The Bear in the Assessor's Parlor: Valuation Day in Merrimack County

Valuation Day, or the Annual Plundering, Done Politely

Let me tell you how a New Hampshire town picks your pocket, for it is not done with a knife. It is done with a pencil, a ledger, and a man named something like Thaddeus.

In our towns the selectmen serve as the assessors. Every spring they take the inventory, which old-timers call the invoice, of every taxable soul and every taxable stick in town as it stood upon the first day of April. That is Fools' Day, and I have always held it the most honest date the State ever chose. First they count your poll, which is to say yourself, if you are a man of taxable age, breathing and upright. Dying is the only exemption, and the paperwork is murder. Then comes your estate: horses, oxen, cows, sheep and hogs, your carriage if you are vain, your mill if you are fool enough to build one on the Suncook, your stock in trade and your money at interest. Should they suspect you of holding back, they may call upon you to swear to the whole list, so that you damn your soul and empty your purse at a single sitting.

A town assessor is a tooth-puller for the purse. He never takes the rotten one, only the gold, and unlike me he gives you no slug of something to bite down on first. These being war years, Mr. Lincoln's Revenue Act of 1862 has given us a second set of valuers. It cut the country into collection districts, each with a federal assessor, a pack of assistant assessors, and a collector at the tail end to swallow what they flush out. A man in Merrimack County with a copper pot may thus find the town's valuer at his front door and the government's at his back, both licking their pencils.

The Dental Scalding Kettle

The town list asks after 'taxable implements', the tools a man earns his bread by. I own an anvil and a forge, both honest. I own a dentist's chair, a turnkey, three pairs of forceps, and a bone saw bought off a regimental surgeon in Concord who swore he never used it on anyone who didn't deserve it. All honest. And in my back room sits a large copper vessel with a cap, a long arm, and a coiled worm resting in a tub of cold creek water. In the eyes of the State that last is not honest, though copper itself is as honest as the sunrise.

So I had a story ready. The vessel was a dental scalding kettle, for boiling forceps clean between patients. The joke was on me, for in this year of grace nobody boils his instruments: not dentists, not surgeons, not the hog-butcher. A dentist wipes his forceps on his apron, the apron on his trousers, and the trousers on the next patient's chair, and that is the whole sacred rite. I had to invent a reason for boiling steel that no assessor had ever heard of in his life. I settled on this: the steam drove the tooth-devils out of the iron.

A Bear in the Parlor

It was mud season when the selectmen's legman came. I shall call him Thaddeus Grout, near enough to his true name that he will know himself. He was a long, skinny fellow with a neck like a heron and an Adam's apple that rode up and down like a well bucket on a short rope. He came up the turnpike with his boots sucking in the April slop. Under one arm he carried his inventory book, bound in calf with a brass clasp, and in his coat pocket his dinner: a paper of salt herring and a wedge of sharp cheese. Remember that herring.

He sat in my parlor, where I pull teeth, and wet his pencil. Horses: one mare, spavined, mean. Cows: one, dry. Hogs: none, because Barnaby had eaten the last, which I did not say aloud. Money at interest: I laughed so long that he wrote 'none, emphatically.' He priced my forceps at forty cents a pair, which offended me deeply. Then he sniffed. A man may hide a copper pot, but he cannot hide what it breathes. Grout pushed open the back-room door, and there she sat, gleaming, her worm coiled in the tub like a sleeping snake. I gave him the tooth-devils, and God help the man, he wrote it down. When he asked about the coil, I told him it cooled the screams of my patients before they reached the Tiltons up the road. Then a single clear drop fell from the worm into the jar. Grout caught the next one on his finger and touched it to his tongue. His Adam's apple went up the rope and stayed there, and his eyes went wet.

That was when the floor began to shake. Mud season rots a sill the way sugar rots a molar. Barnaby's chain was staked to an iron staple driven into the old sill log beneath the still-house window. Barnaby smelled salt herring, which he loves more than he loves me. He leaned once, and the staple came out like a loose tooth from a drunkard's gum. Four hundred pounds of black bear came round the house dragging eleven feet of chain and half the sill, and through the parlor door without troubling to open it. His nose went straight into Grout's pocket. Herring, paper, cheese, the whole right coat-tail and a long strip of woolen drawers went into that mouth in one bite.

There stood the assessor of the town of Pittsfield with his backside out in the April draft, white as a boiled parsnip and bearing a mole shaped like the State of Delaware. He went for the window. The window was shut and latched against the spring wind. He did not open it. He took the sash, two panes and my wife's geranium with him, landed headfirst in the dung heap outside the mare's stall, and stood up wearing it.

Meanwhile Barnaby wanted dessert, and he ate the inventory book: calfskin, hoof glue, iron-gall ink, clasp and all. That was the whole valuation of the town. Iron-gall ink does not agree with a bear. Ten minutes later he brought the lot up on my wife's braided hearth rug, a pint and a half of purple-black bile, and on one scrap I could read 'Berry, oxen, two' as plain as Scripture. I went out with forceps and lantern and pulled eleven slivers of glass from Grout's scalp, two from his ear and one from the parsnip. I gave him a pull from the scalding kettle for his nerves. He did not ask what the tooth-devils had done to it.

