Buried In a Bog

by Sheila Connolly

“Sure. I know Mick’s sister, and my cousin taught Jimmy’s girl Rose in school. We go back a ways.”

  “I’m not asking for charity, you know,” Maura said dubiously.

  “It’s not charity—it’s helping each other out.”

  She was talking about simple kindness, which had been all too rare in Maura’s life. That was going to take thinking about. “Should I talk to Mrs. Nolan about it?”

  “You’re off to see her again?”

  “I’m planning on it, and I think she’d enjoy another visit. Look, about this car of hers—I feel funny just taking it like this.”

  “She wouldn’t have offered if she didn’t want you to have the use of it. She hasn’t driven in years, and it can’t be worth much. Just enjoy it, will you?”

  Enjoy. Relax. Have fun. These were concepts Maura was having trouble wrapping her head around. And the fact that people wanted to do things for her, make her life easier, took getting used to. Was it that the people here were extraordinarily nice, or were the people in Southie, or even Boston, just less friendly in general?

  “Thank you for being frank with me.”

  “So you’ll be staying on?”

  Maura smiled at her. “Maybe. I need to have another talk with the guys at the pub. That place is a pigsty, and I don’t know if I want to be spending a lot of time there.”

  Ellen waved a hand at her. “Ah, it’s got good bones. Old Mick, he was used to the dirt. But the place has some life in it yet.”

  “Hey, I’m just a temporary bartender who can’t stand dirt. Well, I should go get ready for the day. I’ll let you know what I decide after I speak to Mrs. Nolan and drop by the pub for a chat, if that’s all right with you.”

  “No problem. I’ll be here.”

  Maura stood up, then waved at the child in Ellen’s lap. “Bye-bye, Gráinne.”

  Gráinne looked silently at her, then raised one starfish hand and waved back.

  Chapter 7

  Maura collected her bag and her car keys. Dressing had proved challenging, since everything she had squashed into her one bag was still as hopelessly wrinkled as it had been the day before. She could almost hear her gran’s voice: Ah, Maura, sure and you’re not in such a hurry that you can’t tidy up? She put the bag down again, shook out the rumpled clothes on the bed, and put them one by one on hangers. She was not happy with the results. If—still an “if”—she chose to stay around longer, she’d have to do some wash. Worse, she’d need more clothes: she was not going to make it working at the pub with only two pairs of jeans. She wondered briefly whether she should ask Ellen where to shop for inexpensive clothes, but that could wait, along with the “where to do laundry” question. She’d make it through one more day with the clothes on her back, and right now she wanted to get to Mrs. Nolan’s house.

  She slid the house door shut behind her and wrapped her jacket around her against the rain, hurrying to the car. She climbed in quickly, then sat, taking it in. “Hello, car,” she whispered, feeling foolish. “Are you going to be nice to me? Because I don’t know a whole lot about manual shifts, you know.” The car did not answer.

  Maura inserted the key in the ignition, checked to see if the parking brake was on, depressed the clutch and the brake pedals, sent up a brief prayer, and turned the key; the car started immediately. Oh, yeah! Next, she located the controls for the windshield wipers—essential today—and then the headlights. Both worked. Now she was supposed to tackle the driveway, which both curved and slanted up to the road some forty feet above her. Somehow it had looked less intimidating when she had parked the night before, but even she knew clutches were tricky going uphill. Why couldn’t she be staying in a nice, flat place? But there was only one way to the road. Maura gritted her teeth and engaged the clutch.

  Multiple lurches and heart-stopping stalls later, Maura found herself at the top of the rise, looking at the two lanes of the main south coastal road. At least there was little traffic. She had to turn right to get onto the road, therefore to the far side, then turn left almost immediately, where the smaller road ran between a high rock face on the left and the trickling river on the right. And then she had to hope that she recognized the road she’d taken yesterday. You can do this, Maura. You did it yesterday. It will get easier. She inched out onto the road, then made the turn and followed the road as it wound past a few newer houses close to the village, then older houses farther away, then a few abandoned construction sites and fields clotted with brambles. She kept going until she recognized the intersection where the policeman had spoken to her yesterday. Since there were no moving vehicles in sight, she stopped for a moment, but there was no sign of the police activity of the day before, not even any tire tracks. A trio of incurious horses contemplated her car as they munched on whatever grass they could find around the bog.

