Miss Coynte of Greene

Miss Coynte of Greene was the unhappily dutiful care taker of a bedridden grandmother. This old lady, the grandmother whom Miss Coynte addressed as Mére and sometimes to herself as merde, had outlived all relatives except Miss Coynte, who was a single lady approaching 30.

The precise cause of Miss Coynte's grandmother's bedridden condition had never been satisfactorily explained to Miss Coynte by their physician in Greene, and Miss Coynte, though not particularly inclined to paranoia, entertained the suspicion that the old lady was simply too lazy to get herself up, even to enter the bathroom.

"What is the matter with Mére, Dr. Settle?"

"Matter with your grandmother?" he would say reflectively, looking into the middle distance. "Well, frankly, you know, I have not exactly determined anything of an organic nature that really accounts for her staying so much in bed."

"Dr. Settle, she does not stay 50 much in bed, but she stays constantly in it, if you know what I mean."

"Oh, yes, I know what you mean...."

"Do you know, Dr. Settle, that I mean she is what they call'incontinent' now, and that I have to spend half my time changing the linen on the bed?"

Dr. Settle was not unsettled at all by this report.

"It's one of a number of geriatric problems that one has to accept," he observed dreamily as he made toward the downstairs door. "Oh, where did I put my hat?"

"You didn't have one," replied Miss Coynte rather sharply.

He gave her a brief, somewhat suspicious glance and said, "Well, possibly I left it in the office."

"Yes, possibly you left your head there, too."

"What was that you said?" inquired the old doctor, who had heard her perfectly well.

"I said that Chicken Little says the sky is falling," replied Miss Coynte without a change of expression.

The doctor nodded vaguely, gave her his practiced little smile and let himself out the door.

• • •

Miss Coynte's grandmother had two major articles on her bedside table. One of them was a telephone into which she babbled all but incessantly to anyone she remembered who was still living and of a social echelon that she regarded as speakable to, and the other important article was a loudmouthed bell that she would ring between phone talks to summon Miss Coynte for some service.

Most frequently she would declare that the bed needed changing, and while Miss Coynte performed this odious service, Mere would often report the salient points of her latest phone conversation.

Rarely was there much in these reports that would be of interest to Miss Coynte, but now, on the day when this narrative begins, Mére engaged her granddaughter's attention with a lively but deadly little anecdote.

"You know, I was just talking to Susie and Susie told me that Dotty Reagan, you know Dotty Reagan, she weighs close to three hundred pounds, the fattest woman in Greene, and she goes everywhere with this peculiar little young man who they say is a fairy, if you know what I mean."

"No, Mére, can you swing over a little so I can change the sheet?"

"Well, anyway, Dotty Reagan was walking along the street with this little fairy who hardly weighs ninety pounds, a breeze would blow him away, and they had reached the drugstore corner, where they were going to buy sodas, when Dotty Reagan said to the fairy, 'Catch me, I'm going to fall,' and the little fairy said to her, 'Dotty, you're too big to catch,' and so he let her fall on the drugstore corner."

"Oh," said Miss Coynte, still trying to tug the soiled sheet from under her grandmother's massive and immobile body on the brass bed.

"Yes, he let her fall. He made no effort to catch her."

"Oh," said Miss Coynte again.

"Is that all you can say, just 'Oh'?" inquired her grandmother.

Miss Coynte had now managed by almost superhuman effort to get the soiled bed sheet from under her grandmother's great swollen body.

"No, I was going to ask you if anything was broken, I mean like a hipbone, when Dotty Reagan fell."

A slow and malicious smile began to appear on the face of Miss Coynte's grandmother.

"The coroner didn't examine the body for broken bones," the grandmother said, "since Dotty Reagan was stone-cold dead by the time she hit the pavement of the corner by the drugstore where she had intended to have an ice-cream soda with her fairy escort who didn't try to catch her when she told him that she was about to fall."

Miss Coynte did not smile at the humor of this story, for, despite her condition, an erotic, not a frigid, spinster approaching 30, she had not acquired the malice of her grandmother and, actually, she felt a sympathy both for the defunct Dotty Reagan and for the 90-pound fairy who had declined to catch her.

"Were you listening to me or was I just wasting my breath as usual when I talk to you?" inquired her grandmother, flushing with anger.

"I heard what you said," said Miss Coynte, "but I have no comment to make on the story except that the little man with her would probably have suffered a broken back, if not a fracture of all bones, if Miss Dotty Reagan had fallen on top of him if he had tried to catch her."

