A Walk to Remember Read Free

working diligently and watching it grow, prospering slowly over time. My grandfather was much shrewder than that. The way he made his money was simple—he started as a bootlegger, accumulating wealth throughout Prohibition by running rum up from Cuba. Then he began buying land and hiring sharecroppers to work it. He took ninety percent of the money the sharecroppers made on their tobacco crop, then loaned them money whenever they needed it at ridiculous interest rates. Of course, he never intended to collect the money—instead he would foreclose on any land or equipment they happened to own. Then, in what he called “his moment of inspiration,” he started a bank called Carter Banking and Loan. Theonly other bank in a two-county radius had mysteriously burned down, and with the onset of the Depression, it never reopened. Though everyone knew what had really happened, not a word was ever spoken for fear of retribution, and their fear was well placed. The bank wasn’t the only building that had mysteriously burned down.
    His interest rates were outrageous, and little by little he began amassing more land and property as people defaulted on their loans. When the Depression hit hardest, he foreclosed on dozens of businesses throughout the county while retaining the original owners to continue to work on salary, paying them just enough to keep them where they were, because they had nowhere else to go. He told them that when the economy improved, he’d sell their business back to them, and people always believed him.
    Never once, however, did he keep his promise. In the end he controlled a vast portion of the county’s economy, and he abused his clout in every way imaginable.
    I’d like to tell you he eventually went to a terrible death, but he didn’t. He died at a ripe-old age while sleeping with his mistress on his yacht off the Cayman Islands. He’doutlived both his wives and his only son. Some end for a guy like that, huh? Life, I’ve learned, is never fair. If people teach anything in school, that should be it.
    But back to the story. . . . Hegbert, once he realized what a bastard my grandfather really was, quit working for him and went into the ministry, then came back to Beaufort and started ministering in the same church we attended. He spent his first few years perfecting his fire-and-brimstone act with monthly sermons on the evils of the greedy, and this left him scant time for anything else. He was forty-three before he ever got married; he was fifty-five when his daughter, Jamie Sullivan, was born. His wife, a wispy little thing twenty years younger than he, went through six miscarriages before Jamie was born, and in the end she died in childbirth, making Hegbert a widower who had to raise a daughter on his own.
    Hence, of course, the story behind the play.
    People knew the story even before the play was first performed. It was one of those stories that made its rounds whenever Hegbert had to baptize a baby or attend a funeral. Everyone knew about it, and that’s why, I think, so many people got emotional whenever they saw the Christmas play. They knew itwas based on something that happened in real life, which gave it special meaning.
    Jamie Sullivan was a senior in high school, just like me, and she’d already been chosen to play the angel, not that anyone else even had a chance. This, of course, made the play extra special that year. It was going to be a big deal, maybe the biggest ever—at least in Miss Garber’s mind. She was the drama teacher, and she was already glowing about the possibilities the first time I met her in class.
    Now, I hadn’t really planned on taking drama that year. I really hadn’t, but it was either that or chemistry II. The thing was , I thought it would be a blow-off class, especially when compared with my other option. No papers, no tests, no tables where I’d have to memorize protons and neutrons and combine elements in their proper formulas . . . what could possibly be