Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt
The Treegap constable knelt over the sprawled body of the man in the yellow suit, and then he said, “He ain’t dead. Leastways, not yet.”
Winnie opened her eyes a crack. She could see the shotgun lying on the grass where Mae had dropped it. She could see Mae’s hands, too, hanging limp, clenching, then hanging limp again. The sun was scorching hot, and near her ear a gnat whined.
The constable stood up. “What did you hit him for?” he wheezed resentfully.
“He was taking the child away,” said Mae. Her voice was dull and exhausted. “He was taking the child against her will.”
At this the constable exploded. “Ding-dang it, woman, what you trying to say? Taking that child against her will? That’s what you done. You kidnapped that child.”
Winnie let go of Tuck’s waist and turned around. Her trembling had stopped. “They didn’t kidnap me,” she said. “I came because I wanted to.”
Behind her, Tuck drew his breath in sharply.
“You wanted to?” echoed the constable, his eyes wide with disbelief. “You wanted to?”
“That’s right,” said Winnie unflinchingly. “They’re my friends.”
The constable stared at her. He scratched his chin, eyebrows high, and eased his own shotgun to the ground. Then he shrugged and looked down at the man in the yellow suit, who lay motionless on the grass, the blazing sun white on his face and hands. His eyes were closed now, but except for that, he looked more than ever like a marionette, a marionette flung carelessly into a corner, arms and legs every which way midst tangled strings.
The one glance she gave him fixed his appearance forever in Winnie’s mind. She turned her eyes away quickly, looking to Tuck for relief. But Tuck was not looking back at her. Instead, he was gazing at the body on the ground, leaning forward slightly, his brows drawn down, his mouth a little open. It was as if he were entranced and—yes, envious—like a starving man looking through a window at a banquet. Winnie could not bear to see him like that. She reached out a hand and touched him, and it broke the spell. He blinked and took her hand, squeezing it.
“Well, anyway,” said the constable at last, turning businesslike, “I got to take charge here. Get this feller into the house before he fries. I’m telling you now: if he don’t make it, you’re in a pickle, you people. Now, here’s what we’ll do. You,” he said, pointing at Mae, “you got to come with me, you and the little girl. You got to be locked up right away; and the little girl, I got to get her home. The rest of you, you stay here with him. Look after him. I’ll get back with a doctor quick as I can. Should have brought a deputy, but I didn’t expect nothing like this to happen. Well, it’s too late now. All right, let’s get moving.”
Miles said softly, “Ma. We’ll get you out right away.”
“Sure, Ma,” said Jesse.
“Don’t worry about me none,” said Mae in the same exhausted voice. “I’ll make out.”
“Make out?” exclaimed the constable. “You people beat all. If this feller dies, you’ll get the gallows, that’s what you’ll get, if that’s what you mean by make out.”
Tuck’s face crumpled. “The gallows?” he whispered. “Hanging?”
“That’s it,” said the constable. “That’s the law. Now, let’s get going.”
Miles and Jesse lifted the man in the yellow suit and carried him carefully into the house, but Tuck stood staring, and Winnie could guess what he was thinking. The constable swung her up onto his horse and directed Mae to her own saddle. But Winnie kept her eyes on Tuck. His face was very pale, the creases deeper than ever, and his eyes looked blank and sunken. She heard him whisper again, “The gallows!”
And then Winnie said something she had never said before, but the words were words she had sometimes heard, and often longed to hear. They sounded strange on her own lips and made her sit up straighter. “Mr. Tuck,” she said, “don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right.”
The constable glanced heavenward and shook his head. Then, clutching his shotgun, he climbed up behind Winnie and turned the horse toward the path. “You first,” he barked at Mae. “I got to keep an eye on you. And as for you,” he added grimly, speaking to Tuck, “you better hope that feller don’t die on you. I’ll be back soon as I can.”
“Everything’ll be all right,” Tuck repeated slowly.
