February Tea

      Penny, God bless her soul, was good with secrets. I tell you, if ever I needed someone to bare my very soul to, I woulda picked Penny, hands down. Now there was a woman you could respect. None of that gossip these other things do, clucking about like hens and wagging thick tongues. No sir, Penny was not that kinda lady. She kept her private moments to herself.

      So imagine my surprise when this February day she sits me down at tea and she says to me, “Rose. Now, Rose, I gotta tell you something, and it’s mighty important, so I don’t want you runnin’ around telling nobody, ok? This’ll just be between you and me, just us too old girls and nobody need to know nothing, ya hear?”

      I heard alright. I can’t remember any other time Penny talked to me like, and I knew Penny for more than half my life. Why, we practically raised our children together, and we raised our grandbabies together and I ain’t never heard her talk to me like that before. So I sat myself down at her kitchen table and she passed me a cup of tea. Now, if I didn’t know that something was wrong before, I definitely knew it then. Every afternoon when I came over for tea, Penny would use her best kettle and take out her best cups, the ones with tiny pink rosebuds all along the rim, and she’d pour me a cup and ask if I wanted a cookie. I know I shouldn’t have them at my age, what with my cholesterol being too high and all, but sometimes I let myself say yes and she brings out those nice round cookies they sell at Darcy’s supermarket down on the main road. She always puts them on a plate, though I can’t say I know why, seeing as how I’m just gonna eat the cookies up anyway, might as well eat them straight from the box. But she tries, the old girl, and you can’t blame her for it. Always so polite and proper, reminds me of my momma.

      Except today, the tea she passed me was in a chipped, dark blue mug, and it was half empty and cold. I didn’t wanna seem rude or nothing, so I cupped it with both hands and looked over at Penny. Her eyes were red, not like she’d been crying but like she’d come real close, and her hair was a mess. She was clutching a handkerchief close to her face and her dark skin looked like it had grown a dozen new wrinkles overnight. She was a mess, and it was so strange to see her like this, I mean, she didn’t even come close to crying in the Church when the Spirit was in her and everyone was screaming and dancing and even then, not a tear out of her with everyone else sobbing from the strength of the Spirit.

      Penny put down her handkerchief and folded her hand on the sticky kitchen table and looked straight at me and she said, “Rose…Malcolm is dead.”

      I could tell you this story a million different ways and no way would tell you how hard those words hit me. Penny coulda whistled right at the moment and I swear to Jesus that I woulda been blown over by the force of the wind. Malcolm. Little baby Malcolm.

      “No,” I said, and I said it so softly, like a baby’s whisper, I’m surprised she heard me at all. But by the look on her face I know she did. “There’s gotta be a mistake, Penny. Not Malcolm.”

      She shook her head and she got up and went to the cabinet. She pulled out a bottle of Jack and poured it straight into her tea cup and then poured some into mine. She took a long gulp and then she looked back at me and shook her head again. “Ain’t no mistake. This morning, Grace came over in tears, hysterical. Said her momma was at the hospital, they had to take her in for shock, she couldn’t even identify the body. And no way little Grace is gonna do it. But he ain’t called his momma in three days and you know that it ain’t something Malcolm would do, so that body gotta be his.” She took another shot of Jack, this time straight from the bottle and shut her eyes. “They found him in a ditch, Rose,” she said, and her voice was cracking. This woman who did not allow me to see her cry when her husband died was letting tears fall into her empty teacup. “My baby, my beautiful grandbaby!”

      I tell you, I didn’t know what to do. I was stunned into silence, into just staring at her. Here was my oldest friend and I didn’t know what to do. She pulled up her handkerchief and wiped at her tears. “Do you know what they did to him?”