Grout had to rebuild the Fort Wilkins entry from memory, and his memory had been through a window. That summer's list, a copy of which hangs over my forge, reads: 'Kettle, dental, dented: one dollar fifty. Implements, smithing: middling. One dog, black, large, unfriendly. Value: none, and God help the buyer.' Ever after, Grout assessed me from the turnpike with a spyglass. I have been taxed by the town, by Washington and by my wife, and only the bear ever got me a reduction.

Tales from the Blue Ridge

Miss Clara Higgins, an herbalist of the Blue Ridge of Virginia and a collector of mountain talk, came up by rail and stage to tell how her people fared. In Virginia the county sends round the commissioner of the revenue. One year a commissioner came early and caught her great-great-grandfather Ezra Higgins with the bright copper cap of his still in his hands. Ezra set it on the scarecrow's head. The commissioner tipped his own hat to the shining figure in the corn, and Ezra explained that it was his uncle, deaf as a stump and owning nothing but his hat. The book read: 'Uncle, one, no property.'

Her grandmother Jessamine kept one spotted hog. When the commissioner came to count her stock, it bolted past him through three gates in turn, and he wrote down three hogs. Granny offered to pay on all three gladly the minute he fetched the other two. He hunted for half an hour, the privy included, then struck all three from the list. Another forebear kept a row of barrels in his cellar, every one marked 'Cider Vinegar'. The one nearest the stair held real vinegar, two years old, with the mother floating in it. The commissioner threw back a generous dipper of it, lost his hat into the barrel, declared the lot vinegar, and never tasted another barrel on that place. The rest held the finest apple brandy in three counties.

She gave me the soldiers' names for bad liquor as well: tanglefoot, oh-be-joyful, bust-head, pop-skull and rifle-knock. The mountain boys now call it blockade, and its makers blockaders. Every listing day Granny Jessamine set out a jug labelled 'Oh-Be-Joyful, for the Commissioner's Rheumatism'. It held creek water with a sassafras root in it, and the man swore by it year after year. As Miss Clara tells it, Granny said that "a man will feel any medicine he's sure he's stealing."

What the Assessor Saw in My Back Room

Grout saw my copper for perhaps four seconds, so let me show the experimenter at his own apparatus what was missed. I set this down as history, and the law still says what it says. Begin with a fermented wash, then charge the pot, leaving about a quarter of it empty. A boiling wash foams, and with no room to rise it will vomit up into the cap and down the arm, scorching mash into the worm and blocking the line.

After honest cuts, the first rule is that a still must breathe. The vapour path from pot through cap, arm and worm must stay open to the air at the far end. Plug it with foam, scorched mash, a kinked worm or a fool's cork, and the vessel will blow its cap or split its seams. A man named Pike corked his worm to 'hold the steam in', and I have treated burns where hot mash took the skin off in sheets. Keep the fire low and patient. Alcohol vapour is heavier than air: from a leaking joint it creeps along the floor to the firebox and lights low and blue all at once. Keep open flame well away from the joints and the worm's end, keep a wet sack and a pail of sand handy, and never walk away from a running still.

Then the cuts. The foreshots go into a pail for the lamp, never down a throat. The heads smell of solvent, fresh varnish or a green apple: ethyl compounds and acetaldehyde, harsh and headache-making. On a small pot the first several percent goes to waste, and a careful hand throws away a little more than he thinks he needs to. The hearts come sweet and warm like bread, and those you keep. The tails creep in oily and cloudy, smelling of wet cardboard: heavier fusel alcohols, to be set aside. Miss Clara's people put it best: "Short heads, short life; long tails, long face." Last of all, bright copper pulls out the sulphur stink of a dirty wash, which is why I scrub my pot after every run. What Grout tasted was clean hearts from bright copper.

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, writes that his uncle swears by hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Hardwood ash was money up here once: leached to lye and boiled down to potash and pearl ash for soap and glass. But lye stays down in the liquid and does not ride up with the vapour. What it can do is foam. Hezekiah Babb of Barnstead put a full peck of hickory ash into his doubler on a hot run. It foamed up, choked the line, and sent the keg's cap through his barn roof, and his cow gave soapy milk for a week. A little ash or lime may sweeten a soured mash in the fermenter, but that is a farmwife's trick, not a purifier.

Red oak curls in my own doubler turned the keg the colour of strong tea, yet the spirit ran out as clear as ever, because colour and tannin do not climb with the vapour. If you want colour, rest the spirit long in white oak after the run. Red oak is so porous that the spirit weeps out through the staves.

As for the county-fair sage who lights a spoonful and cries that a blue flame proves it pure: the wood spirit in the foreshots burns pale blue, and so does good grain spirit. A blue flame proves only that your spirit will burn. The only proof of safety is what you threw away before the jar.