Excerpt of Buried In A Bog by Sheila Connolly

Maura Donovan checked her watch again. If she had it right, she had been traveling for over fourteen hours; she wasn't going to reset it for the right time zone until she got where she was going, which she hoped would be any minute now. First the red–eye flight from Boston to Dublin, the cheapest she could find; then a bus from Dublin to Cork, then another, slower bus from Cork to Leap, a flyspeck on the map on the south coast of Ireland. But she was finding that in Ireland nobody ever hurried, especially on the local bus. The creaking vehicle would pull over at a location with no obvious markings, and people miraculously appeared. They greeted the driver by name; they greeted each other as well. Her they nodded at, wary of a stranger in their midst.

She tried to smile politely in return, but she was exhausted. She didn't know where she was or what she was doing. She was on this rattletrap bus only because Gran had asked her to make the trip?just before she died, worn down from half a century of scrabbling to make a living and keep a roof over her granddaughter's head in South Boston. Now that she thought about it, Gran had probably been planning this trip for her for quite a while. She had insisted that Maura get a passport, and not just any passport, but an Irish one, which was possible only because Gran had filed for an Irish Certificate of Foreign Birth for her when she was a child. What else had Gran not told her?

And what else had she been too young and too selfish to ask about? Gran had never talked much about her life in Ireland, before she had been widowed and brought her young son to Boston, and Maura had been too busy trying to be American to care. She didn't remember her father, no more than a large laughing figure. Or her mother, who after her father's death had decided that raising a child alone, with an Irish–born mother–in–law, was not for her and split. It had always been just her and Gran, in a small apartment in a shabby triple–decker in a not–so–good neighborhood in South Boston.

Which was where Irish immigrants had been settling for generations, so Maura was no stranger to the Boston Irish community. Maybe her grandmother Nora Donovan had never shoved the Ould Country down her throat, but there had been many a time that Maura had come home from school or from work and found Gran deep in conversation with some new immigrant, an empty plate in front of him. She'd taken it on herself to look out for the new ones, who'd left Ireland much as Gran had, hoping for a better life, or more money. The flow had slowed for a while when the Celtic Tiger—the unexpected prosperity that had swept the country and disappeared again within less than a decade—was raging, but then it had picked up again in the past few years.

Maura suspected that Gran had been slipping the lads some extra cash, which would go a long way toward explaining why they'd never had the money to move out of the one–bedroom apartment they'd lived in as long as Maura could remember. Why Gran had worked more than one job, and why Maura had started working as early as the law would let her. Why Gran had died, riddled with cancer after waiting too long to see a doctor, and had left a bank account with barely enough to cover the last bills. Then the landlord had announced he was converting the building to condominiums, now that Southie was becoming gentrified, and Maura was left with no home and no one.

It was only when she was packing up Gran's pitifully few things that she'd found the envelope with the money. In one of their last conversations in the hospital, Gran had made her promise to go to Ireland, to tell her friend Bridget Nolan that she'd passed, and to say a Mass in the old church in Leap, where she'd been married. "Say my farewells for me, darlin'," she'd said, and Maura had agreed, although she had thought it was no more than the ramblings of a sick old woman. How was she supposed to fly to Ireland, when she wasn't sure she could make the next rent payment?