1、http:/http:/A Walk to RememberNICHOLAS SPARKSCONTENTS:PROLOGUECHAPTER ONECHAPTER TWOCHAPTER THREECHAPTER FOURCHAPTER FIVECHAPTER SIXCHAPTER SEVENCHAPTER EIGHTCHAPTER NINECHAPTER TENCHAPTER ELEVENCHAPTER TWELVECHAPTER THIRTEENPrologue When I was seventeen, my life changed forever. I know that there a
2、re people who wonder abou t me when I say this. They look at me strangely as if trying to fathom what could have happened back then, though I seldom bother to explain. Because Ive lived here for most of my life, I dont feel that I have to unless its on my terms, and that would take more time than mo
3、st people are willing to give me. My story cant be summed up in two or three sentences; it cant be packaged into something neat and simple that people would immediately understand. Despite the passage of forty years, the people still living here who knew me that year accept my lack of explanation wi
4、thout question. My story in some ways is their story because it was something that all of us lived through. It was I, however, who was closest to it. Im fifty-seven years old, but even now I can remember everything from that year, down to the smallest details. I relive that year often in my mind, br
5、inging it back to life, and I realize that when I do, I always feel a strange combination of sadness and joy. There are moments when I wish I could roll back the clock and take all the sadness away, but I have the feeling that if I did, the joy would be gone as well. So I take the memories as they c
6、ome, accepting them all, letting them guide me whenever I can. This happens more often than I let on. It is April 12, in the last year before the millennium, and as I leave my house, I glance around. The sky is overcast and gray, but as I move down the street, I notice that the dogwoods and azaleas
7、are blooming. I zip my jacket just a little. The temperature is cool, though I know its only a matter of weeks before it will settle in to something comfortable and the gray skies give way to the kind of http:/days that make North Carolina one of the most beautiful places in the world. With a sigh,
8、I feel it all coming back to me. I close my eyes and the years begin to move in reverse, slowly ticking backward, like the hands of a clock rotating in the wrong direction. As if through someone elses eyes, I watch myself grow younger; I see my hair changing from gray to brown, I feel the wrinkles a
9、round my eyes begin to smooth, my arms and legs grow sinewy. Lessons Ive learned with age grow dimmer, and my innocence returns as that eventful year approaches. Then, like me, the world begins to change: roads narrow and some become gravel, suburban sprawl has been replaced with farmland, downtown
10、streets teem with people, looking in windows as they pass Sweeneys bakery and Palkas meat shop. Men wear hats, women wear dresses. At the courthouse up the street, the bell tower rings. . . . I open my eyes and pause. I am standing outside the Baptist church, and when I stare at the gable, I know ex
11、actly who I am. My name is Landon Carter, and Im seventeen years old. This is my story; I promise to leave nothing out. First you will smile, and then you will cry-dont say you havent been warned. Chapter 1 In 1958, Beaufort, North Carolina, which is located on the coast near Morehead City, was a pl
12、ace 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 w
13、aved 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 w
14、herever 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 th
15、e 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
16、 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 B
17、aptist 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 whod been with the church since Moses parte
18、d the Red Sea. Okay, maybe he wasnt that old, but he was old enough that you could almost see through the guys 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 st
19、ores around Easter. http:/Anyway, he wrote this play called The Christmas Angel, because he didnt 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 whe
20、ther theyd been sent by God, anyway? And who was to say he wouldnt revert to his sinful ways if they hadnt been sent directly from heaven? The play didnt exactly tell you in the end-it sort of plays into faith and all-but Hegbert didnt trust ghosts if they werent actually sent by God, which wasnt ex
21、plained in plain language, and this was his big problem with it. A few years back hed 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
22、 didnt 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 wasnt exactly the play weve all come to know and love. . . .” So Hegbert decided to try his hand at writing his own
23、 play. Hed 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, Ill tell you, when he talked about the fornic
24、ators. 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 wed giggle like idiots, like we were the wittiest creatures ever to inhabit the planet. Old Hegbert, hed stop dead
25、in his tracks and his ears would perk up-I swear to God, they actually moved-and hed turn this bright shade of red, like hed 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. Hed peer f
26、rom side to side, his eyes narrowing into slits as he searched for us, and then, just as suddenly, hed start to go pale again, back to that fishy skin, right before our eyes. Boy, it was something to watch, thats for sure. So wed be hiding behind a tree and Hegbert (what kind of parents name their k
27、id Hegbert, anyway?) would stand there waiting for us to give ourselves up, as if he thought wed be that stupid. Wed put our hands over our mouths to keep from laughing out loud, but somehow hed always zero in on us. Hed be turning from side to side, and then hed stop, those beady eyes coming right
28、at us, right through the tree. “I know who you are, Landon Carter,” hed say, “and the Lord knows, too.” Hed let that sink in for a minute or so, and then hed finally head off again, and during the sermon that weekend hed stare right at us and say something like “God is merciful to children, but the
29、children must be worthy as well.” And wed sort of lower ourselves in the seats, not from embarrassment, but to hide a new round of giggles. Hegbert didnt 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, lat