Mae, slumped on the back of the fat old horse, did not respond. But Winnie leaned round the constable and looked back at Tuck. “You’ll see,” she said. And then she faced forward, sitting very straight. She was going home, but the thought of that was far from her mind. She watched the rump of the horse ahead, the swish of coarse, dusty hairs as he moved his tail. And she watched the swaying, sagging back of the woman who rode him.
Up through the dim pine trees they went, the constable’s breath wheezing in her ears, and emerging from the coolness and the green, Winnie saw again the wide world spread before her, shimmering with light and possibility. But the possibilities were different now. They did not point to what might happen to her but to what she herself might keep from happening. For the only thing she could think of was the clear and terrible necessity: Mae Tuck must never go to the gallows. Whatever happened to the man in the yellow suit, Mae Tuck must not be hanged. Because if all they had said was true, then Mae, even if she were the cruelest of murderers and deserved to be put to death—Mae Tuck would not be able to die.
21
Winnie pulled her little rocking chair up to her bedroom window and sat down. The rocking chair had been given to her when she was very small, but she still squeezed into it sometimes, when no one was looking, because the rocking made her almost remember something pleasant, something soothing, that would never quite come up to the surface of her mind. And tonight she wanted to be soothed.
The constable had brought her home. They had seized her at once, flinging the gate open and swooping down on her, her mother weeping, her father speechless, hugging her to him, her grandmother babbling with excitement. There was a painful pause when the constable told them she had gone away of her own free will, but it only lasted for a moment. They did not, would not believe it, and her grandmother said, “It was the elves. We heard them. They must have bewitched her.”
And so they had borne her into the house, and after she had taken the bath they insisted upon, they fed and petted her and refused, with little laughs and murmurs, to accept her answers to their questions: She had gone away with the Tucks because—well, she just wanted to. The Tucks had been very kind to her, had given her flapjacks, taken her fishing. The Tucks were good and gentle people. All this would have been swept away in any case, however, this good impression of her friends which she was trying to create, when she told them what had happened to the man in the yellow suit. Had they really given him the wood in exchange for finding her? They had. Well, perhaps he wouldn’t want it now. Mae had hit him with the shotgun. He was very sick. They received this news with mingled hope and horror, and her father said, “I suppose the wood will be ours again if that man should…that is, if he doesn’t…”
“You mean, if he dies,” Winnie had said, flatly, and they had sat back, shocked. Soon after, they put her to bed, with many kisses. But they peered at her anxiously over their shoulders as they tiptoed out of her bedroom, as if they sensed that she was different now from what she had been before. As if some part of her had slipped away.
Well, thought Winnie, crossing her arms on the windowsill, she was different. Things had happened to her that were hers alone, and had nothing to do with them. It was the first time. And no amount of telling about it could help them understand or share what she felt. It was satisfying and lonely, both at once. She rocked, gazing out at the twilight, and the soothing feeling came reliably into her bones. That feeling—it tied her to them, to her mother, her father, her grandmother, with strong threads too ancient and precious to be broken. But there were new threads now, tugging and insistent, which tied her just as firmly to the Tucks.
Winnie watched the sk
She cradled her head in her arms and closed her eyes. At once the image of the man in the yellow suit rose up. She could see him again, sprawled motionless on the sun-blanched grass. “He can’t die,” she whispered, thinking of Mae. “He mustn’t.” And then she considered his plans for the water in the spring, and Tuck’s voice saying, “They’d all come running like pigs to slops.” And she found herself thinking, “If it’s true about the spring, then he has to die. He must. And that’s why she did it.”
Then she heard hoofbeats on the road below, a horse hurrying into the village, and not long after, there were footsteps and a knocking on the door. Winnie crept out of her room and crouched in the shadows at the top of the stairs. It was the constable. She heard him saying, “So that’s that, Mr. Foster. We can’t press no kidnapping charges, since your little girl claims there wasn’t no kidnapping. But it don’t matter now, anyway. The doc just got back a few minutes ago. That feller—the one you sold your land to? He’s dead.” There was a pause, and the murmur of other voices; then a match striking, the acrid smell of fresh cigar smoke. “Yep, she got him a good one, all right. He never even come to. So it’s an open-and-shut case, since I seen her do it. Eyewitness. No question about it. They’ll hang her for sure.”
