The Worst Molar in Merrimack County: Absalom Thorne and the Whiskey Bill

Rotten Teeth in Cider Country

Barnaby, my black bear, has been snuffling at the window of Fort Wilkins for days on end. It is not supper he smells. It is a molar, pickled in a jar upon my shelf. A bear can smell a rotten tooth across a county line, and I have drawn enough of them to keep Barnaby in a permanent state of hope. I am dentist and blacksmith both to this valley, and the county has twice made me its most notorious prisoner, so I am owed a few tales. This one concerns the worst molar I ever met, the biggest farmer I ever wrestled, and the whiskey bill that came after, which hurt him worse than the forceps did.

First the reader must know how New England mouths came to such a state. Our great-grandfathers drank cider at breakfast, cider at dinner and cider at supper, and gave it to the children by the dipper. They sweetened their porridge with West India molasses and washed it down with molasses rum. Put sugar and acid in a man's mouth three times a day for sixty years and you get a jaw like a burnt-over sugar bush: black stumps, pockets of rot, and one lonesome eyetooth standing guard over the ruins.

When the cider was not strong enough, they jacked it. A barrel is set out in a January cold snap, the water freezes into a crust, the ice is chipped away, and what remains in the middle is strong and mean. Mark the chemistry of it, you who work at your own apparatus. A distiller separates the good from the bad and casts the bad away. Freeze it, and the bad stays in the cup with the good. My grandfather drank jacked cider every winter of his life and woke each morning as though a mule had kicked his skull and gone back for his hat. They called it the apple palsy. I call it bookkeeping. Nature always collects.

In this country a tooth is worth something. After Old Boney was beaten in 1815, scavengers went over the Belgian field with pliers and sacks, and London dentists set the Waterloo teeth in ivory for fine gentlemen. It is whispered in the trade this very year that barrels of teeth from the Virginia battlefields have crossed the water the same way, so that somewhere in London a gentleman chews his mutton with a Maine boy's incisors. The Union examining surgeons sent a recruit home if he lacked the front teeth to tear a paper cartridge. In sixty-three two strapping Barnstead lads asked me to pull theirs so they would fail the examination. I charged them double, told them a coward's grin costs extra, and sent them home with all their teeth. One came back from Petersburg a sergeant.

As for pain, Horace Wells, a Vermont-born dentist of Hartford, had his own tooth drawn under laughing gas in 1844 and felt nothing. In 1845 he went to Boston to show the great surgeons; his patient hollered at the wrong moment, the students hissed, someone shouted humbug, and poor Wells never got over it. Now a fellow named Colton pulls teeth by the thousand in New York with the gas. I have no laughing gas at Fort Wilkins. I have laughing whiskey, and it works mainly on the dentist. Oil of cloves numbs the gum and does nothing for the rot, and the new vulcanite plates come with Goodyear agents demanding a license fee on every set. A royalty on a man's mouth.

The Biggest Farmer in the Suncook Valley

In the mud season of fifty-nine an oxcart drew up at my door bearing Absalom Thorne of Gilmanton Iron Works: six foot seven, three hundred and thirty pounds, hands like coal shovels. I once saw him lift a yearling heifer over a stone wall rather than walk to the gate. His left cheek was swollen as though he kept a hen's egg in it for later. He had tried string tied to a doorknob, and pulled the door off its hinges. He had tried the harness maker's pliers, and bent them. He had tried a Barnstead blacksmith, who went home with two loose teeth of his own. The rot was an abscess in the lower back molar, and his breath smelled like a woodchuck dead in July. Barnaby stood straight up on his hind legs in admiration.

I sat him in my surgery chair and the chair burst like a rotten apple crate. So I laid him on the floorboards. Silas McAllister's father took one arm, my hired man the other, and Enoch the miller sat square upon his chest. Then came the whiskey: one quart for courage, a second for the pain, a third because he had watched me drink the first. The forceps went on and the crown crumbled like rotten maple, leaving two roots hooked like a grappling iron about the jawbone. I braced my boot upon his collarbone and pulled. Absalom's bellow stopped the cows of Loudon giving milk for a week. Then the root came, with a wet suck and a pop like a fence post leaving April mud, and behind it a gout of yellow corruption that crossed the room and struck my Farmer's Almanac square in the month of June. No one has read that June since.

