George's French Wife

The Bredan Creamery closed down about 20 years ago. It seemed it had always been there, an oddity in town, but at the same time, something solid, hulking, steady. George Bredan apparently associated butter and cream with Normady, because the whole place was built in the style of a Norman castle. Battlements, moat, crenelated towers and all. Well, the moat was really just a small pond out front. George's second wife was French, so maybe he was trying to please her, by building it. I do wish they'd do something with the place. There's nothing sadder than an abandoned castle.

George opened the Bredan Creamery in 1929, just a few months before the stock market crash. Luckily for him, he'd always had a policy of paying cash for everything. Crashed stock market or no, people still had to eat, and cows still had to be milked. National financial crises affected us out here, of course, but not nearly as badly as they did city folk, and those that traded in less than tangible commodities. Milk, cheese, and butter were tangilbles, so as long as George had built his dream creamery with no debt, he did all right.

George grew up here, and had served in WWI in the U.S. Army, in the forests of the Ardennes. When he came home, he brought back with him a French wife. I believe that she grew up on a farm in the area where he was stationed, but she always talked as if she'd been a Paris debutante. Not that she actually put down our country ways, but more like she had a secret contempt for all things American, which she couldn't quite hide. Except from George. He thought her the epitome of sophistication and class, and felt that a little European culture would benefit the whole town. Thus, the French wife, and the Norman-style castle/creamery.

Marie Bredan (every time I hear or see that name, I can hear her pronouncing it in that distinct French accent of hers, which did indeed, give it a bit of class,) married George, I think, to get out of France as much as anything else. Living in a country that's been ravaged by war is no picnic, and she and her family thought that the best ticket out was to marry an American soldier-boy. She was probably right, and so too, probably, was George, so the marriage appeared to be beneficial to each.

Marie grew up on a dairy farm, so was no stranger to the milk and dairy products business. She took over the books from George's father Mason, and he happily retired to the front porch of the local store, to endless checker games over a cuppa, and the company of his Spanish American war buddies.

Most of the ladies in town ignored Marie's existance in the beginning. I don't know if they weree jealous of her heritage, her "working ways", or the freedom that George gave her by providing her with her very own automobile. Maybe it was a combination of all those things, or maybe it was just that she was "French", and most of them had a Scandanavian heritage, so there was a little European transplant rivalry going on. That standoffishness between them eventually changed, however.

More than any knowledge of French culture, or Parisian couture, what Marie brought with her was something more intangible that no one really noticed at first. Though George and his father had been in the creamery business for years, and had all the latest mechanical marvels installed in the new building, Marie's family had been in the dairy business for generations. For them, it wasn't just a business, it was an entire way of life. Her father was still living, as were two of her brothers, and before long, there was an endless stream of exchanges between the two families about cow breeding, cheese-making, milk curdling, and pasteurization techniques. The marriage of Marie Villon and George Bredan seemed to be a match made in creamery heaven.

While George concentrated on the processing end of things, Marie took over the supply and sale end of things. She instituted a system of credits for raw materials - milk - that benefitted both the local farmers and the creamery. Somehow she had worked a deal with old man Iverson at the store, so that she could pay off the farmer's grocery and supply bills with the dairy farmer's creamery credits, and supply the store with the milk and cheese that it in turn sold to everyone else in town. I can't pretend that I understand how that all worked, I only know that it did, and that Marie had the gratitude of every dairy farmer for three counties for her innovative approach and willingness to barter for goods. For his part, George became a master cheese-maker, taking to heart all the lessons his in-laws sent via post, creating some of the most innovative and popular cheeses in that part of the country.

Marie gave birth to her first son in 1922, about seven years before they opened the new creamery. A second son was born in 1928, and a daughter in 1931. Georges, (spelled in the French way, rather than the American one) was a serious child, taking his responsibilities to his family and his town seriously. No more so than the year he turned 19, and the United States was attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. Georges enlisted in the Army right away, and like his father in the war before, was sent, eventually, to fight in France.

For her part, Marie's company was sought out more and more by the ladies in town, as if she would have some sort of special knowledge of what was happening in the world, and with their sons, nephews, and husbands in theaters of war all around the world. Marie took her new-found popularity as seriously as her son Georges took his patriotic duty, and listened to every radio broadcast she could, so she could keep the ladies well-informed. For some reason, her company was calming, and seemed more informative that others', perhaps only really because of the "exotic" nature of her accent, and the fact that she alone, of all the people they knew, had lived in that far off place where their menfolk were now fighting and dying. They knew, too, that her own son was in danger, and offered her as much comfort and company as she offered them.

Georges never came home from France. His grandfather and his uncles were given permission to retrieve his body and bury it on the lands his mother had walked as a child. George Bredan died in 1952, and his widow Marie inherited the creamery. Louis Bredan helped her run it until her death, then simply closed the place up, since he'd never really cared one way or the other for the old stone Norman castle that had so enchanted his mother and father.