Winnie went back to her room and climbed into bed. She lay in the dark, propped up on the pillows, and stared at the lighter square of her window, at the heat lightning throbbing. It was like pain, she thought again, a dull pain on the fringes of the sky. Mae had killed the man in the yellow suit. And she had meant to kill him.
Winnie had killed a wasp once, in fear and anger, just in time to spare herself a stinging. She had slammed at the wasp with a heavy book, and killed it. And then, seeing its body broken, the thin wings stilled, she had wished it were alive again. She had wept for that wasp. Was Mae weeping now for the man in the yellow suit? In spite of her wish to spare the world, did she wish he were alive again? There was no way of knowing. But Mae had done what she thought she had to do. Winnie closed her eyes to shut out the silent pulsing of the lightning. Now she would have to do something. She had no idea what, but something. Mae Tuck must not go to the gallows.
22
Next morning Winnie went out to the fence directly after breakfast. It was the hottest day yet, so heavy that the slightest exertion brought on a flood of perspiration, an exhaustion in the joints. Two days before, they would have insisted that she stay indoors, but now, this morning, they were careful with her, a little gingerly, as if she were an egg. She had said, “I’m going outside now,” and they had said, “All right, but come in if it gets too hot, won’t you, dear?” And she had answered, “Yes.”
The earth, where it was worn bald under the gate, was cracked, and hard as rock, a lifeless tan color; and the road was an aisle of brilliant velvet dust. Winnie leaned against the fence, her hands gripping the warm metal of the bars, and thought about Mae behind another set of bars in the jailhouse. And then, lifting her head, she saw the toad. It was squatting where she had seen it first, across the road. “Hello!” she said, very glad to see it.
The toad did not so much as flick a muscle or blink an eye. It looked dried out today, parched. “It’s thirsty,” said Winnie to herself. “No wonder, on a day like this.” She left the fence and went back into the cottage. “Granny, can I have some water in a dish? There’s a toad out front that looks as if he’s just about to die of thirst.”
“A toad?” said her grandmother, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “Nasty things, toads.”
“Not this one,” said Winnie. “This one is always out there, and I like him. Can I give him a drink of water?”
“Toads don’t drink water, Winifred. It wouldn’t do him any good.”
“They don’t drink water at all?”
“No. They take it in through their skins, like a sponge. When it rains.”
“But it hasn’t rained forever!” said Winnie, alarmed. “I could sprinkle some water on him, couldn’t I? That would help, wouldn’t it?”
“Well, I suppose so,” said her grandmother. “Where is he? In the yard?”
“No,” said Winnie. “He’s across the road.”
“I’ll come with you, then. I don’t want you leaving the yard alone.”
But when they came out to the fence, Winnie balancing a small bowl of water with enormous care, the toad was gone.
“Well, he must be all right,” said her grandmother. “If he could hop off.”
With mingled disappointment and relief, Winnie tipped the water onto the cracked earth at the gate. It was sucked in immediately, and the wet brown stain it left behind paled and vanished almost as quickly.
“I never saw such heat in all my life,” said Winnie’s grandmother, dabbing uselessly at her neck with a handkerchief. “Don’t stay out here much longer.”
“I won’t,” said Winnie, and was left alone once more. She sat down on the grass and sighed. Mae! What could she do to set Mae free? She closed her eyes against the glaring light, and watched, a little dizzily, as brilliant patterns of red and orange danced inside her eyelids.
And then, miraculously, Jesse was there, crouching just on the other side of the fence. “Winnie!” he hissed. “You sleeping?”