30、er. Anyway, like I said, Hegbert wrote The Christmas Angel one year and decided to put on that play instead. The play itself wasnt bad, actually, which surprised everyone the first year it was performed. Its basically the story of a man who had lost his wife a few years back. This guy, Tom Thornton,
31、 used to be real religious, but he had a crisis of faith after his wife died during childbirth. Hes raising this little girl all on his own, but he hasnt been the greatest father, and what the little girl really wants for Christmas is a special music box with an angel engraved on top, a picture of w
32、hich shed cut out from an old catalog. The guy searches long and hard to find the gift, but he cant find it anywhere. So its Christmas Eve and hes still searching, and while hes out looking through the stores, he comes across a strange woman hes never seen before, and she promises to help him find t
33、he gift for his daughter. First, though, they help this homeless person http:/(back then they were called bums, by the way), then they stop at an orphanage to see some kids, then visit a lonely old woman who just wanted some company on Christmas Eve. At this point the mysterious woman asks Tom Thorn
34、ton what he wants for Christmas, and he says that he wants his wife back. She brings him to the city fountain and tells him to look in the water and hell find what hes looking for. When he looks in the water, he sees the face of his little girl, and he breaks down and cries right there. While hes so
35、bbing, the mysterious lady runs off, and Tom Thornton searches but cant find her anywhere. Eventually he heads home, the lessons from the evening playing in his mind. He walks into his little girls room, and her sleeping figure makes him realize that shes all he has left of his wife, and he starts t
36、o cry again because he knows he hasnt been a good enough father to her. The next morning, magically, the music box is underneath the tree, and the angel thats engraved on it looks exactly like the woman hed seen the night before. So it wasnt that bad, really. If truth be told, people cried buckets w
37、henever they saw it. The play sold out every year it was performed, and due to its popularity, Hegbert eventually had to move it from the church to the Beaufort Playhouse, which had a lot more seating. By the time I was a senior in high school, the performances ran twice to packed houses, which, con
38、sidering who actually performed it, was a story in and of itself. You see, Hegbert wanted young people to perform the play-seniors in high school, not the theater group. I reckon he thought it would be a good learning experience before the seniors headed off to college and came face-to-face with all
39、 the fornicators. He was that kind of guy, you know, always wanting to save us from temptation. He wanted us to know that God is out there watching you, even when youre away from home, and that if you put your trust in God, youll be all right in the end. It was a lesson that I would eventually learn
40、 in time, though it wasnt Hegbert who taught me. As I said before, Beaufort was fairly typical as far as southern towns went, though it did have an interesting history. Blackbeard the pirate once owned a house there, and his ship, Queen Annes Revenge, is supposedly buried somewhere in the sand just
41、offshore. Recently some archaeologists or oceanographers or whoever looks for stuff like that said they found it, but no ones certain just yet, being that it sank over 250 years ago and you cant exactly reach into the glove compartment and check the registration. Beauforts come a long way since the
42、1950s, but its still not exactly a major metropolis or anything. Beaufort was, and always will be, on the smallish side, but when I was growing up, it barely warranted a place on the map. To put it into perspective, the congressional district that included Beaufort covered the entire eastern part of
43、 the state-some twenty thousand square miles-and there wasnt a single town with more than twenty-five thousand people. Even compared with those towns, Beaufort was regarded as being on the small side. Everything east of Raleigh and north of Wilmington, all the way to the Virginia border, was the dis
44、trict my father represented. I suppose youve heard of him. Hes sort of a legend, even now. His name is Worth Carter, and he was a congressman for almost thirty years. His slogan every other year during the election season was “Worth Carter represents -,” and the person was supposed to fill in the ci
45、ty name where he or she lived. I can remember, driving on trips when me and Mom had to make our appearances to show the people he was a true family man, that wed see those bumper stickers, stenciled in with names like Otway and Chocawinity and Seven Springs. Nowadays stuff like that wouldnt fly, but
46、 http:/back then that was fairly sophisticated publicity. I imagine if he tried to do that now, people opposing him would insert all sorts of foul language in the blank space, but we never saw it once. Okay, maybe once. A farmer from Duplin County once wrote the word shit in the blank space, and whe
47、n my mom saw it, she covered my eyes and said a prayer asking for forgiveness for the poor ignorant bastard. She didnt say exactly those words, but I got the gist of it. So my father, Mr. Congressman, was a bigwig, and everyone but everyone knew it, including old man Hegbert. Now, the two of them di
48、dnt get along, not at all, despite the fact that my father went to Hegberts church whenever he was in town, which to be frank wasnt all that often. Hegbert, in addition to his belief that fornicators were destined to clean the urinals in hell, also believed that communism was “a sickness that doomed
49、 mankind to heathenhood.” Even though heathenhood wasnt a word-I cant find it in any dictionary-the congregation knew what he meant. They also knew that he was directing his words specifically to my father, who would sit with his eyes closed and pretend not to listen. My father was on one of the House committees that oversaw the “Red influence” supposedly infiltrating every aspect of the c