  With a sigh, Maura turned and drove up the hill until she came to the Nolan house on the left. She debated with herself for a moment: try to maneuver into the small area in front of the house, enclosed by a wall, or take the easy way and park next to the abandoned stone houses opposite, where there was more room? The second option, she decided: she’d rather get wet than risk scratching her borrowed car. She turned right and stopped, carefully pulling on the parking brake before turning off the engine. The rain continued to fall in sheets around her, and an unhappy cow bellowed in a nearby barn, setting off an unseen dog behind another wall.

  Maura got out of the car and debated about locking it. Back in Boston it wouldn’t have been a question: even if a car there was locked, the owner might still come back to find its tires gone. On a hill in Ireland, Maura couldn’t see another living soul, human or animal. What were the odds that a car thief would stumble on her car? She slipped the keys in her pocket, leaving the car unlocked, and headed toward Mrs. Nolan’s house.

  The door was closed when she came to it, so she knocked firmly, recalling that the older woman was hard of hearing. Inside there was the sound of shuffling, and a voice called out, “I’m on the way.” After thirty seconds or so, Bridget Nolan pulled open the door and beamed up at Maura. “Ah, it is you, after all. Dia duit, a Mhaire. I’ve been hoping you’d come by. Come in, come in, and dry yourself off.”

  “Thank you. It’s definitely wet today. Is it usually like this?”

  “Oh, no. Usually we have a hard rain,” Mrs. Nolan replied.

  It took Maura a moment to realize that she was joking. “I’m glad I know how to swim!”

  Mrs. Nolan nodded her approval at her reply. “Come in and sit by the fire. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I still love a good peat fire.”

  “Where do you get peat these days?” Maura asked.

  “The real thing, not those sad blocks you find in stores? I’ve a few friends who still cut their own.”

  Maura could see more or less rectangular pieces of what must be peat, half-burnt but still glowing in the small fireplace. They gave off a peculiar but distinctive smell, one that she’d noticed at the pub, the first day she was there.

  “It’s nice and warm in here, isn’t it?” Mrs. Nolan said. “I’ll just put the kettle on for the tea. Sit, will you?”

  Maura sat obediently. “By the way, I really appreciate you letting me use your car. I’d never realized that there was no way to get around once you leave the main roads.”

  “So Michael sorted that out for you? It slipped my mind yesterday. Ah, you young lot—you don’t walk places the way we used to. Impatient, aren’t you?”

  “I guess so. What was it you said when I came in? Was that Irish?”

  Mrs. Nolan toddled back. “Dia duit, you mean?” When Maura nodded, she explained, “It’s a greeting—it means ‘God be with you,’ but you may think of it as ‘hello.’”

  “You said something after it too. Ah why-ra?”

  “But that’s your name, dearie. I won’t trouble you with learning the language—not many people speak it anymore, although our government does keep trying to keep it going, more credit to them. But your name
is Maire, which is Mary.”

  What, now they’d given her a new name? “But I’m Maura,” she protested. “And you called your grandson ‘mee-hawl’?”

  “Yes, that’s how it’s said in Irish. As for your name, your grandmother and I wrote back and forth about it, when your parents were expecting you. She wanted you to have an Irish name, but she thought that Maire with the ‘a-i’ would be hard for you in school, and Maura with the ‘a-u’ is closer to the Irish sound of it anyway, and less old-fashioned than ‘o-i’ Moira. Better than Mary, don’t you think? Now, if your father had wanted to follow the old naming patterns, you should have been Nora, after his mother, but she thought that might be too out of date for a girl. What was your mother’s name, again? It seems to have slipped my mind.”

  “Helen.”

  “Ah, that’s right. Now, had you been a boy, you should have been James, after your grandfather, Nora’s husband. If you like, I can tell you where he’s buried, so you could pay your respects.”

