“Dear me, no,” said Mae, peering at her hopefully. “It’s only my music box. I didn’t suppose anyone could hear it.” She held it out to Winnie. “Do you want to take a look at it?”
“It’s pretty,” said Winnie, taking the little box and turning it over in her hands. The winding key was still revolving, but more and more slowly. The melody faltered. Another few widely spaced notes plinked, and then it stopped.
“Wind it up if you want to,” said Mae. “Clockwise.”
Winnie turned the key. It clicked faintly. And then, after several more turns, the music began to play again, brisk from its fresh winding, and merry. No one who owned a thing like this could be too disagreeable. Winnie examined the painted roses and lilies of the valley, and smiled in spite of herself. “It’s pretty,” she repeated, handing it back to Mae.
The music box had relaxed them all. Miles dragged a handkerchief from a back pocket and mopped at his face, and Mae sank down heavily on a rock, pulling off the blue straw hat and fanning herself with it.
“Look here, Winnie Foster,” said Jesse. “We’re friends, we really are. But you got to help us. Come sit down, and we’ll try to tell you why.”
7
It was the strangest story Winnie had ever heard. She soon suspected they had never told it before, except to each other—that she was their first real audience; for they gathered around her like children at their mother’s knee, each trying to claim her attention, and sometimes they all talked at once, and interrupted each other, in their eagerness.
Eighty-seven years before, the Tucks had come from a long way to the east, looking for a place to settle. In those days the wood was not a wood, it was a forest, just as her grandmother had said: a forest that went on and on and on. They had thought they would start a farm, as soon as they came to the end of the trees. But the trees never seemed to end. When they came to the part that was now the wood, and turned from the trail to find a camping place, they happened on the spring. “It was real nice,” said Jesse with a sigh. “It looked just the way it does now. A clearing, lots of sunshine, that big tree with all those knobby roots. We stopped and everyone took a drink, even the horse.”
“No,” said Mae, “the cat didn’t drink. That’s important.”
“Yes,” said Miles, “don’t leave that out. We all had a drink, except for the cat.”
“Well, anyway,” Jesse went on, “the water tasted—sort of strange. But we camped there overnight. And Pa carved a T on the tree trunk, to mark where we’d been. And then we went on.”
They had come out of the forest at last, many miles to the west, had found a thinly populated valley, had started their farm. “We put up a house for Ma and Pa,” said Miles, “and a little shack for Jesse and me. We figured we’d be starting families of our own pretty soon and would want our own houses.”
“That was the first time we figured there was something peculiar,” said Mae. “Jesse fell out of a tree…”
“I was way up in the middle,” Jesse interrupted, “trying to saw off some of the big branches before we cut her down. I lost my balance and I fell…”
“He landed plum on his head,” said Mae with a shudder. “We thought for sure he’d broke his neck. But come to find out, it didn’t hurt him a bit!”
“Not long after,” Miles went on, “some hunters come by one day at sunset. The horse was out grazing by some trees and they shot him. Mistook him for a deer, they said. Can you fancy that? But the thing is, they didn’t kill him. The bullet went right on through him, and didn’t hardly even leave a mark.”
“Then Pa got snake bite…”
“And Jesse ate the poison toadstools…”
“And I cut myself,” said Mae. “Remember? Slicing bread.”
But it was the passage of time that worried them most. They had worked the farm, settled down, made friends. But after ten years, then twenty, they had to face the fact that there was something terribly wrong. None of them was getting any older.
“I was more’n forty by then,” said Miles sadly. “I was married. I had two children. But, from the look of me, I was still twenty-two. My wife, she finally made up her mind I’d sold my soul to the Devil. She left me. She went away and she took the children with her.”
“I’m glad I never got married,” Jesse put in.
“It was the same with our friends,” said Mae. “They come to pull back from us. There was talk about witchcraft. Black magic. Well, you can’t hardly blame them, but finally we had to leave the farm. We didn’t know where to go. We started back the way we come, just wandering. We was like gypsies. When we got this far, it’d changed, of course. A lot of the trees was gone. There was people, and Treegap—it was a new village. The road was here, but in those days it was mostly just a cow path. We went on into what was left of the wood to make a camp, and when we got to the clearing and the tree and the spring, we remembered it from before.”
