Penitence Biddiford

 Meet Penitence B. Biddiford

Some stories just take some telling. Penitence Biddiford's is one of those. But hers is an important story to tell, for the concepts underlying all these various misadventures are integral for understanding the dynamic success of the Owl's Hill Arts Center, and rather serve as some good rules to abide by in general.

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 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.

Psyllium-Fibre Infused

The Unexpected Savior

Penitence Biddiford let her story unfold slowly, the twists and turns and colorful characters swirling about like reefer smoke in a high-ceilinged studio, in an old mill, with the sun setting low.  She stayed with her sister Constance, in Connie's big apartment at the Biddiford Academy, where she was Administrator. The Academy sits high atop Schleprock's Bluff, looking off westwards, a magnificent pile of a building, all wings and Great Halls, cut from native fieldstone. Another legacy of dour Cerberus Biddiford, a Biddiford had helmed the Academy since its founding in 1875.

"Connie hosted a euchre game every Wednesday night up there. It was tradition." Penitence Biddiford shakes her head, a rueful, sweetly stoned smile playing across her features. "We tried so damn hard to keep it all between us: just Connie, me and Daddy's lawyer, old Dewey Cheatham. And I do mean old. He was Grandpa's lawyer, too. He  was the only man they let play Wednesdays, which was handy, once I got back. Salty and smart though he may be, Dewey hadn't any more answers than we did. We were stymied, and ready to cry one Wednesday, talking about all this, when we realized someone else was with us, listening from the doorway."

Bella Feent-Swain, an imposing and immense woman, had heard the whole thing. The wife of Ruben 'Tater-Boy' Swain, the potato magnate, she was a sorority sister of Connie's, and a close confidant.  "I'm surprised, really, that Connie hadn't said anything to her before. Those two are tight." But she hadn't, and who could blame her, given the sorry and sordid circumstances?

And Then The Cat Got Out Of The Bag

"Bella stood there looking at the three of us, outrage and sorrow, and pure righteous fury building. I've never seen a person's face go beet red in so little time. Shoulders on up. She was pissed. She said to us, 'Sisters, Dewey, this aggression cannot stand. These swamp-hounds, sloth-devils and toe-jammers need to be chased back under the rocks and into the hollow logs from whence they've come.  May I share this sorrowful story with my Grandfather?' Neither Connie nor I realized the full import of the question, but old Dewey sure did.

"'Would you please, Bella?' he asked her." 

Her studio gone dim and shadowy, Penitence Biddiford lighted three old-time oil lamps, and placed them on pedestals about the covered walnut statue. The grain caught the soft glow and began slowly to come alive. She moved about light as a fairy, choosing the words, remembering the songs. Time seemed to go all shifty on us. "Bella called Connie a couple days later. Her Grandfather wanted to meet us at the Cyclamate to talk things over. Dewey inisited, so we went."

Ms. Biddiford In Her Studio

Penitence Biddiford wore the evening draped about her, all the purple, all the shadows, all the mustering of light, and she took up a corner of the tarp draping her statue. She whispered, “Grandfather,” and pulled it away. We stood before something amazing.

A great mountain of a man came to life there in the light of those lamps. Immense and powerful, he might have stepped out to join us, were he not carved of walnut. What must have been acres of denim went into the wooden coveralls he sported, ‘Sears & Roebuck’ carved plainly onto the suspender buckles. Chore boots as big as barges graced his great feet, and a kindness, a tremendous warmth radiated out from small, close-set eyes, squinting as if he’d misplaced his glasses, or was perhaps just very stoned. He gripped a straw hat in his left hand, and his right was firmly in his coverall pocket, busy. Old Farmer Feent. He’d taken more than three years to carve. 

“It’s him,” I said, and she nodded. “He’s as beautiful as I thought he would be.”

At The Cyclamate

The Cyclamate Tavern sits way down at the end of Aburrido Street, just before the park along the river. It’s a dingy place on the brightest of days, run by the three formidable Sweet sisters, Sugar, Honey and Candy. Mountainous women, they’d inherited the place from their no account father, Clarence “Lefty” Sweet, a poor businessman and a drinking partner of Rance Biddiford.