"Yes, well, the fairy had sense enough not to catch her and so his bones were not fractured."

"I see," said Miss Coynte. "Can you lie on the rubber sheet for a while till I wash some clean linen?"

"Be quick about it and bring me a bowl of strawberry sherbet and a couple of cookies," ordered the grandmother.

Miss Coynte got to the door with the soiled sheet and then she turned on her grandmother for the first time in her ten years of servitude and she said something that startled her nearly out of her wits.

"How would you like a bowl full of horseshit?" she said to the old lady, and then she slammed the door.

She had hardly slammed the door when the grandmother began to scream like a peacock in heat; she let out scream after scream, but Miss Coynte ignored them. She went downstairs and she did not wash linen for the screaming old lady. She sat on a small sofa and listened to the screams. Suddenly, one of them was interrupted by a terrific gasp.

"Dead," thought Miss Coynte.

She breathed an exhausted sigh. Then she said, "Finally."

She relaxed on the sofa and soon into her fancy came that customary flood of erotic imagination.

Creatures of fantasy in the form of young men began to approach her through the room of the first floor, cluttered with furnishings and bric-a-brac inherited from the grandmother's many dead relatives. All of these imaginary young lovers approached Miss Coynte with expressions of desire.

They exposed themselves to her as they approached, but never having seen the genitals of a male older than the year-old son of a cousin, Miss Coynte had a somewhat diminutive concept of the exposed organs. She was easily satisfied, though, having known, rather seen, nothing better.

After a few hours of these afternoon fantasies, she went back up to her grandmother. The old lady's eyes and mouth were open, but she had obviously stopped breathing....

Much of human behavior is, of course, automatic, at least on the surface, so there should be no surprise in Miss Coynte's actions following her grandmother's death.

About a week after that long-delayed event, she leased an old store on Marble Street, which was just back of Front Street on the levee, and she opened a shop there called The Better Mousetrap. She hired a black man with two mules and a wagon to remove a lot of the inherited household wares, especially the bric-a-brac, from the house, and then she advertised the opening of the shop in the daily newspaper of Greene. In the lower-left-hand corner of the ad, in elegant Victorian script, she had her name, Miss Valerie Coynte, inserted, and it amazed her how little embarrassment she felt over the immodesty of putting her name in print in a public newspaper.

• • •

The opening was well attended, the name Coynte being one of historical eminence in the Delta. She served fruit punch from a large cut-glass bowl with a black man in a white jacket passing it out, and the next day the occasion was written up in several papers in that part of the Delta. Since it was approaching the Christmas season, the stuff moved well. The first stock had to be almost completely replaced after the holiday season, and still the late Mére's house was almost overflowing with marketable antiquities.

Miss Coynte had a big publicity break in late January, when the Memphis Commercial Appeal did a feature article about the success of her enterprise.

It was about a week after this favorable write-up that a young man employed as assistant manager of the Hotel Alcazar crossed the street to the shop to buy a pair of antique silver salt and pepper shakers as a silver-wedding-anniversary gift for the hotel's owner, Mr. Vernon T. Silk, who was responsible for the young man's abrupt ascendancy from a job as bellhop to his present much more impressive position at the hotel.

More impressive it certainly was, this new position, but it was a good deal less lucrative, for the young man, Jack Jones, had been extraordinarily well paid for his services when he was hopping bells. He had been of a thrifty nature and after only six months, he had accumulated a savings account at the Mercantile Bank that ran into four figures, and it was rumored in Greene that he was now preparing to return to Louisiana, buy a piece of land and become a sugar-cane planter.

His name, Jack Jones, has been mentioned, and it probably struck you as a suspiciously plain sort of name and I feel that, without providing you with a full-figure portrait of him in color, executed by an illustrator of remarkable talent, you can hardly be expected to see him as clearly as did Miss Coynte when he entered The Better Mousetrap with the (continued on page 198)Miss Coynte of Greene(continued from page 188) initially quite innocent purpose of buying those antique silver shakers for Mr. Vernon Silk's anniversary present.

