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Show 69 blond coloring and the looks of an angel, full of energy and laughter, singing when he wasn't laughing at his own made-up games. "How did they get lost?" Henry asked. "They didn't get lost. They got sick and died. Kathleen and I were sick, too, but we got better. Kurt and Kara didn't." Karl remembered it much too well, from the very beginning of the tragedy. The way Mary Eileen Culley had always come to the Kerner house to play with Kara, because even as a child of seven, Mary Eileen liked the cleanliness and order of the Kerner home better than the dirt and bedlam of the Culley house. Mary Eileen always brought along her little sister Mary Agnes, even on that day that Mary Agnes was coughing and feverish, a fact that Maggie Rose didn't discover for more than an hour because she was doing the wash, and the children had played quietly in the parlor. It was not until Mary Agnes Culley began to cry hoarsely that her throat hurt that Maggie Rose sent her home. A few days later, when Maggie Rose learned that the Culley children were severely ill with diphtheria, she became frantic. She sent for the doctor and put her own children to bed, but it didn't matter. She couldn't save them. One by one they took sick, Kara first, then Kurt, then Karl and Kathleen. On the day that Karl awakened from a lingering red haze of dilirium, his throat so filled with membrane that he felt choked and had to fight for breath, he found his father's sister Augusta seated beside his bed. Aunt Augusta told him that Kurt and Kara's souls had gone to heaven, that their bodies were buried in Holy Name Cemetery. |
