visit a lonely old woman who just wanted some company on Christmas Eve. At this point the mysterious woman asks Tom Thornton 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 he’ ll find what he’ s 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 he’ s sobbing, the mysterious lady runs off, and Tom Thornton searches but can’ t find her anywhere. Eventually he heads home, the lessons from the evening playing in his mind. He walks into his little girl’ s room, and her sleeping figure makes him realize that she’ s all he has left of his wife, and he starts to cry again because he knows he hasn’ t been a good enough father to her. The next morning, magically, the music box is underneath the tree, and the angel that’ s engraved on it looks exactly like the woman he’ d seen the night before.
So it wasn’ t that bad, really. If truth be told, people cried buckets whenever 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, considering 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 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 you’ re away from home, and that if you put your trust in God, you’ ll be all right in the end. It was a lesson that I would eventually learn in time, though it wasn’ t 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 Anne’ s Revenge, is supposedly buried somewhere in the sand just offshore. Recently some archaeologists or oceanographers or whoever looks for stuff like that said they found it, but no one’ s certain just yet, being that it sank over 250 years ago and you can’ t exactly reach into the glove compartment and check the registration. Beaufort’ s come a long way since the 1950s, but it’ s 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 the state— some twenty thousand square miles— and there wasn’ t 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 district my father represented.
I suppose you’ ve heard of him. He’ s 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 city 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