Books: Free Spirits Moonshine

Garland Bunting talks too loud, wears store-bought glasses, doctors himself with coonhound medicine, and has such a sizable paunch that when he told a clothing salesman, “I’d like to see something to fit this,” the man replied, “I would too.” For more than two decades Bunting has also been a North Carolina legend, the pre-eminent undercover county revenue agent in a state where the making of illegal alcohol is considered next door to a constitutional right. Bunting has been so good at his work that many local folk assume he is “a conjure doctor,” a devil’s ally who “can read your mind like it’s you thinking.” Bunting modestly demurs: “Country people, you know. They put a lot of junk on me. Many times, though, it’s what kept me alive.”

Alec Wilkinson, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of Midnights: A Year with the Wellfleet Police (1982), heard about Bunting and thought there might be a story in the lawman’s exploits. Their first meeting got off to an edgy beginning. Because Wilkinson was from New York City, Bunting suspected him of being a Mafia hit man. But the Yankee journalist hung around long enough to win Bunting’s confidence and come up with Moonshine, an intoxicating report on free and illicit spirits.

The book’s subtitle, A Life in Pursuit of White Liquor, is a trifle deceptive, calling up images of Robert Mitchum tooling down Thunder Road. Bunting is no stranger to gunplay and squealing tires. He once got so entangled in an electrified fence, a colleague remembers, that “each of his fingers had lightning bolts shooting out of them.” But the struggle that really interests Bunting involves an almost courtly game of wits between him and the various owners of illegal stills.

He utilizes a gift for gab, a talent for making “the old feel young and the poor feel rich,” as one friend puts it. Bunting favors disguises, what he calls “hidebehinds,” becoming everything from a fish peddler to a buck dancer in order to confuse or disarm his prey. When these tricks fail, he calls upon oratorical ammunition. Confronted with some violators intent on ambushing him, he announces: “It is my duty to inform you that I am slick with a gun. I don’t want to meet you in the Great Beyond and have you telling me that I didn’t warn you ahead of time.”

Wilkinson, whose own prose style combines wit with understatement, is canny enough to give the flamboyant Bunting his head, quoting not only his anecdotes but such side comments as his thoughts on flounder (“I don’t eat nothing with both eyes on the same side of the head”). The book is filled with whiteliquor lore, including a description of all the impurities to be found in moonshine: “Maggots spawn in mash. Rats, snakes, owls, possums, foxes, and other small creatures find their way to it and drink it and get drunk and fall in and drown.” What Wilkinson does best, though, is evoke the spirits of a man, a region and a culture that have remained stubbornly idiosyncratic. The last words Bunting says to Wilkinson, “A purpose accomplished is sweet to the soul,” turn out to apply equally to them both.