Inside that second tank, bolted to a frame and wrapped in oilcloth, was a copper still. A real one. The pot, the cap, the coiled worm, all hand hammered and green with age. Packed around it were a dozen empty mason jars with the lids still on, a handwritten recipe book, and a photograph of a young man in overalls standing next to the same still with his arm around it like it was his best friend.
On the back of the photo, in pencil, it said, Pap and the old girl, 1931.
I called the couple over. Their names were Jolene and Rick, and they had inherited the house from an aunt who had lived there since the fifties. They had never heard a word about any still.
Jolene looked at the photo for a long time. Then she said, that is my great grandfather.
Somebody had loved that old still so much they buried it in a steel coffin rather than let anybody break it up for scrap.
Jolene called her mother, who was eighty and lived in Weston. Her mother knew the whole story. Her grandfather, Pap Hayes, ran moonshine in Braxton County through the worst of the Depression. It was how he fed nine children. When the revenue men started closing in, his wife made him quit. He could not stand to see the still destroyed. So he cleaned out an old tank, sealed the whole thing inside it, and buried it in the yard. He told the family it was gone.
He never dug it back up. He went to work for the railroad and raised all nine kids and died in 1968. Every one of those kids went through high school. Four of them went to college.
Jolene did not want to keep a still in her yard. She also did not want it scrapped.
So she called the county historical society. A retired history teacher named Mr. Frame drove out that afternoon. When he saw it, he got down on one knee in the dirt. He said he had been collecting stories about the Depression in Braxton County for thirty years, and he had never once seen an original still that survived. They were all destroyed.
The historical society put it on display that fall in the old train depot in Sutton. They built a whole exhibit around it. The recipe book is in a glass case. So is the photo of Pap.
At the opening, the mother of Jolene cut the ribbon. Thirty seven members of the Hayes family came, from four states. Most of them had never met each other.
Mr. Frame gave a little talk. He said this was not a story about breaking the law. It was a story about a man who did what he had to do to keep nine children fed through the hardest years this country ever saw, and then walked away from it when it was time.
Somebody in the back said, amen.
Jolene and Rick filled the old tank hole with topsoil and planted a garden there. Mostly corn, as a joke.
Twenty four years I have been pulling tanks. I never pulled one out full of family before.