Mr. Jones was a startlingly personable young man, perhaps more startlingly so in his original occupation as bellhop, not that there had been a decline in his looks since his advancement at the Alcazar but because the uniform of a bellhop had cast more emphasis upon certain of his physical assets. He had worn, as bellhop, a little white mess jacket beneath which his narrow, muscular buttocks had jutted with a prominence that had often invited little pats and pinches even from elderly drummers of usually more dignified deportment. They would deliver these little familiarities as he bent over to set down their luggage and sometimes, without knowing why, the gentlemen of the road would flush beneath their thinning thatches of faded hair, would feel an obscurely defined embarrassment that would incline them to tip Jack Jones at least double the ordinary amount of their tips to a bellhop.

Sometimes it went past that.

"Oh, thank you, suh," Jack would say, and would linger smiling before them. "Is there anything else that I can do for you, suh?"

"Why, no, son, not right now, but----"

"Later? You'd like some ice, suh?"

Well, you get the picture.

There was a certain state senator, in his early 40s, who began to spend every weekend at the hotel, and after midnight at the Alcazar, when usually the activities there were minimal, this junior senator would keep Jack hopping the moon out of the sky for one service after another-- for ice, for booze and, finally, for services that would detain the youth in the senator's two-room suite for an hour or more.

A scandal such as this, especially when it involves a statesman of excellent family connections and one much admired by his constituency, even mentioned as a Presidential possibility in future, is not openly discussed; but, privately, among the more sophisticated, some innuendoes are passed about with a tolerant shrug.

Well, this is somewhat tangential to Miss Coynte's story, but recently the handsome young senator's wife--he was a benedict of two years' standing but was still childless--took to accompanying him on his weekend visits to the Alcazar.

The lady's name was Alice and she had taken to drink.

The senator would sit up with her in the living room of the suite, freshening her drinks more frequently than she suggested, and then, a bit after midnight, seeing that Alice had slipped far down in her seat, the junior senator would say to her, as if she were still capable of hearing, "Alice, honey, I think it's beddy time for you now."

He would lift her off the settee and carry her into the bedroom, lay her gently upon the bed and slip out, locking the door behind him: Then immediately he would call downstairs for jack to bring up another bucket of ice.

Now once, on such an occasion, Jack let himself into the bedroom, not the living-room door with a passkey, latched the door from inside and, after an hour of commotion, subdued but audible to adjacent patrons of the Alcazar, the senator's lady climbed out naked onto the window ledge of the bedroom.

This was just after the senator had succeeded in forcing his way into that room.

Well, the lady didn't leap or fall into the street. The senator and Jack managed to coax her back into the bedroom from the window ledge and, more or less coincidentally, the senator's weekend visits to the Alcazar were not resumed after that occasion, and it was just after that occasion that Mr. Vernon Silk had promoted Jack Jones to his new position as night clerk at the hotel.

In this position, standing behind a counter in gentleman's clothes, Jack Jones was still an arrestingly personable young man, since he had large, heavy-lashed eyes that flickered between hazel and green and which, when caught by light from a certain angle, would seem to be almost golden. The skin of his face, which usually corresponds to that of the body, was flawlessly smooth and of a dusky-rose color that seemed more suggestive of an occupation in the daytime, in a region of fair weather, than that of a night clerk at the Alcazar. And this face had attracted the attention of Miss Dorothea Bernice Korngold, who had stopped him on the street one day and cried out histrionically to him: "Nijinsky, the face, the eyes, the cheekbones of the dancer Waslaw Nijinsky! Please, please pose for me as The Specter of the Rose or as The Afternoon of the Faun!"

"Pose? Just pose?"

"As the Faun you could be in a reclining position on cushions!"

"Oh, I see. Hmm. Uh-huh. Now, what are the rates for posing?"

"Why, it depends on the hours!"

"Most things do," said Jack.

"When are you free?" she gasped.

"Never," he replied, "but I've got afternoons off and if the rates are OK...."

• • •

Well, you get the picture.

Jack Jones with his several enterprises did as well as Miss Coynte of Greene with her one. Jack Jones had a single and very clear and simple object in mind, which was to return to southern Louisiana and to buy that piece of land, all his own, and to raise sugar cane.

Miss Coynte's purpose or purposes in life were much more clouded over by generations of dissimulation and propriety of conduct, by night and day, than those of Jack Jones.

However, their encounter in The Better Mousetrap had the volatile feeling of an appointment with a purpose; at least one, if not several purposes of importance.

She took a long, long time wrapping up the antique silver shakers and while her nervous fingers were employed at this, her tongue was engaged in animated conversation with her lovely young patron.

