A Walk To Remember
By
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 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 year...

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