“It hadn’t changed, no more’n we had,” said Miles. “And that was how we found out. Pa’d carved a T on the tree, remember, twenty years before, but the T was just where it’d been when he done it. That tree hadn’t grown one whit in all that time. It was exactly the same. And the T he’d carved was as fresh as if it’d just been put there.”
Then they had remembered drinking the water. They—and the horse. But not the cat. The cat had lived a long and happy life on the farm, but had died some ten years before. So they decided at last that the source of their changelessness was the spring.
“When we come to that conclusion,” Mae went on, “Tuck said—that’s my husband, Angus Tuck—he said he had to be sure, once and for all. He took his shotgun and he pointed it at hisself the best way he could, and before we could stop him, he pulled the trigger.” There was a long pause. Mae’s fingers, laced together in her lap, twisted with the tension of remembering. At last she said, “The shot knocked him down. Went into his heart. It had to, the way he aimed. And right on through him. It scarcely even left a mark. Just like—you know—like you shot a bullet through water. And he was just the same as if he’d never done it.”
“After that we went sort of crazy,” said Jesse, grinning at the memory. “Heck, we was going to live forever. Can you picture what it felt like to find that out?”
“But then we sat down and talked it over…” said Miles.
“We’re still talking it over,” Jesse added.
“And we figured it’d be very bad if everyone knowed about that spring,” said Mae. “We begun to see what it would mean.” She peered at Winnie. “Do you understand, child? That water—it stops you right where you are. If you’d had a drink of it today, you’d stay a little girl forever. You’d never grow up, not ever.”
“We don’t know how it works, or even why,” said Miles.
“Pa thinks it’s something left over from—well, from some other plan for the way the world should be,” said Jesse. “Some plan that didn’t work out too good. And so everything was changed. Except that the spring was passed over, somehow or other. Maybe he’s right. I don’t know. But you see, Winnie Foster, when I told you before I’m a hundred and four years old, I was telling the truth. But I’m really only seventeen. And, so far as I know, I’ll stay seventeen till the end of the world.”
8
Winnie did not believe in fairy tales. She had never longed for a magic wand, did not expect to marry a prince, and was scornful—most of the time—of her grandmother’s elves. So now she sat, mouth open, wide-eyed, not knowing what to make of this extraordinary story. It couldn’t—not a bit of it—be true. And yet:
“It feels so fine to tell somebody!” Jesse exploded. “Just think, Winnie Foster, you’re the only person in the world, besides us, who knows about it!”
“Hold on now,” said Miles cautiously. “Maybe not. There might be a whole lot of others, for all we know, wandering around just like us.”
“Maybe. But we don’t know them,” Jesse pointed out. “We’ve never had anyone but us to talk about it to. Winni
e—isn’t it peculiar? And kind of wonderful? Just think of all the things we’ve seen in the world! All the things we’re going to see!”
“That kind of talk’ll make her want to rush back and drink a gallon of the stuff,” warned Miles. “There’s a whole lot more to it than Jesse Tuck’s good times, you know.”
“Oh, stuff,” said Jesse with a shrug. “We might as well enjoy it, long as we can’t change it. You don’t have to be such a parson all the time.”
“I’m not being a parson,” said Miles. “I just think you ought to take it more serious.”
“Now, boys,” said Mae. She was kneeling by the stream, splashing her face and hands with cool water. “Whew! Such weather!” she exclaimed, sitting back on her heels. She unfastened the brooch, took off her shawl, and toweled her dripping face. “Well, child,” she said to Winnie, standing up, “now you share our secret. It’s a big, dangerous secret. We got to have your help to keep it. I expect you’re full of questions, but we can’t stay here no longer.” She tied the shawl around her waist then, and sighed. “It pains me to think how your ma and pa will worry, but there’s just no way around it. We got to take you home with us. That’s the plan. Tuck—he’ll want to talk it out, make sure you see why you can’t tell no one. But we’ll bring you back tomorrow. All right?” And all three of them looked at her hopefully.
