Chapter Fourteen

 

THE EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT

 

Local Sales, Cider Accident, Teetotaler, Prohibition

 

          What brought this to mind was reminiscing with brother Richard about our earliest years at Beeman Academy and recalling the long, cold rides to school in the horse-drawn school cart driven by Maggie Goulette.

 

          Maggie at one time had gained some notoriety around the village for selling alcoholic beverages to townsmen in her home on Cemetery Road and providing unspecified entertainment late at night to men visitors.

 

          We boys were pretty young at the time and not privy to the details but picked up fragments of gossip from our elders about men and drinking and late night piano playing and singing.

 

          In those Depression years Maggie was not alone in skirting the laws of Prohibition.  I was only about eight or nine years old but able to recognize that there were disparities between the public positions of many adults and their private practices.

 

          There was cider.  Every farm had apple orchards.  Our was relatively large, being six rows wide and extending from the rear of our barnyard and farm equipment shed all the way to our neighbor's fence.

 

          Dad grew many different types, some for instant eating, some for cellar storage and winter use, some for market, some juicy and some firm, some sweet and some sour and some planted, I think, just because Gramp was curious how they'd turn out.

 

          When the saleable crop had been picked there were many left on the trees and the ground and were candidates for apple cider.  In New Haven there was a cider mill down by the river and we'd gather up bushels of apples and take them in the wagon and be allowed to watch some of the process at the mill.  We returned always with several barrels and kegs of sweet cider to be stored in the coolest, darkest side of the cellar.  Equipped with wooden spouts, they were turned on their sides for aging.

 

          We could tell when it was fermenting: there'd be a little buzz in your throat when you took a sip.  Eventually it became hard cider and the most available alcoholic beverage on the farm.  We boys tried it, of course, as we tried everything, but it would never become our drink of choice.

 

          Some years there were accidents.  My mother took extreme measures when the menfolk were imbibing the cider after it had become quite alcoholic and they were exhibiting drunken behavior in the house and out in the yard.  After her warnings were ignored she went to the cellar and knocked the bungs out of the offending barrels.  They were very careful to stay out of her way while they cleaned up the cellar.

 

          I'm sure there are many variations on country hard cider stories, but one I remember vividly concerns Dad's and a neighbor's experiment with a recipe for keeping cider sweet, even after it had attained an impressive alcohol content.  It had something to do with adding raisins and other ingredients to the barrel before the cider turned.

 

          North of us, just this side of Brown's Hill, there lived the Cushman boys, somewhat older than we, bright and conscientious farm workers but also fun-loving.  As friendly neighbors were wont to do in those days, we'd sometimes gather as families in each other's homes to play cards, eat together, gossip and even have a spell of singing if there was a piano and a competent player.

 

          Mrs. Cushman was a principled Christian lady who abhorred the use of alcohol and believed the same of her three sons.

 

          Dad had brought along some of his deceitful cider and poured a glass for Mrs. Cushman who complemented him on the taste and the delightful tang and declared it wonderful that he had found a way to maintain it in its sweet and pristine state.  So good, in fact, that she might do with another glass, and as the evening progressed, she became ever more a delightful hostess, smiling and joking and vowing that she'd "never had such a good time and we must do this again very soon."  I don't think she ever knew.  A good lady.

 

          Nature's gifts to conviviality during the Depression and Prohibition were plentiful and economical.  The ladies who for the most part abhorred the hard cider made and favored wines, home-made from dandelions and other flowers and fruits and they were confident that if and when they giggled it was certainly in a refined and genteel manner.

 

          Carrying nature's processes one step further, Dad and his cronies decided to try their hand at making beer.  I remember the process only dimly but have retained a mental image of the product: a dark greenish glass bottle with a yeasty residue in the bottom, a dark amber hue to the beer and a whitish-brown foam at the top.  It was capped at the top with a rubber pressure stopper.

 

          The bottles that survived the aging process (some leaked and went flat and some exploded) were stored in the milk cooler situated in a small building adjacent to the ice house and available to the men during the sweaty sunlit hours.  We boys, of course, acquainted ourselves with the product in imitation of our elders, but did not much favor the bitter taste and smell.

 

          We had one dog, Lucky, who would eagerly lap it up and seek more if given a little in a saucer.

 

          A  few years ago my son gave me one of the popular and legal Make-Beer-at-Home kits and I brewed up a batch in the garage.  I lacked the skill of my Dad's generation and the odor accompanying the process made me an unpopular brewmaster.

 

          The last experiment of Dad's that I can remember was the creation of a miniature still that he and a couple of his buddies had thought up.  It was a small Rube Goldberg affair for distilling alcohol out of hard cider.  I recall a corked container over a small flame with a copper tube running down through a tub of icy-cold water and into a glass jar where every few minutes a drop of alcohol would drip into the glass.

 

          They were delighted that it worked but it was plain to see that it held little promise as a commercial enterprise and they disassembled it after their first try -- and undoubtedly just before Mom would have preempted them.

 

          As boys always attuned to the untoward, we were aware that the highways between Montreal and the major U.S. cities southward handled a lot of traffic in illegal liquor.  One could not be a Vermonter and be unaware of it.  Some residents knew and were scandalized, some knew and were apparently accepting, and some knew and benefitted.

 

          The first group was vocal in their indignation, the second was relatively quiet, and from the third nothing at all was heard.

 

          An excellent history of the town of New Haven was published in 1984, entitled "New Haven in Vermont, 1761 - 1983."  It included a tongue-in-cheek reference to Maggie's providing "living room entertainment and sales of home brew."  I am sure it garnered many a chuckle at the time but social sensibilities then were not as finely tuned as they are today.

 

          Maggie was a product of her times -- the Great Depression and Prohibition -- but it is in my better memories that I shall always retain the images that Maggie's name evokes.

 

          In our earliest school years she drove the horse-drawn covered wagon that was our "school cart."  On cold, snippy early winter mornings she came nearly four miles from her house behind a plodding team of horses, frost forming around their steaming nostrils, perched on the driver's seat with the reins in her mittened hands and wearing a bulky hat with a scarf tied over it against the icy wind.

 

          When the snow fell to a sufficient depth the passenger unit was transferred to a sleigh and remained horse-drawn.

 

          At each house with small children she would descend from her seat in front to check the children into the wagon, assist the little ones, make certain they had not forgotten their lunches and would draw the canvas flaps at the rear against the cold wind or rain or snow.  Then she would climb back up to the exposed driver's seat, reach for the reins and wave a cheery good morning to any watching parent.

 

          She repeated this at a dozen or more stops before we arrived at school.  The trip was reversed at night and then the long lonely trek back to her abode on Cemetery Road.

 

          Sometimes my child's empathetic imagination envisaged her thoughts and feelings as she gazed endlessly out past the horses ears: were they sad or happy or empty?  I sometimes felt sorry and didn't know why.

 

          In a couple of years Maggie's transport was replaced by a man-operated, more modern cab-mounted truck.

 

          On September 5, 1937 the townspeople of New Haven voted 74-71 to repeal Prohibition and "3.2" beer would become legal.

 

          When nearly every autumn we return to Vermont, brother Richard and I are wont to reminisce about those early days and share a beer.  In our Army days we had greater familiarity with liquor and there was a lot of drinking.  Some commanders set the example, junior officers followed and some careers were ruined by habitual and excessive use of alcohol.

 

          In recent years I have found that a glass of wine at dinner is stimulating and enhancing to the palate, and drinking much beyond that provides rapidly diminishing returns.

 

          Requiescat in Pacem, Maggie of Cemetery Road.