Tuck Everlasting Summary

Tuck Everlasting has a prologue, 25 chapters and an epilogue. The chapters are very short, mostly three to six pages, and the prologue and epilogue do a great deal of work at either end:

The prologue

Three unconnected things happen on one day in the first week of August: Mae Tuck rides to the wood to meet her sons, as she does once every ten years; Winnie Foster decides to think about running away; and a stranger turns up at the Fosters' gate at sunset, looking for someone he will not name. Babbitt tells you outright that they are about to connect, and gives the book its governing image — the first week of August hanging at the very top of summer like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.

The twenty-five chapters

• 1-6 — Treegap, the touch-me-not cottage and its iron fence, Winnie's complaint to the toad, the man in the yellow suit at the gate, and Winnie finding Jesse drinking at the spring
• 7-11 — the kidnapping, and the Tucks' story: how all four of them and the horse drank from the spring eighty-seven years ago, and how they worked out what had happened to them
• 12-17 — Tuck rows Winnie out on the pond and explains the wheel; Jesse asks her to drink the water at seventeen and come away with him
• 18-22 — the man in the yellow suit trades his information to the Fosters for the wood, comes for Winnie, and Mae kills him with the butt of the shotgun in front of the constable
• 23-25 — Mae in jail with the gallows standing outside, the jailbreak, and what Winnie does with the bottle Jesse left her

The epilogue

Set seventy years later, when Mae and Tuck drive back into a Treegap they no longer recognise.

This Tuck Everlasting summary begins with a fence. Winnie Foster is ten, nearly eleven, an only child in the oldest and most respectable family in Treegap, living in a square cottage with a touch-me-not appearance, grass cut painfully to the quick, and an iron railing that says move on, we don't want you here. Her mother and grandmother watch her every minute. She talks to a toad through the bars and tells it she is tired of being looked at, that she will never do anything important if she stays in here, and that she had better run away.

The Fosters also own the wood next to the cottage, though nobody ever goes into it. At its centre is a giant ash tree, and at its roots a small spring with pebbles piled over it. The road, laid out originally by cows, curves around the wood rather than through it, which Babbitt offers as the reason nobody ever found the spring.

The morning after her resolution, Winnie goes into the wood and finds a boy sitting at the foot of the ash tree drinking from the spring. He is beautiful and he says he is seventeen. When she asks for a drink he refuses and starts piling the pebbles back. Then a woman and an older brother arrive on a horse, the woman says the worst is happening at last, and they lift Winnie onto the horse and ride away with her.

It is a kidnapping, but a panicked and apologetic one — Mae Tuck says sorry the entire way and calms Winnie by winding up her music box. At the house they explain. Eighty-seven years ago the whole family, and the horse, drank from that spring on their way west. Since then nothing has been able to hurt them. Jesse fell out of a tree while sawing branches and landed on his head. Hunters shot the horse at dusk, mistaking it for a deer, and the bullet went straight through. Tuck was bitten by a snake, Jesse ate poisonous toadstools, Mae cut herself slicing bread. Ten years passed, then twenty, and none of them looked any older; Miles's wife decided he had sold his soul to the devil and left, taking their two children. They eventually found the clearing again and saw that the T Tuck had carved on the tree twenty years earlier was still fresh and the tree had not grown at all. The cat, which had never drunk, had lived a normal life and died. To be certain, Tuck put his own shotgun to his chest and pulled the trigger, and the shot knocked him down and went through him and scarcely left a mark.

What nobody knows is that the man in the yellow suit has followed them and heard the whole thing from outside. He has spent his adult life chasing this — his grandmother once told him about a friend who married into a family that never aged, and about the tune from their music box, which came down to him through his mother. The friend was Miles's wife.

Meanwhile Tuck takes Winnie out on the pond at sunset, because the pond has answers. The water is always moving, he tells her, down to the sea, up into the clouds, back down as rain. It is a wheel, and everything is on it — the frogs, the bugs, the fish, the wood thrush, people — always new ones, always growing and changing and moving on. Then the rowboat wedges in a fallen tree, and he uses it: that is what the Tucks are, stuck, unable to move on, dropped off the wheel and left behind while everything else keeps turning. Dying is part of the wheel, right next to being born, and you cannot pick out the pieces you like and leave the rest. What the Tucks have, he says, is not living. They just are — like rocks beside the road.

