Tuck Everlasting

The man enters and tells a story from his childhood. Years ago, a friend of his grandmother married a man from a family that never seemed to age. After 20 years, the woman took her children and stayed with the man with the yellow suit (still a child) and his family. They told many stories, one of which about the very memorable tune Mae’s music box plays. When he heard the tune coming from the Fosters’ wood the other night, he knew he found them. He followed them when they kidnapped Winnie and listened to their entire story.

The Tucks are pained and outraged. The man in the yellow suit wants their help to find the spring so he can sell the water to “certain people, people who deserve it” (96). He offers the Tucks money for their help, but the Tucks refuse. The man shrugs off their anger and grabs Winnie, pushing her out the door, where Mae stands with Tuck’s shotgun. The man is unphased. If the Tucks don’t want to help, he’ll force Winnie to drink from the spring and use her instead. Mae cracks the man over the head with the shotgun, breaking his skull. He collapses, and the constable rides into the clearing “just in time to see it all” (102).

The man in the yellow suit is badly hurt but not dead. Mae defends her actions, saying the man was taking Winnie against her will. The constable accuses Mae of doing the exact same thing, but Winnie argues that she came with the Tucks because she wanted to. Her statement stops the argument, and she notices Tuck staring at the nearly dead man “like a starving man looking through a window at a banquet” (105).

Despite Winnie’s statement, Mae is still in trouble, and if the man dies, she’ll be hanged for murder. Mae and Winnie go with the constable while the rest of the Tucks take the dying man inside to wait for a doctor. As Winnie rides back along the road that brought her to the Tuck’s house, she no longer thinks of the wide world and all its possibilities. She thinks only of the near future and what must be done to keep Mae from being hanged because even if she was brought to the gallows, “Mae Tuck would not be able to die” (107), and the secret would be out.