A Walk To Remember

A Walk To Remember
Nicholas Sparks

Chapter 1
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 Octoberbeneath 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 theBaptist
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 thepicture.
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, maybehe 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 onperforming 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 faithand 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. Itdidn’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, wereactually 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...