That night Jesse kneels by the sofa where Winnie is sleeping and makes his offer: wait until you are seventeen, the same age as me, then drink some and come away with me, and we could have a good time that never, never stops.

The man in the yellow suit steals the Tucks' horse, rides to the Fosters near midnight, and trades what he knows for ownership of the wood. With a signed paper in his pocket he sets off with the constable, then rides ahead alone. He tells the Tucks he owns the spring now and intends to sell the water — only to certain people, people who deserve it, and it will be very, very expensive. He invites them to join him in demonstrations. Tuck refuses. So the man drags Winnie outside, saying that once she has drunk the water she will do for demonstrations just as well. Mae takes the shotgun by the barrel and swings it round her head like a wheel, and the stock cracks into the back of his skull, and he drops like a tree. The constable comes through the pines at exactly that moment and sees all of it. The man dies the next day.

This is where the book's real problem arrives, and it is a good one. Mae is going to hang — and Mae cannot die. The gallows will not kill her, and the whole secret will come out in front of the town.

So Miles, who is a trained carpenter, plans to take the barred window frame bodily out of the wall of her cell. The difficulty is that the proud new constable checks on his prisoner constantly and will notice within minutes. The solution is Winnie's own idea: when Mae climbs out, Winnie will climb in and take her place under the blanket. She thinks to herself that at midnight she will make a difference in the world.

It works. A thunderstorm covers the noise, Miles prises the frame free on the third flash of lightning, Mae squeezes out, Winnie drops onto the cot and Miles wedges the frame back. She lies awake all night humped under the blanket to look bigger, hears the tinkling of the music box fading into the distance, and in the morning the constable finds her and shouts that she is an accomplice and a criminal and too young to be punished for it. She is released to her parents, who can get no explanation out of her beyond the truth: the Tucks were her friends and she loved them. The village children, who had always found her too neat and too clean to be a real friend, start coming to talk to her through the fence.

Two weeks later, with autumn coming, a large dog corners the toad on the road. Winnie reaches through the bars, picks the toad up herself despite finding it disgusting, and drops it safely on the grass. Then she runs upstairs for the bottle of spring water Jesse gave her at their goodbye, kneels down, and pours all of it very slowly and carefully over the toad. The book leaves her decision technically open — there is more water in the wood, just in case, if she should decide, when she is seventeen — and then she smiles and sets the toad free and tells it that it is safe, forever.

The epilogue is set seventy years later. Mae and Tuck come back into Treegap behind the same fat old horse and do not recognise it: the road is blacktopped with a white line down the middle, there is a gas station roughly where the wood used to be, and a hot-dog stand and a chrome diner and a bigger jailhouse with a police car outside. The counterman explains that a big electrical storm about three years ago split the great tree right down the middle and set it on fire, and they had to bulldoze the whole lot out. He has never heard of any spring.

While Mae shops, Tuck walks up to the cemetery and finds the Foster plot, and on one of the smaller stones: In Loving Memory, Winifred Foster Jackson, Dear Wife, Dear Mother, 1870-1948. He works out that she has been gone two years, clears his throat, checks that nobody is watching, wipes his eyes, straightens his jacket and gives her a brief salute. Good girl, he says out loud.

Driving out of town they nearly run over a toad sitting in the middle of the blacktop, entirely unbothered by a passing truck. Tuck climbs down and carries it to the weeds at the roadside. Durn fool thing must think it's going to live forever, he says to Mae — not knowing that it is Winnie's toad and that it does. And then they roll on, and the tinkling little melody of the music box drifts out behind them and is lost at last far down the road.

The lines most often quoted from Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt, verified against the text:

"The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning."

"It's a wheel, Winnie. Everything's a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping. The frogs is part of it, and the bugs, and the fish, and the wood thrush, too. And people. But never the same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on."

"That's what us Tucks are, Winnie. Stuck so's we can't move on. We ain't part of the wheel no more. Dropped off, Winnie. Left behind."

"But dying's part of the wheel, right there next to being born. You can't pick out the pieces you like and leave the rest. Being part of the whole thing, that's the blessing."

"Life's got to be lived, no matter how long or short. You got to take what comes."

"Durn fool thing must think it's going to live forever."

The last is the final line of dialogue in the book, and Tuck has no idea he is talking about the one toad in the world that will. One warning worth having: "Don't be afraid of death; be afraid of the unlived life" is not in this novel. It is a line written for William Hurt in the 2002 Disney film, and it has been misfiled under Babbitt's name on quote sites ever since.