At first this conversation was more in the nature of an interrogation.

"Mr. Jones, you're not a native of Greene?"

"No, ma'am, I ain't. Sorry. I mean I'm not."

"I didn't think you were. Your accent is not Mississippi and you don't have a real Mississippi look about you."

"I don't have much connection with Mississippi."

"Oh, but I heard that our junior state senator, I heard it from Mére, was preparing you for a political career in the state."

"Senator Sharp was a very fine gentleman, ma'am, and he did tell me one time that he thought I was cut out for politics in the state."

"And his wife, Mrs. Alice Sharp?"

"Mrs. Alice Sharp was a great lady, ma'am."

"But inclined to ... you know?"

"I know she wanted to take a jump off the fifth-floor window ledge without wings or a parachute, ma'am."

"Oh, then Mére was right."

"Is this Mére a female hawss you are talking about who was right?"

"Yes, I think so. Tell me. How was Miss Alice persuaded not to jump?"

"Me and the senator caught ahold of her just before she could do it."

"Well, you know, Mr. Jones, I thought that this story of Mére's was a piece of invention."

"If this Mére was a female hawss, she done a good deal of talking."

"That she did! Hmm. How long have you been in Greene?"

"I'll a been here six months and a week next Sunday coming."

"Why, you must keep a diary to be so exact about the time you arrived here!"

"No, ma'am, I just remember."

"Then you're gifted with a remarkable memory," said Miss Coynte, with a shaky little tinkle of laughter, her fingers still fussing with the wrapping of the package. "I mean to be able to recall that you came here to Greene exactly six months and a week ago next Sunday."

"Some things do stick in my mind."

"Oh!"

Pause.

"Is there a fly in the shop?"

"Fly?"

(continued on page 237)Miss Coynte of Greene(continued from page 198)

"Yes, it sounds to me like a horsefly's entered the shop!"

"I don't see no fly in the shop and I don't hear none either."

Miss Coynte was now convinced of what she had suspected.

"Then I think the humming must be in my head. This has been such a hectic week for me, if I were not still young, I would be afraid that I might suffer a stroke; you know, I really do think I am going to have to employ an assistant here soon. When I began this thing, I hadn't any suspicion that it would turn out to be such a thriving enterprise...."

There was something, more than one thing, between the lines of her talk, and certainly one of those things was the proximity of this exotic young man. He was so close to her that whenever she made one of her flurried turns--they were both in front of a counter now--her fingers would encounter the close-fitting cloth of his suit.

"Mr. Jones, please excuse me for being so slow about wrapping up these things. It's just my, my--state of exhaustion, you know."

"I know."

"Perhaps you know, too, that I lost my grandmother yesterday, and----"

"Wasn't it week befo' last?"

"Your memory is remarkable as...."

She didn't finish that sentence but suddenly leaned back against the counter and raised a hand to her forehead, which she had expected to feel hot as fire but which was deathly cold to her touch.

"Excuse me if I...."

"What?"

"Oh, Mr. Jones," she whispered with no breath in her throat that seemed capable of producing even a whisper, "if there isn't a fly, there must be a swarm of bees in this shop. Mr. Jones, you know, it was a stroke that took Mére."

"No, I didn't know. The paper just said she was dead."

"It was a stroke, Mr. Jones. Most of the Coyntes go that way, suddenly, from strokes due to unexpected ... excitement...."

"You mean you feel ...?"

"I feel like Chicken Little when the acorn hit her on the head and she said, 'Oh, the sky is falling!' I swear that's how I feel now!"

It seemed to Miss Coynte that he was about to slip an arm about her slight but sinewy waist as she swayed a little toward him, and perhaps he was about to do that, but what actually happened was this: She made a very quick, flurried motion, a sort of whirling about, so that the knuckles of her hand, lifted to just the right level, brushed over the fly of his trousers.

"Oh!" she gasped. "Excuse me!"

But there was nothing apologetic in her smile and, having completed a full turn before him, so that they were again face to face, she heard herself say to him:

"Mr. Jones, you are not completely Caucasian!"

"Not what, did you say?"

"Not completely a member of the white race?"

His eyes opened very wide, very liquid and molten, but she stood her ground before their challenging look.

"Miss Coynte, in Greene nobody has ever called me a nigger but you. You are the first and the last to accuse me of that."

"But what I said was not an accusation, Mr. Jones, it was merely----"

"Take this!"

