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