“All right,” said Winnie. For, she decided, there wasn’t any choice. She would have to go. They would probably make her go, anyway, no matter what she said. But she felt there was nothing to be afraid of, not really. For they seemed gentle. Gentle and—in a strange way—childlike. They made her feel old. And the way they spoke to her, the way they looked at her, made her feel special. Important. It was a warm, spreading feeling, entirely new. She liked it, and in spite of their story, she liked them, too—especially Jesse.
But it was Miles who took her hand and said, “It’s really fine to have you along, even if it’s only for a day or two.”
Then Jesse gave a great whoop and leapt into the stream, splashing mightily. “What’d you bring for breakfast, Ma?” he cried. “We can eat on the way, can’t we? I’m starving!”
So, with the sun riding high now in the sky, they started off again, noisy in the August stillness, eating bread and cheese. Jesse sang funny old songs in a loud voice and swung like a monkey from the branches of trees, showing off shamelessly for Winnie, calling to her, “Hey, Winnie Foster, watch me!” and “Look what I can do!”
And Winnie, laughing at him, lost the last of her alarm. They were friends, her friends. She was running away after all, but she was not alone. Closing the gate on her oldest fears as she had closed the gate of her own fenced yard, she discovered the wings she’d always wished she had. And all at once she was elated. Where were the terrors she’d been told she should expect? She could not recognize them anywhere. The sweet earth opened out its wide four corners to her like the petals of a flower ready to be picked, and it shimmered with light and possibility till she was dizzy with it. Her mother’s voice, the feel of home, receded for the moment, and her thoughts turned forward. Why, she, too, might live forever in this remarkable world she was only just discovering! The story of the spring—it might be true! So that, when she was not rolling along on the back of the fat old horse—by choice, this time—she ran shouting down the road, her arms flung out, making more noise than anybody.
It was good. So good, in fact, that through it all, not one of them noticed that the man they had passed on the road, the man in the yellow suit, had crept up to the bushes by the stream and heard it all, the whole fantastic story. Nor did they notice that he was following now, beside the road far behind, his mouth, above the thin, gray beard, turned ever so slightly toward a smile.
9
The August sun rolled up, hung at mid-heaven for a blinding hour, and at last wheeled westward before the journey was done. But Winnie was exhausted long before that. Miles carried her some of the way. The tops of her cheeks were bright pink with sunburn, her nose a vivid, comic red, but she had been rescued from a more serious broiling by Mae, who had finally insisted that she wear the blue straw hat. It came down far over her ears and gave her a clownish appearance, but the shade from its brim was so welcome that Winnie put vanity aside and dozed gratefully in Miles’s strong arms, her own arms wound around his neck.
The pastures, fields, and scrubby groves they crossed were vigorous with bees, and crickets leapt before them as if each step released a spring and flung them up like pebbles. But everything else was motionless, dry as biscuit, on the brink of burning, hoarding final reservoirs of sap, trying to hold out till the rain returned, and Queen Anne’s lace lay dusty on the surface of the meadows like foam on a painted sea.
It was amazing, then, to climb a long hill, to see ahead another hill, and beyond that the deep green of a scattered pine forest, and as you climbed, to feel the air ease and soften. Winnie revived, sniffing, and was able to ride the horse again, perched behind Mae. And to her oft-repeated question, “Are we almost there?” the welcome answer came at last: “Only a few more minutes now.”
A wide stand of dark pines rose up, loomed nearer, and suddenly Jesse was crying, “We’re home! This is it, Winnie Foster!” And he and Miles raced on and disappeared among the trees. The horse followed, turning onto a rutted path lumpy with roots, and it was as if they had slipped in under a giant colander. The late sun’s brilliance could penetrate only in scattered glimmers, and everything was silent and untouched, the ground muffled with moss and sliding needles, the graceful arms of the pines stretched out protectively in every direction. And it was cool, blessedly cool and green. The horse picked his way carefully, and then ahead the path dropped down a steep embankment; and beyond that, Winnie, peering around Mae’s bulk, saw a flash of color and a dazzling sparkle. Down the embankment they swayed and there it was, a plain, homely little house, barn-red, and below it the last of the sun flashing on the wrinkled surface of a tiny lake.
