The Deputies' Revenge: A Drugged Bear and the 1865 Fort Wilkins Still Fire

How a Deputy Finds a Still

Fellow philosophers of the copper pot: before I tell you how the Merrimack County deputies took their revenge on me in January of this year, 1865, you ought to know how a deputy finds a man's still in the first place. He does not sniff it out, for he hasn't the nose. Somebody tells him, and the man who tells him gets paid.

When Mr. Lincoln's Revenue Act of 1862 came along, Washington carved the country into collection districts and put an assessor and a collector in each one. These were no strangers from Philadelphia. They were men from right here, men who had sat behind you in the meeting-house and who remembered every time your cow got into their corn. So the tax man came loaded with grudges the way a musket comes loaded with ball.

Sweeter still for the snitch, the revenue laws let an informer collect a share of whatever fine or forfeiture his tip turned up. They call it a moiety. In Latin the word means half, and in Yankee it means Judas money. An informer is a man who will sell his neighbour for half a fine and then ask to borrow that neighbour's wagon to go and collect it. I knew one, a cooper from over Barnstead way. I shall call him Ebenezer Pike, because the Lord has already cursed his true name and I will not pile on.

Why Copper Grew Dear in Wartime

You must also understand why a sheriff would sooner seize my still than my whole stock of liquor. Copper went to war. Every bronze twelve-pounder Napoleon the boys hauled from Antietam to Petersburg ate copper the way Barnaby eats deputies, and so did the brass cartridges, the percussion caps and the fittings on every gun carriage. My retirement went off to war in Mr. Lincoln's cannon, and I have never forgiven the Army of the Potomac for it.

Most of the country's sheet copper came from the Lake Superior mines on the Keweenaw, where men go down holes so deep the devil charges them rent. Some came from the Vershire diggings in Orange County, Vermont, where the ore comes up green as a drowned man's toes. A sheet of good copper rode a wagon from the Connecticut River valley down to Concord and then up the turnpike to me. By 1864 it cost so much that I hammered my pots with one eye on the anvil and the other on the door. My still was worth more than my liquor, my liquor was worth more than my good name, and a Barnstead cooper stood to earn half of all three for one trip to the sheriff's office.

Laudanum Bread at Midnight

It was the coldest stretch since the Suncook froze to the bottom. After their earlier misfortunes with my bear, the deputies had nursed their grudge all autumn like a sore tooth. They knew no pistol would get them past Barnaby, since a bear that size takes a pistol ball the way you or I would take a horsefly. So they tried cleverness, which sits on a deputy about as naturally as a saddle on a hog. One of them bought a bottle of laudanum from a Concord druggist, the sort any grandmother buys for her nerves, and soaked a whole loaf of molasses bread in it. Near midnight they came up the back pasture by Catamount Hill and tossed the loaf over the woodpile.

Barnaby swallowed it without chewing and slept like a Congregationalist through the second half of a sermon, flat on his back with his paws in the air.

There were four of them. A deputy I shall call Hollis Twombly led the party, a man with a neck like a stovepipe and a brain to match. With him came two hired men from the mill and Ebenezer Pike himself, who had come to make sure of his moiety. They pried my still-house door with a crowbar and went in carrying a tin lantern.

Now I must make a confession against myself. I had run the still that afternoon, and I had sealed the joint at the head with flour paste, the same rye-flour slobber my grandfather used. A still sealed with flour paste is a pie crust with ambitions, and it bursts at the worst moment. The paste had cracked, and a thin breath of spirit vapour was leaking from the warm pot and settling along the floorboards. Alcohol vapour is heavier than air, and it lies in low places like a sleeping dog. Then Twombly set his lantern on the floor so he could use both hands to pry my worm off the barrel.

There was no gunpowder bang. It went whump, soft as a feather pillow, and then a blue sheet of fire ran across the floor like spilled milk, licked the mash barrels and climbed the pine wall.

A Bear, a Bucket Brigade and a Silk Stitch

The fire did not wake me. Barnaby did. The smoke roused him from his opium sleep with a headache like a tax assessor's, and he dealt with it the way an assessor would, by taking a piece out of whoever stood nearest. That was Twombly, who was backing out the door, bent double and coughing. I have pulled four thousand teeth and I know my noises. First came the sound of a wet bedsheet torn off the line in a gale, then a pop like a cork leaving a cider jug, and then a scream that climbed two octaves and stayed there. Barnaby sat back chewing a mouthful of blue county wool and spat out a brass button, which I have worn on my watch chain ever since. To this day Twombly eats his supper standing up, like a horse.