“At least the place smells more like patchouli than anything else, these days,” she said. That wasn’t always the case. “We got down there early, the three of us, and the sisters seemed to know what was up. Somehow they always seem to. Big Candy Sweet grabbed Dewey and whispered in his ear, then left. The place had cleared out except for us. Just like that. So Dewey suggested that, as with the bar left graciously open and at our disposal, we might as well start drinking. Nervous as we were, we did.”

Penitence. Penitence. Penitence. 

Nets of spells and enchantments she casts about her without thinking. Her voice carried shadow and light entwined, and she moved about in the oil-lamp glow spectral and serpentine, no more than moving whisps of smoke herself, taking form and shape from whatever she happened to be closest to. The looming walnut Farmer filled my consciousness. And I was tremendously stoned.

“Old Farmer Feent showed up two hours later. Connie and I were dancing on the bar to Bob Seger, Dewey was playing bartender and  trying to peek up our skirts, when a great blast of cool air rushed in and filled the place with smells of moss and rain and growing things. Great footsteps rang off the floorboards, and a laugh loud as thunder burst out, when Old Farmer Feent rounded the corner and saw us. 

‘Whatcha see up there, Dew-Berry?’ he hollered out, a beatific grin splitting his pumpkin-sized face. ‘Nice, is it?’ and Dewey laughed and did a jig step for him. ‘Prettier than daybreak, up there on the Great Divide!’”

Penitence Biddiford solidified before me. “To tell you the truth, there’s a lot I don’t remember about that evening. I do remember Old Farmer Feent telling us a story of a long ago love-triangle. My mother, my father, and Young Farmer Feent. I know. It’s as messed up as it sounds. Mother’s always been a beauty, and a fickle one at that. She led those two on from elementary school, til she finally married my father.” The old man is a sore and complicated subject. “Daddy was always handsome and clever. Good at using people, and not much else. A showoff too, and he enjoyed making other people look bad. Like the poor Young Farmer. I can just imagine what a dick Daddy was to him.” Her eyes well up at the thought.

“That poor man!” she wails into the studio, to Walnut Feent, to me and the world. “He looked at me so sorrowfully, tears cascading from his close-set, squinty little eyes and he began to sob inconsolably, setting great waves to rolling beneath those seven acre coveralls he wore. “‘You know what she told me?’ he blubbered. It took him a moment to spit out the words. ‘She said she’d never go out with a farmer!’ And then she married Daddy. I guess. After that, I don’t remember much. I remember Dewey dancing on the bar to Bob Seger. I remember Connie wiggling around on Old Farmer Feent’s lap. I think I remember Old Farmer Feent taking shots of FeentWater out of my navel. I’m pretty sure Farmer Feent Jr. had to come down and take us home.” She shakes her head.

But things were different after that night. For starters, an army of deadbeats, reprobates and ne’er-do-wells materialized, in brand new coveralls, and made things right at the Mill. Broken windows were repaired, new whitewash applied, decades of crapp hauled out and scrubbed away. The boiler was replaced, thanks to a generous offer from her late father’s bank. Loan sharks and bookies went other places. The crazy bastard back in the hills had an unfortunate and fatal tractor accident. And people began to seek her out, wanting to be part of things. Wanting to be a part of the Owl’s Hill Arts Center.

“And that’s how it started,” she says. “If it weren’t for that sainted man, there’d be none of this. The Prime Mover. Whatever he did, however he did it, he brought people together who dream the same dream. He made us Us. He made us We. And We have made this.” She doesn’t want to talk anymore, and I thank her for her time and leave.

Saint Feent of the Summertimes.

The miracles he wrought were small ones, perhaps, but resonant. That army of deadbeats? These days they’re known as the Feent Corps, and they deploy from town to town, cleaning things up and being good role models. Miracles of Amity and Solidarity, Kindness and Regularity, Old Farmer Feent loved ideas, he loved women, and he loved drinking. But most of all, he loved caring, and he cared about everything and everyone. And while Old Farmer Feent’s monstrous boots are a pair we can never hope to fill, we can aspire to and achieve a reasonable measure of Feentliness ourselves, simply by caring about people and things other than ourselves.  That’s not asking too much of you, is it? To channel your inner Feent and see what happens? Go on. Try. It’ll make the world a nicer place.

For JF

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