The Suncook Valley's Worst Mosquito Summer and Why My Mash Ran Fast

The Fever, the Ague, and the Bottle

Every man in this country has a mosquito story and a bottle to go with it. All my life I have heard the old folks speak of the fever and ague, the shakes. A man burns like a forge one day and rattles like a loose wagon wheel the next, his teeth chattering so hard that I have had patients crack their own molars and bring me the remains. It is the plague of every settler on the western prairie, but we have known it here too, in the river lowlands along the Connecticut and in the wet bottoms where the mills dam up the water.

Ask a Concord physician with a gold watch chain what causes it and he will tell you miasma, the bad air that rises off the swamp at evening. The Italians call it mal aria, and our learned men nod along. I am only a tooth-puller with soot in my beard, but I will tell you what I have observed. Each time I have stood in that bad air at evening, I was not bitten by the air. I was bitten by something with six legs and a needle for a nose. I do not claim I can prove it. Still, if the Concord doctors spent one August night in the Suncook marsh in place of a feather bed, they might change their tune.

The cure is quinine, ground from the bark of the South American cinchona tree, and it is as bitter as a widow's opinion of her husband's brother. During the late war the blockade squeezed quinine out of the South so hard that ladies sewed it into their petticoats, and smugglers stuffed it into the hollow heads of china dolls. And wherever there is a fever, there is a Yankee selling a bottle for it: Ayer's Ague Cure out of Lowell, and Hostetter's Stomach Bitters, which the boys in blue drank by the case. I have tasted Hostetter's. It cures the ague the way a mule kick cures a headache, which is to say you forget the first complaint entirely. Few people know that Mr. Lincoln's revenue law of 1862 taxed more than whiskey. It put stamp taxes on patent medicines as well, so every bottle of bitters had to wear a federal stamp the way a cow wears a brand. Even the temperance lady sipping her nerve tonic was paying for the war one spoonful at a time.

The Summer the Marsh Hatched an Army

The spring before, the Suncook came up out of its banks like a drunk out of a Saturday-night pew. It flooded the low meadows behind the mills and filled every hollow, cellar hole, potash kettle and rain barrel from here to Barnstead Parade. When the water went down it left a thousand little standing ponds, warm as dishwater. Then came July, the hottest I can remember, and every one of those puddles hatched an army.

The swarms came off the marsh at sundown in a gray cloud, whining like a thousand fiddlers tuning up at once and none of them sober. They got into ears, noses, collars and trousers. Half of Pittsfield walked bowlegged that summer, and not from riding. Take note, as a natural philosopher should, that only the female bites. The male sips flower juice and sings. She wants blood for her eggs, and she will go through a wool stocking to get it.

In my still-house I had six barrels of corn and rye working, and they drew skeeters the way a church supper draws Baptists. The clouds over the barrel heads were thick enough to cut with a hay knife. The mash foamed and rolled like a fat alderman after Thanksgiving, and a ferment that ought to have taken five days ran in three. So I built a theory: the skeeters bit me, flew off drunk on my rye-thickened blood, drowned in the barrels by the thousand, and every bite they had taken out of me set the mash boiling. I told that to anyone who would stand still for it. Wait a little and I will tell you what really happened.

The Deputy, the Lancet, and the Bear

The best part of that summer was Deputy Ezekiel Pound, a fresh man out from Concord who meant to make his name by lying up three nights in the marsh behind my still-house to catch me at a run. I knew he was there the first evening because I could hear him slapping himself like a man applauding his own funeral. By the third morning he staggered out of the cattails with his eyelids swollen shut like a sleeping pig's and his ears like two Baldwin apples left out in a hailstorm. I set him on my dental stool, opened the worst welts on his neck with my gum lancet, and cleaned him with a rag soaked in good strong spirit. He squealed both times.

Then I made the mistake of letting him walk past the still-house window. Barnaby had smelled blood on him all morning. The bear lunged to the end of his chain and sat back holding the whole seat of the deputy's Concord broadcloth breeches, chewing it thoughtfully like a deacon weighing a sermon. Deputy Pound went down Route 28 toward Epsom with his welts on the front and his bare backside on the back, and he never filed a word.