“Oh, Jesse!” Her eyes flew open and she reached through the fence to grasp his hand. “I’m so glad to see you! What can we do? We have to get her out!”
“Miles’s got a plan, but I don’t see how it can work,” said Jesse, speaking quickly, his voice almost a whisper. “He knows a lot about carpentering. He says he can take Ma’s window frame right straight out of the wall, bars and all, and she can climb through. We’re going to try it tonight when it gets dark. Only trouble is, that constable keeps watching her every minute, he’s so durned proud of having a prisoner in that new jail of his. We been down to see her. She’s all right. But even if she can climb through the window, he’ll come after her soon’s he sees she’s gone. Seems to me he’ll notice right off. That don’t give us much time to get away. But we got to try it. There ain’t no other way. Anyhow, I come to say goodbye. We won’t be able to come back here for a long, long time, Winnie, if we get away. I mean, they’ll be looking for Ma. Winnie, listen—I won’t see you again, not for ages. Look now—here’s a bottle of water from the spring. You keep it. And then, no matter where you are, when you’re seventeen, Winnie, you can drink it, and then come find us. We’ll leave directions somehow. Winnie, please say you will!”
He pressed the little bottle into her hands and Winnie took it, closing her fingers over it. “Jesse, wait!” she whispered breathlessly, for all at once she had the answer. “I can help! When your mother climbs out the window, I’ll climb in and take her place. I can wrap myself up in her blanket, and when the constable looks in, he won’t be able to tell the difference. Not in the dark. I can hump up and look a lot bigger. Miles can even put the window back. That would give you time to get away! You’d have at least till morning!”
Jesse squinted at her, and then he said, “Yep—you know, it might work. It might just make the difference. But I don’t know as Pa’s going to want you taking any risk. I mean, what’ll they say to you after, when they find out?”
“I don’t know,” said Winnie, “but it doesn’t matter. Tell your father I want to help. I have to help. If it wasn’t for me, there wouldn’t have been any trouble in the first place. Tell him I have to.”
“Well…all right. Can you get out after dark?”
“Yes,” said Winnie.
“Then—at midnight, Winnie. I’ll be waiting for you right here at midnight.”
“Winifred!” an anxious voice called from the cottage. “Who’s that you’re tal
Winnie stood up and turned to answer. “It’s just a boy, Granny. I’ll be in in a minute.” When she turned around again, Jesse was gone. Winnie clutched the little bottle in her hands and tried to control the rising excitement that made her breath catch. At midnight she would make a difference in the world.
23
It was the longest day: mindlessly hot, unspeakably hot, too hot to move or even think. The countryside, the village of Treegap, the wood—all lay defeated. Nothing stirred. The sun was a ponderous circle without edges, a roar without a sound, a blazing glare so thorough and remorseless that even in the Fosters’ parlor, with curtains drawn, it seemed an actual presence. You could not shut it out.
Winnie’s mother and grandmother sat plaintive all afternoon in the parlor, fanning themselves and sipping lemonade, their hair unsettled and their knees loose. It was totally unlike them, this lapse from gentility, and it made them much more interesting. But Winnie didn’t stay with them. Instead, she took her own brimming glass to her room and sat in her little rocker by the window. Once she had hidden Jesse’s bottle in a bureau drawer, there was nothing to do but wait. In the hall outside her room, the grandfather’s clock ticked deliberately, unimpressed with anyone’s impatience, and Winnie found herself rocking to its rhythm—forward, back, forward, back, tick, tock, tick, tock. She tried to read, but it was so quiet that she could not concentrate, and so she was glad when at last it was time for supper. It was something to do, though none of them could manage more than a nibble.
But later, when Winnie went out again to the fence, she saw that the sky was changing. It was not so much clouding up as thickening, somehow, from every direction at once, the blank blue gone to haze. And then, as the sun sank reluctantly behind the treetops, the haze hardened to a brilliant brownish-yellow. In the wood, the leaves turned underside-up, giving the trees a silvery cast.