The Echoes--A Novel by Jess Montgomery

Author:Jess Montgomery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

* * *

A few minutes later, Hiram sits on the bottom front porch step, Lily and Marvena standing before him. Sadie has curled up on the ground for a snooze. Ida and Dorit have retreated inside. Lily has the feeling that this is the first they’ve listened to Hiram’s wishes in a long time. With the dull stirring on this hot morning of thin curtains in open windows, Lily doubts their conversation is very private.

Hiram’s expression is stolid. He looks as he had in those moments after his outburst at the park—staring a thousand miles away. His hair is tousled, and he’s wearing just an undershirt with his pants. His feet are bare. His forearms rest on his knees, his hands clasped as if in prayer.

“Hiram?” Lily finally says softly, trying to call him back.

After a long moment, he looks up at her. “Told you I had a big crush on Pearl. But more’n that, I knew about the baby. Knew she was pregnant when she left with Soph—with Mrs. Fitzpatrick—to tend to her aunt down in Virginia.”

“How did you know that?” Marvena asks.

“Pearl told me. We became friends again, working for the Fitzpatricks. She told me that the baby is Chalmer’s, but that Mrs. Fitzpatrick didn’t know. When they first came back, I asked Pearl what happened to the baby, and she said she’d had it down in Virginia and came back before Mrs. Fitzpatrick, who’d dismissed her after finding out Pearl was pregnant out of wedlock. Said Mrs. Fitzpatrick called her all sorts of names, claimed she couldn’t have a woman like Pearl working for them.

“When she got back, Pearl left the baby with the wet nurse. She didn’t want people to know she’d had a child out of wedlock, and how would she take care of a baby by herself? I told her I’d marry her, tell everyone the baby was mine, and help her take care of the baby, but she—she just wanted Chalmer to help her take care of the baby. Or pay her to give the baby up for adoption. She was trying to decide which—she hadn’t told him yet about the baby.”

So the shock Chalmer displayed about the baby last night was genuine, Lily thinks.

“I followed her after she left the park,” Hiram says. “She didn’t go back to her house.”

Well, that fit what the neighbors had told Lily and Marvena earlier.

“She trekked all the way over to the Owens place,” Hiram goes on, “where she’d been paying Suda to take care of the baby, got the baby, brought her to the Fitzpatricks, and left her on the side porch. I surprised Pearl as she was leaving—she didn’t know I’d been following her all this time—asked her what she was doing. She said she’d had enough, she was leaving the baby with his father, and she was going to leave town, start over. I begged her to change her mind, told her I— I loved her.” Hiram’s eyes water, his expression finally crumbling in hurt and pain.

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