Just Don't Call Her Penitence (Part One Of Two)

Second In Our Series

Meet Penitence B. Biddiford

Sometimes a person and a project, or a place, become inextricably linked, through circumstance or story. More often than not, it's a local phenomenon, like the case of the Biddifords of Crumbleville, and the Owl's Creek Mill. 

Generations of Crumblevillians have ground their meal at  the Mill, founded in 1867 by Cerberus Baal Biddiford, a stern man returned from Gettysburg without his left leg. Biddiford progeny were plentiful throughout the ensuing years, and the 'Owl's Hill Brand'  was renowned for its purity, and the lightness of products baked with it. But the lights went out on the milling operation in the late 1980s, and the mill sat vacant for a good many years, until the current Biddiford's father repurposed the Old Mill into an antiques mall. Owl's Hill Antiques, a dark and musty place, was L. Rancide Biddiford's brainchild, a depository for random items snagged at auction or estate sale, worn out and generally of dubious value, as antiques or otherwise.  Dirty farm paraphernalia, old horse-shoes,  nails, hinges and the like. The moldy detritus of marginal lives lived and passed barely remarked, but maybe worth a few bucks in the tourist trade.  

"You can too polish a turd," Penitence Beneficia Biddiford states, in her no-nonsense manner. "Daddy did it all his life." She fixes me with her ice-blue eyes, taking my measure. It feels like frost-beams will blast out of those eyes if you say something dumb. 

Ms. Biddiford--P.B. to her close friends, Ms. Biddiford to everyone else--is showing me around the Gallery at the Owl's Hill Art Center, on our way back to her studio. A small, intense woman dressed all in black, she has the air about her of a mean Fifth Grade teacher. And I'm feeling like a Fifth Grade dope on his best behavior. She whirls raven black hair about in a spray, enjoying the unnatural sense of unease she so easily imparts unto others. Particularly unto men.

Her pride and delight in the gallery, however, shine through as brightly as the afternoon  sunlight does, reflecting off the Mill Pond, flooding through the big windows, illuminating color, shape and form into whole new sweeps of meaning. She nods and smiles, without holding back. "This" she says, then shakes her head.

"No, Daddy just let the Mill go to musty, moldy hell," she tells me. We've entered her studio now, dark and cool, huge windows looking out over the pond. It is filled with her work: modernistic pieces of polished steel and aluminum, bolted together, pointing 

Ms. Biddiford, in her studio at Owl's Hill

random fingers towards a distant, unknowable and disconcerting future. "This was a place for him to hide out and drink, bullshit with his friends and pretend he was doing business." She sighs heavily.

"And not that I cared, really. It seemed like he was making it work. I was out of here, gone to college, art school, an MFA and living in Rhode Island when his liver quit. I guess he was upstairs for a few days before they found him. We had to do something with the mill, so I came back to Crumbleville."

What she found upon her return was, to say the least, dismaying.

"It was awful," she says, "it was totally effed up. Connie (her sister, Constance Judgement Biddiford, Administrator of the Biddiford Academy,) and I had no idea it was so bad, or what to do, really."

How Bad Was It?

We are standing in her her studio, before what seems to be an anomaly: a great piece of black walnut, that must have been seven feet in height, and nearly that in diameter. It stands among metalwork that might have graced the homes of well-heeled friends of the Jetsons. A dark green tarp covers what is obviously a finished piece of work. Penitence Biddiford continues.

"Daddy owed money. Everywhere, to everybody. Three mortgages, bookies, bank loans, private loans--some legit, others frighteningly not so...loan sharks, the power company, dope dealers, you name it. Daddy covered for those deadbeats at the Mill, as long as they kept him company. And they split like fleas off a dead dog when he passed. Or tried to."

She looks out over the pond, silent for a long moment. It isn't an easy tale to tell. "And all those sons of bitches he owed money to came after my sister and I. There were liens placed,  loans called, various foreclosures threatened. Some bastard from back in the hills was going to burn down the mill, our house, the Academy etc., unless we settled with him. At least Mother wasn't around to witness this shit. Daddy's one decent act was to make sure she had enough money to move in with her sister upon his demise, which she did happily. But that left just Connie and me, and we were fucking scared."

It's hard to imagine this woman scared of anything, frankly. But she was. You can just tell. She leans against a broad window sill and pushes the slider over, just enough to let  smoke out. She lights a cigarette, letting the smoke waft out in great purply clouds that catch the low light nicely. It smells like reefer.

"Seriously. It would have been easier to take what we could, if we could, and walk away. But fuck that. Wasn't going to happen. We did not know what we were going to do, or how we were going to do it, but we were goddamn well going to do something..."   

Her voice trails off and she hands the joint over. I thanked her. It's nice to take that edge off, and she seemed a little nicer herself, stoned. And to tell you the truth, being a little stoned sure helped to digest what came next.

Part Two: The Unexpected Savior

"He looked at me so sorrowfully, tears cascading from his  close-set, squinty little eyes, and he began to sob, setting  great waves to rolling beneath those seven acre coveralls he wore. 'You know what she told me?' he said to me. It took him a moment before he could finally blubber it out: 'She said she'd never go out with a farmer!'"