  She’d forgotten to ask Mrs. Nolan about that, although it had been in the back of her mind. Her Irish grandfather had never been a very real figure to her. Gran had rarely mentioned him, though she wasn’t sure why. “Were he and Gran happy together?” Maura asked. She’d sometimes thought that maybe it had been an unhappy marriage, which was why Gran had wanted to put that whole time in Ireland behind her.

  Mrs. Nolan’s next words quickly erased that idea. “Indeed they were. He was a fine man, tall, hardworking. And he adored your gran—you could see it in the way he looked at her, when he thought she didn’t see. It near broke her heart when he died. He shouldn’t have, wouldn’t, if he’d gotten to hospital in time. He’d cut himself haying, but he said it was nothing to worry about until it was too late and it had gone septic, and no doctor near.”

  “Was that why she left here?”

  “In part. It made her sad, being here without him, even though she had friends and family all around. She hoped she’d have better opportunities in America. She knew some people there, and she found work, and someone to look after her son. He grew up to be a fine man, didn’t he?”

  Maura wasn’t sure if it was a question or a statement, but she had no reason to disagree. “As far as I know. His only mistake was marrying the wrong woman. The less said about her, the better. I don’t know where she is, and I don’t really care.”

  They both sat in silence for a few moments. Then Mrs. Nolan said, “A sad thing, that poor man in the bog.”

  “You’ve heard about that?” Maura asked, surprised. How had she found out?

  “Oh, yes. Mick came by yesterday and told me, and another friend or two stopped in as well. Michael insists I have a phone here, but I keep it only to please him, and I don’t use it much—I don’t hear near as well as I once did. My friends know to come directly rather than phone, bless them. They told me all about it.”

  “Do they know who it was yet?”

  “No one’s gone missing around here, that we remember. Could have been a traveler, although we don’t see many of them around here. And why would someone from away find himself dead in our bog?”

  Maura found herself getting lost in the Irish terms again. “Wait a moment—‘gardaí’ means police, right?”

  “It does, if there’s more than one of them. It’s a ‘garda’ if he’s alone. Or she, these days. But the place they work from is a garda station.”

  “Okay. So what’s a traveler?” Maura said.

  “Ah, you don’t know the term? A traveler, a tinker. They’re the Lucht Siúil, meaning ‘the walking people’—they wander about and do odd jobs.”

  Maura still wasn’t sure she understood the term—something like a gypsy, maybe? “So you’re saying that someone just passing through might have thought the bog was a good place to dump a body?”

  “I don’t think so, dear. More likely it was someone who didn’t know the land well, who stumbled off the path after dark. Might be that he’d had a bit too much to drink—there’s a pub not far along the road, at the Killinga crossroad.”

  “A pub? Out here?”

  Mrs. Nolan nodded. “Not so long ago when people didn’t have cars and such, they’d welcome a place they could walk to when their work was done. It’s still there—I’m sure you’ll be going by it sometime.”

  But one small question nagged at her: if everybody knew everybody else, shouldn’t someone know the dead man in the bog? Assuming, of course, that he wasn’t one of those prehistoric mummies she’d heard about. Was it a mummy if it had been preserved in a wet bog rather than a dry desert? She had no idea.

  “That bog where they found the…remains…right down the hill from here—the gardaí haven’t figured out how long it was there?”

  “Ah, now, there’s a question. A bog can hold many secrets, and it’s hard to say for how long. Seems hardly a day goes by without someone digging up an ancient crock of butter or a nice bundle of old silver or the like. Sometimes it’s hard to tell where a thing’s been left, and they do tend to shift around over time.”

  “Are there experts to talk to?” Maura asked.

  “Oh, certainly. No doubt we’ll be seeing some high muckety-muck from the National Museum poking around down there. Seems like the government always wants to stick its nose in our business.”

  The last thing Maura wanted was to get involved in a political discussion, especially since she knew nothing about the Irish government and was happy to leave it that way. Local regulations might apply to her, though. It struck her that if she wanted to stay on and work at the pub for more than a day or two, there might be paperwork to consider—or to ignore. Maura had seen more than one bar back home run afoul of regulations: were things more casual here? From what little she’d seen of Jimmy and Mick, they didn’t seem like the types to bother with details like that. Maybe it would be simpler to close the place down, now that Old Mick was gone.

