The Towers of Love Read Online Free

its bark like jutting steps of a stair.
    It was slow going through the wood, and each step involved a little test of the stepping-place. If this had ever been a pasture, Hugh thought, it must have been a very poor one, and perhaps this was why the whole enterprise with its complex of trails and roads had been abandoned and given back to nature, to make of it whatever random madness nature chose. Deep in the woods, in spring, they had gone on wildflower searches—he, his brother and sister, and Edrita—from the time in early spring (it was still too early yet)when the first red horns of skunk cabbage showed themselves above the ground. There had always been a great variety of wildflowers here: cowslip and lady’s-slipper and arbutus and bloodroot, forked adder’s-tongue, jack-in-the-pulpit, and wild yellow violets. Later on, in summer, you could find clusters of flamboyant tiger lilies along the brook’s edge. He remembered picking the flowers and bringing them home in sticky, wilting handfuls, and his mother saying, “But they look so beautiful where they’re growing, darling. Why do you pick them? They never last in the house.” And it had always seemed useless to explain to her that no amount of picking would ever deplete the store of flowers that bloomed, year after year, in the wood’s vast garden.
    They came now, on the other side of the brook road, to the brook itself—to the place between three large boulders where the water ran deep and where, in summer, they had sometimes gone to swim. They had even given this place the affectionate name of the Swimming Hole, though the swimming had never been very good there. The pool had a loose and silty bottom and, after a few minutes’ splashing around, the water became dark and muddy and they emerged from it with a fine, drying layer of dirt on their bodies and sometimes with shiny, welt-shaped black bloodsuckers fastened adhesively to their legs. They had swum naked there—he and Edrita. And it had been in the days when it had been fun to be naked in the woods. Oh, to be sure, there had been a predictable amount of interested examination of each other’s bodies, certain inevitable comparisons. But that, at nine or ten or eleven years old, had not really been the point. He remembered one time, when they had been swimming this way, his mother and Edrita’s mother had come through the woods on horses—it had been in the days when his mother still rode a lot. The mothers had found them that way but, at the time, there had been no scolding, no reproof. His mother and Mrs. Everett had simply suggested that they both put their clothes back on now and come home; it was almost time for lunch. That was all. But later he had overheard the two mothers talking about it. The encounter had disconcerted Edrita’s mother more than it had his. His mother had just laughed and said, “Don’t be silly, Clara! They’re little children.” And when Clara Everett had said, “Yes, but they were stark naked and looking at each other,” his mother had said, “Why shouldn’t they? Everybody adores nakedness. I do. Don’t you?”
    He stood now on one of the three round rocks, looking at the water that curled between them, and Edrita came up behind him.
    â€œIt looks so small,” she said. “Doesn’t it look small? It’s funny, I always remembered this as being such a big pool. But it’s tiny, isn’t it?”
    â€œEverything looks different when you come back to it,” he said.
    â€œHow did we ever fit in it together?” she laughed.
    â€œRemember how muddy it used to get?”
    â€œWhere did we build the little islands?” she asked. “Remember the little islands?”
    He remembered. They were islands of sand and mud and twigs and brook pebbles, shaped along a sandy stretch of the brook’s bank—islands that always washed away during the night and