The Christmas Sleigh Run of 1864 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire

A Yankee Christmas in a Taxing Year

Neighbors, if you would understand the December run I am about to set down, you must first understand how little New England once thought of Christmas. Our Puritan forefathers in the Massachusetts Bay held it a papist frolic, and from 1659 to 1681 they fined a man five shillings for keeping the day. Five shillings for a slice of pudding and a little joy. From their portraits, I judge they never kept anything else either, least of all a smile. That chill came north with them and settled in these granite hills like frost in a cellar hole. My own grandsire spent Christmas Day splitting cordwood and called it piety. Even now the government in Washington does not count it a holiday, and some Treasury clerk sits at his desk on the twenty-fifth counting my money the same as on any Tuesday.

Yet the heart thaws, slowly. The Irish and German hands at the mills along the Suncook brought their candles and carols, and when Mr. Thomas Nast drew Santa Claus for Harper's Weekly in January of 'sixty-three, a fat old elf in a coat of stars and stripes handing out presents in a Union camp, every mother in the valley cut him out and pinned him over the stove. Mr. Nast dressed him in the flag. Around here he would have wanted a buffalo robe and a permit.

Then there was the money. Mr. Lincoln's revenue men raised the whiskey tax by steps, like a man going upstairs to fight his wife: twenty cents a gallon at first, sixty cents in the spring of 'sixty-four, a dollar and a half by summer, and two dollars waiting at New Year's like a bailiff on the porch. Every farmer, deacon, selectman and grieving mother between Epsom and Gilmanton wanted a jug filled before the price jumped again. Christmas had turned every Yankee into a squirrel with a cellar, and I was the nut tree.

And there was a war on. Our New Hampshire boys sat in the frozen trenches before Petersburg, and Cold Harbor had taken more Granite State boys than I care to count. Half the houses on the turnpike had an empty chair at the table. The good news came on the twenty-second of December, when General Sherman telegraphed the President and offered him Savannah as a Christmas present, with a hundred and fifty heavy guns and some twenty-five thousand bales of cotton for a bow. Sherman gave Mr. Lincoln a whole city. I gave the Widow Pease a quart jar. I would wager mine got the warmer thanks.

Muffled Bells and a Borrowed Petticoat

A New Hampshire winter road is not a road at all. It is a rumor with ruts in it. After a storm the town surveyors called out the ox teams to break the roads open and drag a great wooden snow roller, eight feet wide, to pack the snow flat and hard, for a sleigh wants packed snow under its runners and a bare road will shred a runner. Most sleigh bells in this country are cast at East Hampton, Connecticut, called Belltown since old William Barton set up his foundry there, and many a town requires a sleigh to wear them so a man walking home in the dark hears you coming. A sleigh with silent bells is a sleigh with a reason to be silent, and every deputy in the county knows it.

On the twenty-third of December, 1864, a nor'easter had dropped better than two feet on the turnpike. I had twenty-two orders to carry from Pittsfield up to Barnstead Parade, on to Gilmanton Iron Works, and back through Loudon and Chichester, every jar labelled Dr. Wilkins's Winter Bitters, For Chilblains and the Low Spirits of the Season. I had my mare Deacon, a hammer-headed sorrel who bites, and I had bells I could not use. So I asked the Widow Pease for her red flannel petticoat to wrap them in. She told me she had waited nine years for a man to ask for that petticoat and was sorely let down to learn it was for the horse. She gave it over all the same, on my promise to bring it back warm. It came back warm, and smelling powerfully of horse.

The Deputy Who Studied the Stars

The sheriff, still sore from our earlier dealings, had posted young Deputy Lemuel Pettengill on the turnpike to watch Fort Wilkins through the holidays: a tall, serious boy with ears like jug handles and, on his head, the pride of his life, a new black beaver hat his bride had bought in Concord with her egg money. That afternoon Lemuel crept up to peek through my still-house window, and a gust off Catamount Mountain lifted the hat clean off and dropped it into the circle of Barnaby, my black bear. Barnaby licked it inside and out, found a year of deputy head grease better than molasses, and set it crooked over one ear like a Concord senator wearing his first bribe.

Lemuel reached for it. I stayed his hand and told him of the Gilmanton informer who reached into that circle in the spring of 'sixty-three and lost most of the skin from wrist to elbow, and whom I stitched up on my kitchen table with dental silk, forty-one stitches. Lemuel went the colour of skim milk. He could not go home bareheaded, nor tell the sheriff a bear had his hat. So I offered terms: the hat back on the twenty-sixth, provided his eyes were elsewhere on the night of the twenty-fourth. He weighed it like a bad tooth, then allowed that he had always been partial to astronomy.