Absalom sat bolt upright, spat blood and whiskey into the ash bucket, shouted Glory, rose to his full height and cracked his skull upon my ceiling beam so hard he split the oak. He went down like a felled pine. It was the only anesthetic all day that worked.

The Whiskey Bill, and a Walnut

Now the reckoning. The tooth cost twenty-five cents. The whiskey cost three dollars and seventy-five. Add a broken chair and a split beam, and I am less a dentist than a tavern with forceps. Absalom paid me in a firkin of butter and a promise. The butter is long gone. The promise is still out there with Absalom, getting fat.

A word for the revenue men, for I know they read me. In sixty-four a pale gentleman in a Concord coat came moaning of his tooth. I pried open his mouth and found a whole walnut in the shell, stuffed in his cheek to counterfeit a swelling so he might inspect my back room. I told him it was the healthiest walnut I had ever examined. He bolted out the back door past Barnaby's chain, and Barnaby took the seat of his trousers the way a parson takes the collection, all at once and without thanks. He rode back to Concord standing in his stirrups.

A Singing Basin, a Bent Forceps and a Scalding Bath

Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, master coppersmith of the valley, whose father held Absalom's right arm, hammered me a spit basin from one sheet of copper: deep bowl, rolled rim, sixteen inches across, planished so evenly that it rang like a church bell for every tooth. The lads at the tavern across the turnpike kept tally marks on the door frame, and the record was militia muster day of sixty-one: thirty-one teeth. As Silas has it, "Copper tells you the truth if you listen to it."

Silas listened as a boy of eleven, beating the drum for Professor Ludlow's Painless Extraction to cover the screaming. The professor's forceps were bright as silver but went thunk on the tailboard, like a spoon in porridge. Plated iron. Sure enough, on a Loudon farmer's jaw they opened like a wilted daisy, and the professor galloped off toward Chichester, leaving Silas holding the drum. Silas also built me a copper foot bath on my sound principle that warm feet draw blood from the head. A county deputy kicked it over, was boiled pink to the knee, and filed a complaint accusing the foot bath of assault. And Silas refused a tinker who wished to buy his floor sweepings for tooth amalgam, iron grit, brass and all. A man's mouth deserves clean metal as much as a still does.

Copper, Fire and the Cuts

Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law, and what follows is for history and education. Absalom's breath and a bad jar of spirit share a stink: sulfur vapors. In a pot, bright copper seizes those vapors upon its own skin so they never reach the jar. Copper is the dentist of the vapor. It also carries heat about five times better than iron, so the mash does not scorch, and it does not melt until near two thousand degrees. The metal does not burn a still-house down. The vapor does.

Ferment the wash fully until it is sour and dry, strain it well, and fill the pot no more than three-quarters. Smell every joint before lighting. Bring the fire up low and patient. Spirit vapor is heavier than air and creeps along the floor toward any flame, so keep fire well away from the condenser outlet and jars, air the house, keep sand at hand, and never leave a running still.

Things boil in order: methanol near a hundred forty-eight degrees, ethanol near a hundred seventy-three, water at two hundred twelve. The foreshots, smelling of glue pot and cobbler's bench, are thrown out, every drop. The heads, sharp and solvent, are set aside in small jars. When the smell turns sweet and clean, those are the hearts, collected in small jars that you may be choosy. When the run goes oily and smells of wet cardboard and dog, those are the tails; set them aside and stop. One big bucket gives you jacked cider all over again. Afterward scrub the copper with vinegar and salt and rinse thoroughly. Crusted copper is just a kettle with ambitions.

Ashes, Red Oak and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asked whether old-timers truly threw "hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads." Red oak has open pores along the grain; a cooper will show you bubbles blown through a stick of it. In a thump keg it gives woody taste and much leaking. Hickory ash leaches to lye, an alkali, and will make soap, not clean spirit. Only the man at the worm with his small jars cleans out the heads. Old-timers did put apples or peaches in the keg for honest flavor, and I suspect some grandson misremembered peaches as ashes.

And bury the blue-flame test. Wood spirit burns blue much like good grain spirit, and a spoonful of fire cannot reliably tell you of lead. A blue flame tells you it burns. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low. Absalom Thorne still owes me three dollars and seventy-five cents, and his molar waits in the jar until he pays.