She gasped and leaned back, expecting him to smash a fist in her face. But what he did was more shocking. He opened the fly that she had sensed and thrust into her hand, seizing it by the wrist, that part of him which she defined to herself as his "member." It was erect and pulsing riotously in her fingers, which he twisted about it.

"Now what does Chicken Little say to you, Miss Whitey Mighty, does she still say the sky is falling or does she say it's rising?"

"Chicken Little says the sky is rising straight up to----"

"Your tight little cunt?"

"Oh, Mr. Jones, I think the shop is still open, although it's past closing time.

Would you mind closing it for me?"

"Leggo of my cock and I'll close it."

"Please! Do. I can't move!"

Her fingers loosened their hold upon his member and he moved away from her and her fingers remained in the same position and at the same level, loosened but still curved.

The sound of his footsteps seemed to come from some distant corridor in which a giant was striding barefooted away. She heard several sounds besides that; she heard the blind being jerked down and the catch of the latch on the door and the switching off of the two green-shaded lights. Then she heard a very loud and long silence.

"You've closed the shop, Mr. Jones?"

"That's right, the shop is closed for business."

"Oh! No!"

"By no do you mean don't?"

He had his hand under her skirt, which she had unconsciously lifted, and he was moving his light-palmed, dusky-backed, spatulate-fingered hand in a tight circular motion over her fierily throbbing mound of Venus.

"Oh, no, no, I meant do!"

It was time for someone to laugh and he did, softly.

"That's what I thought you meant. Hold still till I get this off you."

"Oh, I can't, how can I?" she cried out, meaning that her excitement was far too intense to restrain her spasmodic motions.

"Jesus," he said as he lifted her onto the counter.

"God!" she answered.

"You have got a real sweet little thing there and I bet no man has got inside it before."

"My Lord, I'm...."

She meant that she was already approaching her climax.

"Hold on."

"Can't."

"OK, we'll shoot together."

And then the mutual flood. It was burning hot, the wetness, and it continued longer than even so practiced a stud as Jack Jones had ever known before.

Then, when it stopped, and their bodies were no longer internally engaged, they lay beside each other, breathing fast and heavily, on the counter.

After a while, he began to talk to Miss Coynte.

"I think you better keep your mouth shut about this. Because if you talk about it and my color, which has passed here so far and which has got to pass in this goddamn city of Greene till I go back to buy me a piece of land and raise cane in Louisiana----"

"You are not going back to raise cane in Louisiana," said Miss Coynte with such a tone of authority that he did not contradict her, then or ever thereafter.

• • •

It was nearly morning when she recovered her senses sufficiently to observe that the front door of The Better Mousetrap was no longer locked but was now wide open, with the milky luster of street lamps coming over the sill, along with some wind-blown leaves of flaming color.

Her next observation was that she was stretched out naked on the floor.

"Hallelujah!" she shouted.

From a distance came the voice of a sleepy patrolman calling out, "Wha's that?"

Understandably, Miss Coynte chose not to reply. She scrambled to the door, locked it, got into her widely scattered clothes, some of which would barely hold decently together.

She then returned home by a circuitous route through several alleys and yards, having already surmised that her mission in life was certain, from this point onward, to involve such measures of subterfuge.

As a child in Louisiana, Jack Jones had suffered a touch of rheumatic fever, which had slightly affected a valve in his heart.

He was now 25.

Old Doc Settle said to him, "Son, I don't know what you been up to lately, but you better cut down on it, you have developed a sort of noise in this right valve that is probably just functional, not organic, but we don't want to take chances on it."

A month later, Jack Jones took to his bed and never got up again. His last visitor was Miss Coynte and she was alone with him for about half an hour in Greene Memorial Hospital, and then she screamed and when his nurse went in, he was sprawled naked on the floor.

The nurse said, "Dead."

Then she glared at Miss Coynte.

"Why'd he take off his pajamas?" she asked her.

Then she noticed that Miss Coynte was wriggling, as surreptitiously as possible under the circumstance, into her pink support hose, but not surreptitiously enough to escape the nurse's attention.

"I don't know what you are talking about," said Miss Coynte, although the nurse had not opened her mouth to speak a word about what Miss Coynte's state of incomplete dress implied.

• • •

It is easy to lead a double life in the Delta; in fact, it is almost impossible not to.

