A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks
(excerpt)
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Chapter One
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A
Walk to Remember
In
1958, Beaufort, North Carolina, which is located on the coast near
Morehead City, was a place like many other small southern towns.
It was the kind of place where the humidity rose so high in the
summer that walking out to get the mail made a person feel as if
he needed a shower, and kids walked around barefoot from April
through October beneath oak trees draped in Spanish moss. People
waved from their cars whenever they saw someone on the street
whether they knew him or not, and the air smelled of pine, salt,
and sea, a scent unique to the Carolinas. For many of the people
there, fishing in the Pamlico Sound or crabbing in the Neuse River
was a way of life, and boats were moored wherever you saw the
Intracoastal Waterway. Only three channels came in on the
television, though television was never important to those of us
who grew up there. Instead our lives were centered around the
churches, of which there were eighteen within the town limits
alone. They went by names like the Fellowship Hall Christian
Church, the Church of the Forgiven People, the Church of Sunday
Atonement, and then, of course, there were the Baptist churches.
When I was growing up, it was far and away the most popular
denomination around, and there were Baptist churches on
practically every corner of town, though each considered itself
superior to the others. There were Baptist churches of every
type--Freewill Baptists, Southern Baptists, Congregational
Baptists, Missionary Baptists, Independent Baptists . . . well,
you get the picture.
Back
then, the big event of the year was sponsored by the Baptist
church downtown--Southern, if you really want to know--in
conjunction with the local high school. Every year they put on
their Christmas pageant at the Beaufort Playhouse, which was
actually a play that had been written by Hegbert Sullivan, a
minister who'd been with the church since Moses parted the Red
Sea. Okay, maybe he wasn't that old, but he was old enough that
you could almost see through the guy's skin. It was sort of clammy
all the time, and translucent--kids would swear they actually saw
the blood flowing through his veins--and his hair was as white as
those bunnies you see in pet stores around Easter.
Anyway,
he wrote this play called The Christmas Angel, because he didn't
want to keep on performing that old Charles Dickens classic A
Christmas Carol. In his mind Scrooge was a heathen, who came to
his redemption only because he saw ghosts, not angels--and who was
to say whether they'd been sent by God, anyway? And who was to say
he wouldn't revert to his sinful ways if they hadn't been sent
directly from heaven? The play didn't exactly tell you in the
end--it sort of plays into faith and all--but Hegbert didn't trust
ghosts if they weren't actually sent by God, which wasn't
explained in plain language, and this was his big problem with it.
A few years back he'd changed the end of the play--sort of
followed it up with his own version, complete with old man Scrooge
becoming a preacher and all, heading off to Jerusalem to find the
place where Jesus once taught the scribes. It didn't fly too
well--not even to the congregation, who sat in the audience
staring wide-eyed at the spectacle--and the newspaper said things
like "Though it was certainly interesting, it wasn't exactly
the play we've all come to know and love. . . ."
So
Hegbert decided to try his hand at writing his own play. He'd
written his own sermons his whole life, and some of them, we had
to admit, were actually interesting, especially when he talked
about the "wrath of God coming down on the fornicators"
and all that good stuff. That really got his blood boiling, I'll
tell you, when he talked about the fornicators. That was his real
hot spot. When we were younger, my friends and I would hide behind
the trees and shout, "Hegbert is a fornicator!" when we
saw him walking down the street, and we'd giggle like idiots, like
we were the wittiest creatures ever to inhabit the planet.
Old
Hegbert, he'd stop dead in his tracks and his ears would perk
up--I swear to God, they actually moved--and he'd turn this bright
shade of red, like he'd just drunk gasoline, and the big green
veins in his neck would start sticking out all over, like those
maps of the Amazon River that you see in National Geographic. He'd
peer from side to side, his eyes narrowing into slits as he
searched for us, and then, just as suddenly, he'd start to go pale
again, back to that fishy skin, right before our eyes. Boy, it was
something to watch, that's for sure.
So we'd
be hiding behind a tree and Hegbert (what kind of parents name
their kid Hegbert, anyway?) would stand there waiting for us to
give ourselves up, as if he thought we'd be that stupid. We'd put
our hands over our mouths to keep from laughing out loud, but
somehow he'd always zero in on us. He'd be turning from side to
side, and then he'd stop, those beady eyes coming right at us,
right through the tree. "I know who you are, Landon
Carter," he'd say, "and the Lord knows, too." He'd
let that sink in for a minute or so, and then he'd finally head
off again, and during the sermon that weekend he'd stare right at
us and say something like "God is merciful to children, but
the children must be worthy as well." And we'd sort of lower
ourselves in the seats, not from embarrassment, but to hide a new
round of giggles. Hegbert didn't understand us at all, which was
really sort of strange, being that he had a kid and all. But then
again, she was a girl. More on that, though, later.A
Walk to Remember
1111 |
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- persuasion  Vanity
was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's
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A novella, The Touchstone (1900), followed but
Wharton's reputation was founded upon a novel about a
failed social climber, The House of Mirth (1905).
portrait
of people and places
 "She
sang, of course, 'M'ama'
and not 'he loves me'
Edith
Wharton, publicity shot, c. 1905. Edith Wharton
Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
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III |
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