Jim Farquhar came into the sleepy little town of Big Ugly one day in the fall of 1927. He was chased into the late afternoon light of a threatening West Virginian day by the storms which had followed him from the desolate reaches of the ranch country he had long since left behind out west. He was not scared of moving such distances. After all, his folks had come more than three thousand miles from Scotland, carrying the name that meant ‘dear one’ like some talisman promising a better life, given hard work and god’s good blessing. Jim could never figger if the work that killed them by degrees was not deemed hard enough, or whether the run of nature’s blessing that ran from sandbowl winds to lightning strikes to swarms of sky-dead locusts that ate everything in sight was just some strange test of their faith. When he buried his dad on the section that had previously killed his mother as well as his two sisters, he just knew it was time to move on again.

It wasn’t that Big Ugly seemed to particularly call to him. It just kinda settled, more like a comfortable feeling, as he walked along the main street. Jim knew for sure that he’d not be looking to bust another sod or string a fence as long as he lived. As he paused to sit on the steps of the white painted church, he whittled thoughtfully at a nubbin of wood with his granddad’s old knife. And so was born the germ of an idea that grew by steady paces into a boat building business, starting off with little dinghies on the crick and growing into ever more expansive curves of elegant wood destined for further seas.

Jim slowly prospered in the next ten years, and he took on old Joe Fiske to help keep the work moving. When Frances O’Donovan came into his yard as clouds of a different storm gathered in the east, he knew that the next stage of his life was ready to sail. A year later Frances bore their first child, followed by two more in successive years. When Jim got his call-up papers, she swore she’d keep the boatyard going til he got back. It was a promise that came to haunt the young woman.

Nearly two years later, the clutch of kids around her ankles started to bawl in alarm at her tears, the brown telegram trailing at her side. She soon realised grief was a luxury she could not afford. Besides, missing was not dead, right? So she still had a promise to keep.

Many years of hard graft followed, endless cycles of elation and gloom as she fought to keep Jim’s yard first merely alive, then later growing. Succeed she did. There came a proud day in 1957 when the yard’s biggest boat, a sweet-bellied deep keeled ocean-going boat, was being moved carefully down Main Street to reach the deeper waters the other side of the railroad bridge. She would be christened Mabel-May.

Meanwhile, unknown to Frances and her yard crew, a gorilla known with mistaken affection as Lady had just bust out of her cage at the visiting circus. Frightened by a car’s sudden horn, Lady lashed out fatally at a woman in her path, and charged out into Main Street. Confronted by the looming and extraordinary vision of the underside of the boat’s hull, which seemed to float above the street like some vast balloon, the raging beast stopped dead in its tracks, and sat in the dust looking stunned. It was still looking in puzzlement at the boat’s long raking keel when the keepers got close enough with the tranquiliser gun to effect a smooth recapture without further loss of life.






It was this strange coincidence of shocking disturbances in the otherwise quiet community that led the Big Ugly Sentinel-Tribune to run what became their most infamous, if economic, headline:


Big Ugly Mother Farquhar Keel Sold Lady!