  “Mrs. Nolan, did Mick tell you he’d asked me to stick around and help out at the pub for now?”

  Mrs. Nolan beamed at her. “He did that. I think it would be grand—I’d have more time to spend with you. There’s so much I can tell you about your gran and the families, but as you can see, I’m not as strong as I once was, and my memory isn’t as good as I’d like. But I’d be happy if you’d take him up on that.”

  “I’m still thinking about it, but I’d love to be able to spend more time with you too. I wish Gran had said more, but she was always so tired in the evenings, and didn’t always have the energy to talk.” And Maura herself had been too young and self-absorbed to ask. She regretted that now.

  “Ah, you’re a kind girl to humor an old woman. The young people now, they don’t want to listen to the old stories, or try to save the old language. Don’t worry yourself, dearie, and don’t feel you have to spend all your time with me. But if you want to listen, I’m happy to talk.”

  “I’d like that,” Maura said. “Where was it Gran lived? Or she was born? If she ever told me, I’ve forgotten the names.”

  “She was one of the Ballyriree Sullivans, a mile or so to the west. Now, your grandfather, James, he came from up toward Drinagh. He’s buried in the old cemetery there; not the one by the new church, but the one up the hill a ways from it, where the old church used to be. With his people.”

  “I’ll have to see if I can find it.”

  “I’d go with you, dear, but I’m afraid my old bones aren’t up to it, this early in the spring. Maybe when the weather turns warm. Heavens, what am I thinking? I near forgot about the tea!”

  “Can I help?” Maura offered.

  “No, I’m good. Don’t trouble yourself.” She stood up and went to the kitchen, where Maura could hear the clink of china as Mrs. Nolan filled the teapot and arranged cups and sugar and milk.

  Gran hadn’t talked much about her early life in Ireland, or her marriage, Maura reflected. As a result, Maura hadn’t given much thought to the people her gran had left behind. After all, it had been decades, and someh
ow Maura had assumed that those people were either dead or scattered. Now her shadowy grandfather was taking shape in her mind, and she had a sneaking suspicion there were other people, living or dead, who were somehow connected to her. In Boston she couldn’t have named all her neighbors who lived in the triple-deckers on either side of her. Yet here there were any number of people who knew her, or at least knew of her. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Mrs. Nolan emerged from the kitchen carrying a tray and walking carefully. She set it down on the table. “There you go. I baked the bread fresh this morning.” She sat down with a small sigh of relief. “Milk and sugar?”

  Maura accepted her cup from Mrs. Nolan’s unsteady hand. “Gran sent you a lot of letters over the years?” Maura asked.

  “She did.” Mrs. Nolan nodded. “She told me when your father married and when he died, but after that it was a dark time for her. She only started up again after a year or two had passed.”

  “She must have had her hands full, working and taking care of me.”

  “Ah, but you were the light of her life! Her very words. She wanted to do right by you, but it wasn’t easy. She was sorry that you didn’t go to university.” Mrs. Nolan looked at her as if asking for an explanation.

  “There was no money. Oh, I know, there were community colleges, and I did take some classes, but I was lousy at useful things like accounting or computer classes, and mainly I had to work to help out. Boston’s an expensive place to live.”

  “She told me. She was so grateful that you wanted to help, but it still made her sad that you ended your schooling. She said you were a bright girl.”

  Maura found herself fighting tears—again. Why did that keep happening? She had always felt that she’d let Gran down by not going to college, but the money just hadn’t been there. They’d never really sat down and talked about it, but they both knew the cold realities. Apparently she had fallen into the same pattern as her grandmother: don’t look back, just keep moving forward and hope that things improve. Was that any way to live a life? Her grandmother had died alone, except for Maura, leaving barely enough money to bury her. She’d been only seventy, and if things had been different, she could have looked forward to more healthy years ahead of her. Instead she’d worn herself out, sacrificed her health just to keep her head above water and take care of Maura. It wasn’t fair.