“Already we paid seven hundred fifty-five dollars in fines when they arrested Fontan. Twice the police arrested us and once the government. All the money we made all the time Fontan worked in the mines and I did washing. We paid it all. They put Fontan in jail. Il n’a jamais fait de mal à personne.”
“He’s a good man,” I said. “It’s a crime.”
“We don’t charge too much money. The wine one dollar a litre. The beer ten cents a bottle. We never sell the beer before it’s good. Lots of places they sell the beer right away when they make it, and then it gives everybody a headache. What’s the matter with that? They put Fontan in jail and they take seven hundred fifty-five dollars.”
“It’s wicked,” I said. “Where is Fontan?”
“He stays with the wine. He has to watch it now to catch it just right,” she smiled. She did not think about the money any more. “Vous savez, il est crazy pour le vin. Last night he brought a little bit home with him, what you drank, and a little bit of the new. The last new. It ain’t ready yet, but he drank a little bit, and this morning he put a little bit in his coffee. Dans son café, vous savez! Il est crazy pour le vin! Il est comme ça. Son pays est comme ça. Where I live in the north they don’t drink any wine. Everybody drinks beer. By where we lived there was a big brewery right near us. When I was a little girl I didn’t like the smell of the hops in the carts. Nor in the fields. Je n’aime pas les houblons. No, my God, not a bit. The man that owns the brewery said to me and my sister to go to the brewery and drink the beer, and then we’d like the hops. That’s true. Then we liked them all right. He had them give us the beer. We liked them all right then. But Fontan, il est crazy pour le vin. One time he killed a jack-rabbit and he wanted me to cook it with a sauce with wine, make a black sauce with wine and butter and mushrooms and onion and everything in it, for the jack. My God, I make the sauce all right, and he eat it all and said, ‘La sauce est meilleure que le jack.’ Dans son pays c’est comme ça. Il y a beaucoup de gibier
