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By Root 4784 0

house Augustus had not long completed. She told the Townsends she was afraid to accept a bed upstairs, lest she have the comfort of it to get out of her mind for the rest of her life. No one came Monday and no one came Tuesday. Very early that Tuesday morning Augustus began collecting the walking sticks he had carved and which he was sending to an Irish merchant in New York. He wrapped each stick in burlap. After he had placed the third one in the wooden box, he stopped and looked over at Rita, sitting up and asleep in the corner. “Rita,” he said in a whisper. She woke and immediately stood up, sensing the end. She could not see all the white men and all the white men’s horses who had come for her, but she nevertheless raised her hands high to surrender. “Come here,” Augustus whispered. He took out the three wrapped sticks and told her to get in the box. Her first thought was a coffin but only white people got coffins that nice.

When she was in it, with her head just an inch or so from the top and her feet with a little less than that from the bottom, he put wrapped walking sticks to either side of her. He had planned to send at least forty sticks to the merchant in New York, but he judged now that the box would take no more than seventeen. Rita’s people had always been people of more bones than meat and muscle, and at long last that was a blessing. Augustus had always wondered what type of New York people bought his walking sticks, what kinds of places they wandered to with them, and that was one thing on his mind as he wrapped sticks and smiled at Rita. There was one stick upon which Augustus had carved Adam at the base. Adam was holding up Eve who was holding up Cain who was holding up Abel and so on and so on. After fourteen or more other figures, including his idea of the king and queen of England, there was George Washington. Rita, not knowing, not caring what was on the stick, but knowing only that she might get another day of sun, took that wrapped stick of Adam and his people and held it. “You get out now and lemme make some holes for the air.” Once he finished, he put her back in and fitted the top on the box. “How that?” he asked her through one of the holes once the top was on. “It be good. It be real good, Augustus,” she said. Before he woke her in the corner, she had been dreaming of work—she had planted seeds in her rows and finished long before everyone else and she was waiting for the overseer to direct her to more work. Just before Augustus whispered her name, she had raised both her hands so that the overseer might see that she was waiting and was not just slacking.

Near the end of Augustus’s work on the box, after he had padded it with burlap, Mildred and Henry came down from upstairs and watched Augustus. It was a little after six in the morning. One rooster crowed, then another, and then another. The four people took the box and the sticks out to the wagon. “Fill these here with water,” Augustus said, handing two flasks to Henry before stepping back to consider the box. Augustus put a clean rag with a few biscuits next to the right of where Rita’s head would go. Augustus moved a stick just a bit and put the filled flasks in the space on the other side of where her head would be. He was surprised at the ease of how he worked, no trembling of the hands, as if he had been born just to put a woman in a box and send her to New York. He believed whistling inside or outside the house was bad luck, but right then as he worked, he was tempted to whistle. Finally, he turned to Rita, held out his hand and helped her up onto the wagon and into the box. Before he nailed her in, Mildred said, “Rita, honey, I see you in the bye and bye. Lord willin.” Rita said, “Mildred, baby, I see you one day in the bye and bye. The Lord wouldn’t hurt us so we couldn’t see each other in the bye and bye.” Rita held on to the stick with Adam and Eve holding up their descendants, and that was the last the three of them ever saw of her. Mildred would dream about her often. She would be walking in a cemetery and would come upon a body,