, so keep your heat low and steady, air moving, no flame near the spirit outlet, water and a wet sack to hand, and never walk away from a running still.

Then the cuts. I run into twenty small numbered jars lined up like jurors. The foreshots come first, sharp and solvent-smelling, carrying the worst of the methanol; they go on the ground, and generously. Then the heads, harsh as new varnish; set them aside. Then the hearts, sweet and smelling of corn; keep those. Last the tails, oily, wet-dog and cardboard, which the old-timers ran again with the next batch. Cover the jars overnight, and in the morning walk the line like a magistrate, smelling and judging, and make your cuts where the character truly changes.

Ashes, Shavings, and Myths at the Anvil

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro asked whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads. His uncle is half right, which is worse than lying. Wood ash in water makes lye, an alkali that can knock down a soured charge's vinegar bite. But lye does nothing to methanol, which boils lower than good spirit and comes heaviest early; only discarding foreshots and setting aside heads will save you. Lye splashing about a hot still will also burn your eyes and hide. Red oak gives tannin, colour, and woody flavour, so raw liquor looks smoother, but it is dressed up, not cleaned: a powdered wig on a hog.

Two more myths go under the punch. Black coffee does not sober a man; the body clears liquor at its own steady pace, and coffee only makes a sleepy drunk a wide-awake one. And burning proves nothing. The English wet gunpowder with spirit, and if the powder still lit, the spirit was 'proved'; hence our word proof. But a jar of methanol-laden foreshots burns as prettily as the finest hearts.

Absalom Pease died at seventy-one in his own bed, to the surprise of the whole town, and left me his pickle barrel. It stands by my forge, and when the law comes calling I lean on it and think about the trousers.