Miss Coynte did not need to be told by any specialist in emotional problems that the only way to survive the loss of a lover such as Jack Jones had been before his collapse was to immediately seek out another; and so in the weekend edition of The Greene Gazette, she had inserted a small classified ad that announced very simply, "Colored male needed at The Better Mousetrap for heavy delivery service."

Bright and early on Monday morning, Sonny Bowles entered the shop in answer to this appeal.

"Name, please?" inquired Miss Coynte in a brisk and businesslike voice, sharply in contrast to her tone of interrogation with the late Jack Jones.

Her next question was: "Age?"

The answer was: "Young enough to handle delivery service."

She glanced up at his face, which was almost two feet above her own, to assure herself that his answer had been as pregnant with double meaning as she had hoped.

What she saw was a slow and amiable grin. She then dropped her eyes and said: "Now, Mr. Bowles, uh, Sonny, I'm sure that you understand that 'delivery service' is a rather flexible term for all the services that I may have in mind."

Although she was not at all flurried, she made one of her sudden turns directly in front of him, as she had done that late afternoon when she first met the late Jack Jones, and this time it was not her knuckles but her raised finger tips that encountered, with no pretense of accident whatsoever, the prominent something behind the vertical parabola of Sonny Bowles's straining fly.

Or should we say "Super Fly"?

He grinned at her, displaying teeth as white as paper.

Sonny turned off the green-shaded lights himself and locked the shop door himself, and then he hopped up on the counter and sat down and Miss Coyote fell to her knees before him in an attitude of prayer.

Sonny Bowles was employed at once by Miss Coynte to make deliveries in her little truck and to move stock in the store.

The closing hours of the shop became very erratic. Miss Coynte had a sign printed that said Out to Lunch and that sign was sometimes hanging on the door at half-past eight in the morning.

"I have little attacks of migraine,". Miss Coynte explained to people, "and when they come on me, I have to put up the lunch sign right away."

Whether or not people were totally gullible in Greene, nothing was said in her presence to indicate any suspicion concerning these migraine attacks.

The Better Mousetrap now had four branches, all prospering, for Miss Coynte had a nose for antiquities. As soon as a family died off and she heard about it, Sonny Bowles would drive her to the house in her new Roadmaster. She would pretend to be offering sincere condolences to relatives in the house, but all the while her eyes would be darting about at objects that might be desirable in her shops. And so she throve.

Sonny had a light-blue uniform with silver buttons when he drove her about.

"Why, you two are inseparable," said a spiteful spinster named Alice Bates.

This was the beginning of a feud between Miss Bates and Miss Coynte that continued for two years. Then one midnight Miss Bates's house caught fire and she was burned alive in it and Miss Coynte said, "Poor Alice, I warned her to stop smoking in bed, God bless her."

One morning at ten, Miss Coynte put up her out to Lunch sign and locked the door, but Sonny sat reading a religious booklet under one of the green-shaded lamps and when Miss Coynte turned the lamp off, he turned it back on.

"Sonny, you seem tired," remarked Miss Coynte.

She opened the cash register and gave him three $20 bills.

"Why don't you take a week off," she suggested, "in some quiet town like Memphis?"

When Sonny returned from there a week later, he found himself out of a job and he had been replaced in The Better Mousetrap by his two younger brothers, a pair of twins named Mike and Moon.

These twins were identical.

"Was that you, Mike?" Miss Coynte would inquire after one of her sudden lunches, and the answer was just as likely to be:

"No, ma'am, this is Moon, Miss Coynte."

Mike or Moon would drive her in her new yellow Packard every evening that summer to the Friar's Point ferry and across it to a black community called Tiger Town, and specifically to a night resort called Red Dot. It would be dark by the time Mike or Moon would deliver Miss Coynte to this night resort and before she got out of the yellow Packard, she would cover her face with dark face powder and also her hands and every exposed surface of her fair skin.

Do I pass inspection? she would inquire of Mike or Moon, and he would laugh his head off, and Miss Coynte would laugh along with him as he changed into his Levis and watermelon-pink silk shirt in the Packard.

Then they would enter and dance.

You know what wonderful dancers the black people are, but after a week or so, they would clear the floor to watch Miss Coynte in the arms and hands of Mike or Moon going through their fantastic gyrations on the dance floor of Red Dot.

There was a dance contest in September with a dozen couples participating, but in two minutes the other couples retired from the floor as Miss Coynte leaped repeatedly over the head of Mike or Moon, each time swinging between his legs and winding up for a moment in front of him and then going into the wildest circular motion about him that any astral satellite could dream of performing in orbit.

