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It was August of 1950. Jesse Tuck and his parents came into the small town of Treegap. They hadn't been here since 1881. As Jesse sat in the backseat of the sedan, he wondered about her. About Winnie. Had she drunk the water when she was seventeen? Or had she decided to let the God in Heaven decide her fate?
The Tucks had kept up with the fashions of the changing periods. They were dressed like any other family you would see in a small town in 1950. Intuitively, Tuck pulled the car alongside a graveyard. This spot in the modern town of Treegap would answer the question that had burned in Jesse's mind for the past sixty-two years.
"Do you want me to..." Mae offered.
"No, Mom." Jesse shook his head. "I've got to do this myself." Jesse had told his parents around sixty years before that he had fallen in love with Winnie. And he had told them about giving her the water. He approached the best-kept grave in the plot, knowing deep inside that it would be here. Sure enough, it was.
In Loving Memory
Winifred Foster Jackson
Dear Wife
Dear Mother
1870-1948
He knelt in front of her grave. Of course, even if she had drunk the water, that didn't mean she was planning on waiting almost seventy years to get married! He shook his head as tears he didn't really want to shed streamed down his cheeks.
He saw a little girl, not more than nine, playing in the grass at the house nearly 100 yards away. He approached her with trepidation. Maybe if she lived so close to the graveyard, it meant that she was Winnie's descendant.
"Uh...little girl?" he approached cautiously. The girl looked up at him.
"I'm not little." she informed him. "I'm almost eleven." He smiled as he thought about Winnie saying almost the exact same thing so many years before.
"Well, then. What's your name?"
"Winifred. But my friends call me Winnie. Winifred is such an old name." So this was Winnie's namesake, probably her great-granddaughter.
"Are you named for your great-grandmother? Her name was Winifred Foster, right?" The girl nodded.
"Just remember, Winnie, that your great-grandmother was a very special person." he smiled at her. She nodded, confused, and he sprinted toward his car.
"Who was that?" Mae asked him.
"That was Winnie's great-granddaughter and namesake."
"Oh." Mae said, knowing now. "I'm so sorry, Jesse." They drove to the edge of what used to be the deep woods.
"I knew you would someday return." A voice came from behind them. It was the man in the yellow suit!
"What are you doing here?" Mae asked, astonished. "I killed you!"
"Well, as I was dying I got one last drink of water--and I lived, but paid the doctor to say I died and to stage a funeral and all." the man held his hand up. "Before you get angry, know that I have spent the past sixty-five years or so looking for an antedote to the water.
"And," he said with a smile, "I finally discovered it. It didn't lie in anything but the water itself.
"Jesse," he addressed the young man. "Did you drink from the spring every ten years or so?"
"Yes, I suppose so." Jesse nodded.
"Well, the secret is that you have to leave the water be for twenty or thirty years, according to legend. Then it will act as an antedote to itself."
"Well, it looks like the water's all dried up anyhow." Mae observed. "I should be angry, but I guess I'm not. You know I would have hanged for your murder if Winnie hadn't saved me?" Tuck and Jesse nodded. The man nodded.
"You're right on both accounts." the man said. "The water's gone, all but this jug that I saved forty years ago."
"So is that the antedote?" Jesse asked.
"Yessir." the man said. "I won't charge you a cent for the relief of death after over 150 years. I drank some thirty years ago and now am vulnerable to death. You were right--living like this was no way to really live." The Tucks were still speechless. Then Jesse took the jug from the man and drank some. Instantly, the old in him and the young collided in a confusion of over 150 years of time.
"I'm coming, Winnie." Jesse whispered, then laid down on the ground and breathed his last. Tuck and Mae did the same, whispering their thanks to the man. Then the man arranged three private funerals, and saw to it that they were buried three days later in the Treegap graveyard.
Now, dear reader, I am happy to relate to you the final chapter in this story. Winifred Foster Jackson, Jesse Tuck, and his parents were reunited in heaven. The man in the yellow suit sought out Miles and supplied the antedote. Miles gratefully joined his family in Heaven, finally. And of the man in the yellow suit, dear reader? Of him, I know nothing more.
The End
A/N: A reader alerted me to my misuse of the word "anecdote" and I have revised this to contain the proper word, "antedote." Many thanks, jesse4ever13!