A burning building does not care who is the outlaw. I came out in my nightshirt and boots, made Pike drop the second-best copper pot he was trying to carry off while it burned his fingers, and put all four men to work. They hauled buckets from the mill pond, threw snow by the shovelful and beat out the floor with wet feed sacks. Twombly carried a bucket in the brigade for the very man he had come to arrest, bleeding from the hindquarters the whole way. I believe it was the only honest labour the county ever got out of him.

We saved the pot, the worm, the house and the bear. We lost the back wall, three barrels of mash and every stitch of Twombly's trousers. The sheriff called the raid "justice delayed". I call it "carpentry required". Afterwards I laid Hollis belly-down in my dentist's chair, poured spirit on the wound to clean it, gave him a leather strap to bite and stitched him shut with silk dental thread. I charged him the full rate, because a hole is a hole whether it is in your gum or under your galluses. He paid in the county's own copper cents. I stamped every one on the anvil, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and handed one back to him as his receipt.

A Carolina Runner on Getting Even

My guest that winter was Mr. Junior Vance of Wilkes County, in the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina. By some trick of Providence I will not pretend to understand, his tales come from a century not yet born. A federal man he called Possum swore to get even with him and brought a borrowed bloodhound named Judge to sniff Junior's trunk. Judge took one sniff of the mash-soaked burlap, sneezed three times, caught the scent of Miss Ida Pruitt's peach pie passing in a basket and dragged Possum down Main Street to the church supper. I count it the soundest judgment any officer of the government has ever shown.

Next, Possum's men parked a log truck across the road at the Brushy Mountain gap in the dead of night. But Junior's uncle Dewey had already whitewashed every fence post along the right-hand ditch, so Junior put out his lamps, dropped two wheels into the ditch and steered from one white post to the next until he was around the barricade. Later Possum drove off in a seized coupe whose springs were set for a full load of jars. Run empty, it bucked like a mule and landed nose-first in Reddies River, and Junior bought it back at the government auction for less than the price of its tires.

His own Ebenezer Pike was a runner named Lonnie, who sold him out for reward money. Junior mailed the revenue office a careful map of Lonnie's still, signed "A Concerned Baptist". When I asked who collected the reward, he said: "The Baptist church. They put a new roof on with it. Lonnie still sings in the choir under it."

Lessons Written in Smoke

That spring I rebuilt my still-house with stone along the bottom course, and I have not sealed a joint with slobber since. Learn from my smoke. Alcohol vapour sinks and pools in corners and under benches, so keep no flame low near your apparatus. Hang your lantern high on a hook, well away from the still, or better yet outside a window. Keep sand and a wet sack within reach, because a bucket thrown wrong can spread a spirit fire further. Never leave a run unattended, least of all to answer a deputy.

Ferment your wash of grain or fruit, water and yeast, and strain it clear, because solids on the bottom will scorch and stink. Charge the pot no more than three-quarters full. A boiling wash foams, and if it climbs into the arm (the old men call this puking) it will send raw mash through your worm and may blow your joints. Bring the heat up slowly. From a chemistry book I took off a Dartmouth man who fell asleep in my chair, I learned that methanol, the wood spirit that blinds and kills, boils at about a hundred and forty-eight degrees by Fahrenheit's scale. Good grain spirit boils at about a hundred and seventy-three, and water at two hundred and twelve. The poison does not come off clean and all at once, though. It smears into the early run like jam on a child's face, so be generous with your cuts.

Pour the foreshots on the ground or into the lamp. The heads smell of glue and fingernail varnish, so set them aside too and never drink them. Keep the sweet, clean hearts. Save the oily, wet-dog-smelling tails to run again. Throw out the foreshots and heads every single run, however short your purse that week. Copper works its alchemy on the sulphur stink only when its face is bright, so after each run scrub the pot with vinegar and salt to strip off the black copper sulphide, then rinse it well with clean water. Join your copper with sound mechanical fittings or silver solder, never with lead. And mark this: distilling spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States. What I set down here is history and instruction only. I tell you about my raid; I do not recommend having one.

Ash, Oak and the Blue-Flame Fable

A letter came from Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro: "My uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that?"

No. Wood ash is mostly potash, the stuff your grandmother leached for soap lye, and in a thump keg it makes nothing but scummy lye water that does not touch the wood spirit. Red oak is no better. Coopers make whiskey barrels of white oak because its pores are plugged with growths called tyloses. Red oak's pores are open tubes, and you can blow smoke clean through a stick of it. Besides, oak gives its toasted vanilla sweetness over months and years in a barrel, not in the few minutes the vapour spends bubbling through a keg. Only the cuts ever cleaned a bad head out of a run.

One more myth, and I knocked it down with a punch on the anvil. Wood spirit burns with a pale blue flame. A blue flame proves your spirit burns, much as a deputy's badge proves he can read, and it tells you nothing about what is inside. I struck Rabbit a fresh large cent with my stamp and chalked his name beside it. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.