Christmas Eve I set out with hot soapstones at my feet, a buffalo robe to my chin, and the jars packed in oat straw. There stood Lemuel in the middle of the road, bareheaded, ears going purple, staring at the North Star as though he meant to arrest it. I passed close enough to spit on his boots. He never blinked. On the Barnstead side of Catamount the drifts had blown in over the rolled road; Deacon floundered to her withers and the sleigh laid me in the snow with eleven jars on top of me. Not one broke, praise be to oat straw. I dug an hour and cursed in Latin, English and a little Abenaki.

The deliveries went through: a jar for the Widow Pease with her petticoat, one for the miller with the cough, one for Captain Hoyt, who left a leg at Chancellorsville. The last went to a farmhouse past Loudon, where a mother had lost her boy at Cold Harbor. She poured a small measure into a tin cup, set it at his empty place, and shut the door quietly. I have pulled perhaps four thousand teeth, and that is the only thing that ever made me weep. On the twenty-sixth Barnaby surrendered the hat for a smoked ham hock, licked clean, its brim chewed into waves. Lemuel wears it still, and the Concord boys call it the Bear-Blessed Beaver.

Christmas in the Southern Mountains

My guest at the Fort this season was Junior Vance of Wilkes County, North Carolina, who comes from further down the road and the calendar than I care to puzzle over, and who has run more spirit through more snow than any man I know. In the Brushy Mountains, he tells me, Christmas was the busiest week of the year: some for the eggnog, some for the fruitcake, and mostly for the in-laws. One Christmas Eve, with an ice storm coming and a roadblock outside Wilkesboro, his mother and his aunt Ruby wrapped every jar in red and green paper with a bow, and packed the load in Fraser fir boughs. The deputy looked over the bows and needles and said, "Son, I ain't about to open another man's Christmas."

Another Christmas morning Junior found a deputy in a ditch, and with a full load aboard he hooked on a log chain and pulled him out; the man declared he had seen nothing all day but the inside of that ditch. Junior's winter wisdom is worth any distiller's attention: a loaded carriage holds the road, an empty one spins, so he carried three hundred pounds of cinder blocks home. Once he forgot to unload them, and a deputy chased him eleven miles to find nothing but blocks. Asked if he was hauling concrete, Junior said, "No sir, I'm building a church." His mother's rule was that every customer got a fruitcake at Christmas, and so one year he found the high sheriff, in house slippers, answering the door of a sweet old pint-a-year customer. She was the sheriff's mother. She kept right on buying.

The Winter Mash and the Copper Cap

Now the alchemy, and first the law: what follows is for history and instruction, for it is unlawful in these United States to make distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit. My Christmas mash was corn and rye. Cook cracked corn in clean water at a rolling boil until thick as porridge. Hang one of Mr. Fahrenheit's thermometers in it, and when it falls to about one hundred fifty to one hundred fifty-five degrees, stir in the rye and a good measure of malted barley, whose enzymes are the little alchemists that turn starch to sugar. Hold it near an hour. Cool below about eighty degrees before pitching yeast, or you scald the poor beasts. Cover loosely, never sealed, and let it work several days until the bubbling quiets. You will have a beer of a few percent.

Winter is the experimenter's trial. Cold or starving yeast throws off hydrogen sulfide, and the still-house will stink of rotten eggs, so keep the fermenter on the warm side of the chimney under horse blankets. Copper does its finest work against sulfur where hot vapour touches it: the cap, the helmet, the arm to the worm. An iron pot with a copper cap beats a copper pot with an iron cap. Fill no more than about three-quarters, lest it foam into the arm and worm. Never seal a still; a sealed kettle over fire is a bomb with a Christian name. Winter's gift is cold water for the worm tub, but if it warms, vapour escapes uncondensed toward the flame, so keep it running cold, the fire low, and a bucket of sand by the door.

Catch the run in small numbered jars and judge each alone. Pour out the foreshots without pity. Set aside the heads, smelling of shoemaker's cement and varnish. Keep the hearts, sweet and clean. Save the tails, wet dog and damp pasteboard, to run again. Rub a drop between your palms and smell it; your nose is a better chemist than any book in Boston.

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Bead

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro writes that his uncle swears by hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Wood ash is potash, a strong alkali; it may knock down a sour smell but leaves a soapy bite and a crust in the keg. Red oak is so porous you can blow pipe smoke through a stave, which is why no cooper makes a whiskey barrel of it; shavings lend colour and tannin, rouge on a hog. Nothing in a thump keg cleans out heads. Only the cuts do.

As for the tavern sage who shakes his jar and reads the bead: big lingering beads tell of strength, and that is all. Foreshots bead as prettily as a choir girl's pearls, and so does spirit run through a lead-soldered pot. And to every mother with an empty chair this winter, God keep your boys. Keep your copper clean and your fire low.