Hacksaw's Copper Against the Swarm

No man worked harder to keep the enemy out of my still-house than Silas "Hacksaw" McAllister, who hammers the copper at the Fort Wilkins foundry. Cheesecloth over the barrel heads got wet and sagged, and the skeeters and the little red-eyed vinegar flies went straight through the gaps. We lost one whole barrel, gone as sour as a pickle crock left in the sun. So Silas drew copper wire through his plate as fine as it would go without snapping, wove it into a screen as tight as a cobweb over four nights, and hammered a copper hoop around each one to sit snug over the barrel head and vent. Not one more barrel soured. Iron screen will rust and stain and put a taste in a ferment. Copper holds up.

That same summer Silas re-brazed a weeping seam on my swan neck, where it bends down toward the worm, with the shop doors open and the skeeters thick as smoke. Long after, when he split that seam with a cold chisel, he found a whole mosquito sealed inside the spelter like a fly in amber. He keeps her in a tin snuffbox over his anvil and calls her "the only revenue collector who ever paid her own way." Silas brazes clean and never puts lead solder on anything that touches the vapour, for lead rots a man's teeth, gut and wits. I have pulled the black teeth to prove it.

His apprentice Ned hauled water for the worm tub from the Berry Pond shore at dusk and came back swollen past knowing. So Silas bored out spruce logs with an auger, as the old-timers did for aqueducts, laid them end to end down from a cold spring on the Catamount slope, and clamped copper sleeves over the joints. From a cracked copper kettle he also made a smudge pot, punched with air holes and filled with punkwood and green fern, and Barnaby sat in its smoke every evening like a deacon in his pew. He came out of July smoked like a ham.

What Truly Fermented the Mash

Now for the confession. Silas put it plain: "It was the heat, Doctor." Yeast is a lazy little beast in cold weather and a holy terror in warm. In a cool October cellar a mash might work a week. That July the still-house was as hot as the hinges of Hades. As for the swarms, the skeeters go for a man's breath and warm skin, and a working mash breathes out that same sort of gas day and night, more than a whole congregation. They took my barrels for the juiciest Christians in New Hampshire. That gas will also smother a man in a closed room, so keep your still-house open to the air.

Too hot is as bad as too cold. Past blood-warm, up in the nineties, the yeast turns sick and makes heavy, oily fusel oil, or it quits halfway and leaves a sweet, sour, sticky mess. I lost part of a barrel by the sun-beaten south wall. Here is the method: set your barrels in the coolest corner, on the north side, on dirt or stone. Cover every head, because one fly carrying the vinegar mother can turn forty gallons to salad dressing. A Frenchman named Pasteur has been studying how vinegar comes about, and I wager he would agree. On the worst days hang a blanket wet with cold spring water over the barrel. When the bubbling slows to a lazy belch every few breaths and the mash tastes dry rather than sweet, it is done.

The Worm Tub, the Fire, and the Cuts

Here is the most important thing in this article. In summer the condenser water warms like a bath, and spirit leaves the worm as vapour, which will burn. A man in Gilmanton ran his tub warm on a July night with a lantern by the spout. There was a soft whump and a blue flash, and he lost his eyebrows, his beard and his still-house. Keep the tub cold and topped up, keep lanterns well away from the spout, and keep the fire under the pot low and steady, because the fire is there to coax, not to bully.

The foreshots come first. They smell of a hot nail and varnish, carry the poison that blinds and kills, and go in the dirt. The harsh heads go aside next. The hearts, the sweet clean middle, are what you save. The tails are oily, smell of wet dog and cloud with water, and hold most of the fusel oil. Set them aside for the next run. A hot summer mash makes more tails, so cut earlier at the back and do not get greedy. A hot mash also gives off more of the rotten-egg, struck-match smell, which bright copper takes out. Silas scours his swan necks with vinegar and salt after a run, because dull copper is lazy copper. And remember that making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the land.

Swamp Medicine Struck and Stamped

Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg will clean out bad heads. Wood ash leached with water makes lye, the potash our grandfathers boiled down for soap and glass, so the ashes only make a weak soap kettle. The oak adds colour and a woody taste, but every drop of the heads remains. An old man in Loudon put sassafras root in his doubler, and it only hid the harshness, which is worse, because a man can smell trouble in a raw run but not under a sweet root. The only cure for bad heads is a careful cut and a jar thrown in the dirt.

One more myth: whiskey in the blood does not keep skeeters off. Those who had been at the jug got it worst that summer. Pennyroyal rubbed on the neck helps a little, but never drink the oil, for it is poison. Smudge pots, mosquito bars, netted hats and covered rain barrels serve better. In the end the frost won that war in September, as it always does, and I took the credit, as I always do.