"Wow!"

With this exclamation, Miss Coynte was accustomed to begin a dance and to conclude it also.

• • •

"Miss Coynte?"

"Yes?"

"This is Reverend Tooker."

She hung up at once and put the Out to Lunch sign on the shop door, locked it up and told Mike and Moon, "Our time is probably about to expire in Greene, at least for a while."

"At least for a while" did not mean right away. Miss Coynte was not a lady of the new South to be demoralized into precipitate flight by such a brief and interrupted phone call from a member of the Protestant clergy.

Still, she was obliged, she thought, to consider the advisability of putting some distance between herself and the small city of Greene sometime in the future, which might be nearer than farther.

One morning while she was out to lunch but not lunching, she put through a call to the chamber of commerce in Biloxi, Mississippi.

She identified herself and her name was known, even there.

"I am doing research about the racial integration of Army camps in the South and I understand that you have a large military base just outside Biloxi, and I wonder if you might be able to inform me if enlisted or drafted blacks are stationed at your camp there?"

Answer: "Yes."

"Oh, you said yes, not no. And that was the only question I had to ask you."

"Miss Coynte," drawled the voice at the other end of the phone line, "we've got this situation of integration pretty well under control, and if you'll take my word for it, I don't think that there's a need for any research on it."

"Oh, but, sir, my type of research is not at all likely to disturb your so-called control; if I make up my mind to visit Biloxi this season."

Enough of that phone conversation.

However....

• • •

The season continued without any change of address for Miss Coynte. The season was late autumn and leaves were leaving the trees, but Miss Coynte remained in Greene.

However, changes of the sort called significant were manifesting themselves in the lady's moods and conditions.

One hour past midnight, having returned from Red Dot across the river, Miss Coynte detained her escorts, Mike and Moon, on the shadowy end of her long front veranda for an inspired conversation.

"Not a light left in the town; we've got to change that to accomplish our purpose."

"Don't you think," asked Mike or Moon, "that----"

The other twin finished the question, saying: "Dark is better for us?"

"Temporarily only," said Miss Coynte. "Now, you listen to me, Mike and Moon! You know the Lord intended something when he put the blacks and whites so close together in this great land of ours, which hasn't yet even more than begun to realize its real greatness. Now, I want you to hear me. Are you listening to me?"

"Yes, ma'am," said Mike or Moon.

"Well, draw up closer," and, to encourage them toward this closer proximity to her, she reached out her hands to their laps and seized their members like handles, so forcibly that they were obliged to draw their chairs up closer to the wicker chair of Miss Coynte.

"Someday after our time," she said in a voice as rich as a religious incantation, "there is bound to be a great new race in America, and this is naturally going to come about through the total mixing together of black and white blood, which we all know is actually red, regardless of skin color!"

All at once, Miss Coynte was visited by an apparition or vision.

Crouched upon the front lawn, arms extended toward her, she saw a crouching figure with wings.

"Lord God Jesus!" she screamed. "Look there!"

"Where, Miss Coynte?"

"Annunciation, the angel!"

Then she touched her abdomen.

"I feel it kicking already!"

The twin brothers glanced at each other with alarm.

"I wonder which of you made it, but never mind that. Since you're identical twins, it makes no difference, does it? Oh! He's floating and fading...."

She rose from her chair without releasing their genitals, so that they were forced to rise with her.

Her face and gaze were uplifted.

"Goodbye, goodbye, I have received the Announcement!" Miss Coynte cried out to the departing angel.

• • •

Usually at this hour, approaching morning, the twins would take leave of Miss Coynte, despite her wild protestations.

But tonight she retained such a tight grip on their genital organs that they were obliged to accompany her upstairs to the great canopied bed in which Mére had been murdered.

There, on the surface of a cool, fresh linen sheet, Miss Coynte enjoyed a sleep of profound temporary exhaustion, falling into it without a dread of waking alone in the morning, for not once during her sleep did she release her tight hold on the handles the twins had provided--or surrendered?--win or lose being the name of all human games that we know of; sometimes both, unnamed.

• • •

Now 20 years had passed and that period of time is bound to make a difference in a lady's circumstances.

Miss Coynte had retired from business and she was about to become a grandmother. She had an unmarried daughter, duskily handsome, named Michele Moon, whom she did not admit was her daughter but whom she loved dearly.

