A Walk to Remember Read Free

and said, “I’ll bet you ten to one that you’re smartest kid in your class.” And he was! Yeah, my father was great at stuff like that. He could fling it with the best of ’em, that’s for sure. And he wasn’t such a bad guy, not really, especially if you consider the fact that he didn’t beat me or anything.
    But he wasn’t there for me growing up. I hate to say that because nowadays people claim that sort of stuff even if their parent
was
around and use it to excuse their behavior.
My dad . . . he didn’t love me . . . that’s why I became a stripper and performed on
The Jerry Springer Show. . . . I’m not using it to excuse the person I’ve become, I’m simply saying it as a fact. My father was gone nine months of the year, living out of town in a Washington, D.C., apartment three hundred miles away. My mother didn’t go with him because both of them wanted me to grow up “the same way they had.”
    Of course, my father’s father took him hunting and fishing, taught him to play ball, showed up for birthday parties, all that small stuff that adds up to quite a bit before adulthood. My father, on the other hand, was a stranger, someone I barely knew at all. For the first five years of my life I thought all fathers lived somewhere else. It wasn’t until my best friend, Eric Hunter, asked me in kindergarten who that guy was who showed up at my house the night before that I realized something wasn’t quite right about the situation.
    “He’s my father,” I said proudly.
    “Oh,” Eric said as he rifled through my lunchbox, looking for my Milky Way, “I didn’t know you had a father.”
    Talk about something whacking you straight in the face.
    So, I grew up under the care of my mother. Now she was a nice lady, sweet and gentle, the kind of mother most people dream about. But she wasn’t, nor could she ever be, a manly influence in my life, and that fact, coupled with my growing disillusionment with my father, made me become something of a rebel, even at a young age. Not a bad one, mind you. Me and my friends might sneak out late and soap up car windows now and then or eat boiled peanuts in the graveyard behind the church, but in the fifties that was the kind of thing that made other parents shake their heads and whisper to their children, “You don’t want to be like that Carter boy. He’s on the fast track to prison.”
    Me. A bad boy. For eating boiled peanuts in the graveyard. Go figure.
    Anyway, my father and Hegbert didn’t get along, but it wasn’t only because of politics. No, it seems that my father and Hegbert knew each other from way back when. Hegbert was about twenty years older than my father, and back before he was a minister, he used to work for my father’s father. My grandfather— even though he spent lots of time with my father—was a true bastard if there ever was one. He was the one, by the way, who made the family fortune, but I don’t want you to imagine him as the sort of man who slaved over his business, 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. The only 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