“Oh, look!” cried Winnie. “Water!”
At the same time, they heard two enormous splashes, two voices roaring with pleasure.
“It don’t take ’em more’n a minute to pile into that pond,” said Mae, beaming. “Well, you can’t blame ’em in heat like this. You can go in, too, if you want.”
Then they were at the door of the little house and Tuck was standing there. “Where’s the child?” he demanded, for Winnie was hidden behind his wife. “The boys say you brung along a real, honest-to-goodness, natural child!”
“So I did,” said Mae, sliding down off the horse, “and here she is.”
Winnie’s shyness returned at once when she saw the big man with his sad face and baggy trousers, but as he gazed at her, the warm, pleasing feeling spread through her again. For Tuck’s head tilted to one side, his eyes went soft, and the gentlest smile in the world displaced the melancholy creases of his cheeks. He reached up to lift her from the horse’s back and he said, “There’s just no words to tell you how happy I am to see you. It’s the finest thing that’s happened in…” He interrupted himself, setting Winnie on the ground, and turned to Mae. “Does she know?”
“Course she knows,” said Mae. “That’s why I brung her back. Winnie, here’s my husband, Angus Tuck. Tuck, meet Winnie Foster.”
“How do, Winnie Foster,” said Tuck, shaking Winnie’s hand rather solemnly. “Well, then!” He straightened and peered down at her, and Winnie, looking back into his face, saw an expression there that made her feel like an unexpected present, wrapped in pretty paper and tied with ribbons, in spite of Mae’s blue hat, which still enveloped her head. “Well, then,” Tuck repeated, “seeing you know, I’ll go on and say this is the finest thing that’s happened in—oh—at least eighty years.”
10
Winnie had grown up with order. She was used to it. Under the pitiless double assaults of her mother and grandmother, the cottage where she lived was always squeaking clean, mopped and swept and scoured into limp submission. There
was no room for carelessness, no putting things off until later. The Foster women had made a fortress out of duty. Within it, they were indomitable. And Winnie was in training.
So she was unprepared for the homely little house beside the pond, unprepared for the gentle eddies of dust, the silver cobwebs, the mouse who lived—and welcome to him!—in a table drawer. There were only three rooms. The kitchen came first, with an open cabinet where dishes were stacked in perilous towers without the least regard for their varying dimensions. There was an enormous black stove, and a metal sink, and every surface, every wall, was piled and strewn and hung with everything imaginable, from onions to lanterns to wooden spoons to washtubs. And in a corner stood Tuck’s forgotten shotgun.
The parlor came next, where the furniture, loose and sloping with age, was set about helter-skelter. An ancient green-plush sofa lolled alone in the center, like yet another mossy fallen log, facing a soot-streaked fireplace still deep in last winter’s ashes. The table with the drawer that housed the mouse was pushed off, also alone, into a far corner, and three armchairs and an elderly rocker stood about aimlessly, like strangers at a party, ignoring each other.
Beyond this was the bedroom, where a vast and tipsy brass bed took up most of the space, but there was room beside it for the washstand with the lonely mirror, and opposite its foot a cavernous oak wardrobe from which leaked the faint smell of camphor.
Up a steep flight of narrow stairs was a dusty loft—“That’s where the boys sleep when they’re home,” Mae explained—and that was all. And yet it was not quite all. For there was everywhere evidence of their activities, Mae’s and Tuck’s. Her sewing: patches and scraps of bright cloth; half-completed quilts and braided rugs; a bag of cotton batting with wisps of its contents, like snow, drifting into cracks and corners; the arms of the sofa webbed with strands of thread and dangerous with needles. His wood carving: curly shavings furring the floor, and little heaps of splinters and chips; every surface dim with the sawdust of countless sandings; limbs of unassembled dolls and wooden soldiers; a ship model propped on the mouse’s table, waiting for its glue to dry; and a stack of wooden bowls, their sides smoothed to velvet, the topmost bowl filled with a jumble of big wooden spoons and forks, like dry, bleached bones. “We make things to sell,” said Mae, surveying the mess approvingly.