From birth we go so easily to death; it is really no problem unless we make it one.

Miss Coynte now sat on the front gallery of her home and, at intervals, her pregnant daughter would call out the screen door, "Miss Coynte, would you care for a toddy?"

"Yes, a little toddy would suit me fine," would be the reply.

Having mentioned birth and death, the easy progress between them, it would be unnatural not to explain that reference.

Miss Coynte was dying now.

It would also be unnatural to deny that she was not somewhat regretful about this fact. Only persons with suicidal tendencies are not a little regretful when their time comes to pass away, and it must be remembered what a full and rich and satisfactory life Miss Coynte had had. And so she was somewhat regretful about the approach of that which she could not avoid, unless she were immortal. She was inclined, now, to utter an occasional light sigh as she sipped on a toddy on her front gallery.

Now one Sunday in August, feeling that her life span was all but completed, Miss Coynte asked her illegitimate pregnant and unmarried daughter to drive her to the town graveyard with a great bunch of late-blooming roses.

They were memory roses, a name conferred upon them by Miss Coynte, and they were a delicate shade of pink with a dusky center.

She hobbled slowly across the graveyard to where Jack Jones had been enjoying his deserved repose beneath a shaft of marble that was exactly the height he had reached in his lifetime.

There and then, Miss Coynte murmured a favorite saying of hers: "Chicken Little says the sky is falling."

Then she placed the memory roses against the shaft.

"You were the first," she said with a sigh. "All must be remembered, but the first a bit more definitely so than all of the others."

A cooling breeze stirred the rather neglected grass.

"Time," she remarked to the sky.

And the sky appeared to respond to her remark by drawing a diaphanous fair-weather cloud across the sun for a moment with a breeze that murmured lightly through the graveyard grasses and flowers.

So many have gone before me, she reflected, meaning those lovers whom she had survived. Why, only one that I can remember hasn't gone before, yes, Sonny Bowles, who went to Memphis in the nick of time, dear child.

Miss Coynte called down the hill to the road, where she had left the pregnant unmarried daughter in curiously animated conversation with a young colored gatekeeper of the cemetery.

There was no response from the daughter, and no sound of conversation came up the hill.

Miss Coynte put on her farsighted glasses, the lenses of which were almost telescopic, and she then observed that Michele Moon, despite her condition, had engaged the young colored gatekeeper in shameless sexual play behind the family crypt of a former governor.

Miss Coynte smiled approvingly.

"It seems I am leaving my mission in good hands," she murmured.

When she had called out to her daughter, Michele Moon, it had been her intention to have this heroically profligate young lady drive her across town to the colored graveyard with another bunch of memory roses to scatter about the twin angels beneath which rested the late Mike and Moon, who had died almost as closely together in time as they had been born, one dying instantly as he boarded the ferry on the Arkansas side and the other as he disembarked on the Mississippi side with his dead twin borne in his arms halfway up the steep levee. Then she had intended to toss here and there about her, as wantonly as Flora scattered blossoms to announce the vernal season, roses in memory of that incalculable number of black lovers who had crossed the river with her from Tiger Town, but of course this intention was far more romantic than realistic, since it would have required a truckload of memory roses to serve as an adequate homage to all of those whom she had enlisted in "the mission," and actually, this late in the season, there were not that many memory roses in bloom.

Miss Coynte of Greene now leaned, or toppled, a nylon-tip pen in her hand, to add to the inscriptions on the great stone shaft one more, which would be the relevant one of the lot. This inscription was taking form in her mind when the pen slipped from her grasp and disappeared in the roses.

Mission was the first word of the intended inscription. She was sure that the rest of it would occur to her when she had found the pen among the memory roses, so she bent over to search among them as laboriously as she now drew breath, but the pen was not recovered--nor was her breath when she fell.

In her prone position among the roses, as she surrendered her breath, the clouds divided above her and, oh, my God, what she saw----

Miss Coynte of Greene almost knew what she saw in the division of clouds above her when it stopped in her, the ability to still know or even to sense the approach of----

Knowledge of----

Well, the first man or woman to know anything finally, absolutely for sure has yet to be born in order to die on this earth. This observation is not meant to let you down but, on the contrary, to lift your spirit as the Paraclete lifted itself when----

It's time to let it go, now, with this green burning inscription: En avant! or "Right on!"