MARY WORRIED FOR ANNIE, WHO WAS FADING AWAY LIKE A LITTLE BROWN bird. She was watchful for any change in her, coaxing her gently to try to eat or drink a little. Con too had grown quiet since his friend had died. He no longer played with the other boys and at night she could hear him cough in the darkness in the bunk above her.
‘Mary! Mary, wake up!’ John was standing before her. ‘It’s Con. He’s burning up.’
Mary moved Annie off her. Climbing out of her bunk, she could see that Con was curled up tightly on his side, his head and neck wet with sweat. Jude and Tim lay beside him fast asleep. She woke them gently and told them to go down below with the girls as she tried to rouse Con. He moaned and complained that his stomach and head hurt before lapsing back into sleep.
Mary tried not to give in to the panic she felt. John fetched a damp rag with which to cool him down, despite her son’s groans of protest. For the rest of the night, she sat on the corner of the bunk, watching over him as John lay beside him. In the morning, he was no better and pulled the blanket over him as the others got up. His cough had worsened, racking his chest, and he had developed a few sores on his body.
‘What are we to do?’ she pleaded with John. ‘There is no physician on the ship.’
John and Nora took over caring for Annie as Mary minded Con. She spent the hours talking and singing to him, as she had done when he was younger. He was drowsy most of the time, retching bile into the bucket a few times before slumping back on to the bunk. Although his body was burning up, his teeth were chattering, and he shivered with rigors as he groaned and mumbled in his sleep, thrashing around on the mattress. With a damp piece of cloth, she desperately tried to keep his fever down.
Kate Connolly, a kindly woman from Sherkin Island, gave her a special poultice she had made of herbs and seaweed from the island to put on his chest.
‘It may do your boy some good,’ she offered quietly, but Con pushed it off him roughly.
As time went on, her eldest son’s condition worsened. Though she tried to make him drink, he refused, saying he was not thirsty. His breath grew laboured and it sounded as if he had a whole bag of water in his chest.
The other children were scared. They tried to talk to him and encourage him to get better, but Con looked away and closed his eyes. It was as if he could no longer see them.
Mary railed against God for allowing her child to fall ill. She had done everything in her power to protect him from the hunger and fever, and still her boy was sick … Sicker than she had ever seen him, struggling for his life.
For two full days he thrashed and moaned as she sat with him and stroked his head.
‘We will be in America in a few days, Con,’ she promised him. ‘You will see your uncle Pat and New York. Everything will be grand there for us.’
She rambled on, trying to get him to fight and cling on to life. John told him of the day he was born and how much he loved him from the first second he held him in his arms. Mary’s eyes welled with tears at the memory of it.
But all their words and all their prayers and all their love were not enough. Late into the long night, as the ship moved on the ocean waves, Con simply closed his eyes and, with only a few deep, shuddering breaths, was still …
With his arms stretched out peacefully on the mattress beside them, Con’s young beating heart finally stopped. Mary sat in silence, holding her own breath, for she too felt that she might die, while John sobbed openly, his head in his hands, broken-hearted.