Why does Jesse insist that Winnie not drink the water in Tuck Everlasting?
Jesse does not want Winnie to drink from the spring because she will become immortal.
Winnie accidentally sees Jesse drink from the special spring in the woods outside her family’s house. She just thinks it is an ordinary spring. She has never seen Jesse before and does not understand what she is seeing.
Jesse and the rest of the Tuck family drank from the spring when they stopped at the farm eighty-seven years before. After a while they realized that they were all immortal. They could not be injured and they could not die.
Winnie knows nothing about this, of course. She is just wandering around because she is bored. She is excited to see another kid, and thinks it is funny when he tells her that he is one hundred and four years old. He then clarifies that he is seventeen, but he really is that old. He...
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just has not aged in over eighty years.
When Winnie wants to drink from the spring, Jesse tries to stop her.
Jesse Tuck's face was instantly serious. "Oh, that. No—no, it's not," he said quickly. "You mustn't drink from it. Comes right up out of the ground. Probably pretty dirty." And he began to pile the pebbles over it again. (Ch. 5)
She asks him why he drank it, and he realizes that she saw him. He does not want her to make the same mistake that his family did. Since she is persistent he and his mother end up taking Winnie home so that they can explain in detail.
Later, Jesse does ask Winnie to drink the water. He wants he to wait until she is his age, and then drink it. They will then both be immortal and they can live together and possibly get married. Winnie considers the offer, but eventually does not accept it.
What excuse does Jesse give Winnie to not drink the water in Tuck Everlasting?
There are two possible sections of the book that you might be referring to. Chapter 5 is when Winnie first meets Jesse Tuck and she happens to come across him as he is drinking from the spring. Winnie asks Jesse if she may have a drink because she is really thirsty. This is how Jesse responds: "You mustn't drink from it. Comes right up out of the ground. Probably pretty dirty." Winnie keeps insisting that she be allowed to take a drink and Jesse keeps dancing around the issue by saying that it would be bad for her to drink any of it. So the reason that Jesse gives Winnie is that the water is dirty and wouldn't be good for her.
He is lying of course because he knows that the water would give Winnie immortality.
Later in chapter 14 Jesse asks Winnie to not drink from the water for a different reason. Jesse wants Winnie to wait until she is 17 years old before taking a drink. That would put her at the same age as Jesse was when he took a drink. Jesse says that they would then be the same age and could go away together. "We could get married, even. That'd be pretty good, wouldn't it!" So the second reason Jesse gives Winnie is to wait in order that they can be the same starting age for the rest of eternity.
Why can't Winnie drink from the fountain in Tuck Everlasting?
Natalie Babbitt reveals the mystery of the spring very slowly in Tuck Everlasting. When Winnie Foster first tries to drink from it in Chapter 5, she has run away from home, at least for the day, and sees Jesse Tuck drink from the hidden spring. Jesse will not allow her to have any water, and to prevent her from drinking it, Ma and Miles kidnap Winnie when they arrive.
The reason Winnie cannot drink from the spring is hinted at in Chapter 1. There readers learn that if anyone noticed the spring that bubbled up under the tree despite the pebbles that concealed it, "that would have been a disaster so immense that this weary old earth, owned or not to its fiery core, would have trembled on its axis like a beetle on a pin." In other words, Winnie cannot drink from the spring because it will produce a worldwide cataclysm. But readers do not know what that horror is until Chapter 7, when the Tucks explain to Winnie that their immortality began when they drank the waters of the spring.
In Chapter 12, Tuck takes Winnie out on the pond and tries to get her to understand why she must never drink the water herself and why she must keep the spring a secret. He explains the wheel of life. He predicts that if people knew of the spring, they would go crazy, trampling each other to get their drink. But then he says the following:
"All the little ones little forever, all the old ones old forever. . . . The wheel would keep on going round, the water rolling by to the ocean, but the people would've turned into nothing but rocks by the side of the road."
Winnie agrees to keep the Tucks' secret, and she even helps Mae Tuck escape from jail so that the secret remains safe. As for drinking the water herself, she is quite tempted to agree to Jesse's invitation to drink it when she is seventeen and marry him. But she pours the water he gives her on the toad, thinking that if she changes her mind, she can get more in the wood. In the Epilogue, readers learn that Winnie died after a long life, having been a wife and mother. She never drank the water. But the spring was bulldozed over after a lightning strike in the wood, so presumably, no one else will ever have the opportunity to drink from the fountain. The epic disaster presented by the spring was diverted by that isolated storm.