“I’ve been up since five,” she laughed. Even her laugh was subdued.
“And what have you been doing since five?” I asked idly.
She opened a box that lay on the grass at her side.
“I’ve been up on Nigger Head after these. I saw them yesterday when I went to old Lundquist’s to take him a bit of cottage cheese I’d made. See!”
I looked as she bade me. Within the box were some fine specimens of ferns and swamp laurel, and a rare white blossom that I had never seen in western woods. An airy, dainty, frosty-white, tiny star-flower.
“They are for you. I heard you wishing for swamp laurel.”
“You are very, very kind, Wanza,” I replied.
I lifted the laurel, but my eyes were on the white flower, and my heart was overcharged, and as I looked a blur crossed my vision and I could not see the waxen petals. But I saw another woods, lush and sweet, hard by a southern homestead, I heard the darkies singing in the fields adjoining, and the sound of the river running between red clay banks. I saw my mother’s smile.
I felt weak at that moment. I needed to grip hard a friendly hand. “Nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is, and whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.” Walt Whitman spoke truly. Someway I knew that Wanza’s sympathy was true and exquisite, that her understanding was profound. I had never before thought of this, but suddenly I knew that it was so. She tendered me the little white flower on her open palm, and I reached out and took it and I took her hand, saying:
“You are a good girl, Wanza Lyttle.”