Jorde pondered a while. “Come to find out, to make a long story short, Ben was cheatin’ them that bought his whiskey, tellin’ them it was a year old when he knew in reason he’d just run it off maybe the night before. Ben Foley was sellin’ pizen!” Old Jorde Foley’s voice trembled. “That’s all it was that he was makin’. Pizen that he forced to ferment with stuff that Effie’s friend, who used to work in the coal mines, brought here. And Ben sellin’ that pizen that burnt the stummick and the brains out of men that drunk it. Hi gad!”—old Foley spat vehemently—“I never raised my son to be no such thief! It was that Jezebel Effie that led my boy to the sin of thievin’. She wanted more cash money than he could earn honest with makin’ good whiskey.”
It was Ben’s fear of prison, old Jorde explained bluntly, that caused him to run from the law, and running he had stumbled and thereby stopped a bullet.
“What the law didn’t bust to pieces of them tubs and shovels and such, I did,” Jorde added with a note of satisfaction. For a moment he lapsed into silence, then added gravely, “Ben just nat’erly disgraced us Foleys.” The father hung his head in shame. “Why, Cynthie would turn over in her grave if she knew of him thievin’ and runnin’—runnin’ from the law! It’s such as that Jezebel with her carryin’s on, temptin’ men to thievin’ that’s put an end to makin’—makin’ good whiskey in these Dug Down Mountains here in Georgia. Put an end to sellin’ good pure whiskey for an honest price like me and mine used to make.”
3. Products of the Soil
Timber
The individualism of the mountaineer has not made of him a scientific inventor, but this marked trait of character has developed his self-reliance and resourcefulness. He may not know, or care to know, in figures the degree of the angle at which the mountain slopes. Probably he has never heard of the clinometer by which geological surveyors arrive at such information. Yet the untrained mountain man seeing a stream gushing down a steep escarpment knows how to divert it to his own best use.
Sometimes he set his tub mill, or the wheel, at the most advantageous point to grind his corn into meal. If, however, his house happened to be near no stream he had a simpler method for grinding his corn, a way his forbears learned from the Indian, or heard about through his Scotch ancestors. He rounded two stones, about the size of the average dishpan, with great patience. Bored a hole in the center of the top one, placed the two in a hollowed log and patiently, laboriously poured corn, a few grains at a time, into the opening. With the other hand he turned the top stone by means of a limber branch attached to a rafter overhead, the other end of which was thrust into a small hole near the rim of the top stone. In this way he kept the top stone moving, slowly, steadily. The Scotch called this simple handmill a quern. It was a laborious way of grinding meal.