      All of a sudden, I was sick right to my stomach, honest to Moses himself. Malcolm had worked hard since he was a kid, he’d saved up enough money to buy a car and when she said that they found him in a ditch, I thought she meant he’d had an accident. But They had done something to him. I didn’t want to know who They were and I didn’t want to know what They had done. I couldn’t even begin to think of who would ever hurt such a sweet boy like Malcolm. He called me Auntie Rose, and every holiday, without fail, he’d come knocking on my door, carrying flowers and a card and if I asked him in he always said his pleases and thank yous. He always did work around the house for his grandma, even though he had gotten a scholarship to go to that college the next town over and always had so much schoolwork. And when his momma got sick with tonsillitis, he worked an extra shift at his job so that he could pay for the doctor. I remember seeing Betty laying in bed and looking up at her boy and saying, “God blessed me with my kids, Auntie Rose. Can’t nobody ask for better babies than Grace and Malcolm, can they?”

      So I didn’t wanna ask, but I knew I had to. I knew that Penny wouldn’t have started this conversation if she didn’t want somebody to know, if she didn’t want to get something off her chest. And she was my oldest friend, what could I do? I had to ask. “What did they do to him?” I asked her, and it was soft again, cuz, I’m not gonna lie, I was scared as all hell to what she would say.

      She shut her eyes again and let a tear fall down her ashy cheek and then she opened both red eyes and looked at me. She squeezed one hand around the neck of the bottle of Jack and with the other she made a fist around the handkerchief. “They beat him,” she started. She was speaking real slow, through clenched teeth like she had a long way to go and didn’t want to breakdown in the middle of it. “They beat him up and broke most of his teeth. Then they cut off his penis and hung him from a tree and when he was dead they cut him down and threw him in the ditch.”

      I didn’t hear myself gasp but I knew I must’ve. My hand flew to my mouth and the whole room got blurry cuz I was seeing it through tears. No, not baby Malcolm. I been the first person that wasn’t blood relations to see him when he was born. I held him above his sister’s cradle when she born. He played with my own grandbabies; he was as good as one of my own. And now Penny was telling me that Malcolm, little baby Malcolm, was dead and not no good death either. A hateful, spiteful and evil death.

      My voice was cracking when I asked her why. There was nothing in my mind that could explain why anyone would want to hurt him, especially in the way they did. It was like my brain was a jigsaw puzzle and none of the pieces were fitting together.

      “I’ll tell you why,” Penny said, she leaned forward. She had this look in her eyes that was telling me that this was what she had meant me to keep to myself, though it’s not like I was gonna start gossiping to those old hens down at Church about what had happened to my grandbaby. “He was dating a white girl down at that school of his.”

      I stood and walked to the sink and grabbed a paper towel to wipe my tears and then sat back down. I fixed my skirt and I took a gulp of Jack and she poured me another and I said, “They killed him over a white girl?”

      She nodded like she was already a little drunk but I knew that no matter how much whiskey she drank that day she would still be stone cold sober. “Her papa is one of them down home white men, real big and fat, and Malcolm was afraid he was gonna find out and do something about it. Didn’t want his daughter dating no nigger. I told him to stop seeing the girl, but you know how stubborn men can be. Just like his grandfather.” She stopped talking for a minute and looked at her kitchen window, foggy with the breath we’d been making. Everything outside looked gray and white through the window, and kids were yelling in the snow. “Her papa musta found out and went after my baby and what was he to do? He probably went with a bunch of friends and oh! My poor baby musta been so scared.”

      “Not Malcolm,” I said. “He wouldn’t let them see him scared.”

      Penny had to go to the hospital to identify the body. Betty couldn’t do it, she was still in shock, and Grace was only sixteen. They led us to a hall with a light that kept flickering on and off and up to a window where on the other side a woman was standing over something with a sheet. The doctor nodded at her and she lifted the sheet off the head and there he was, little baby Malcolm, all the beauty in his chocolate colored face gone to bruises and gashes and eyes swollen shut. Penny squeezed my hand tight and stared at what had become of her grandson and nodded. “That’s Malcolm,” she said.

      May the good Lord, in all His wisdom, strike me down in this very spot if I am lying when I say that in all my years I have never heard, and never will hear, words spoken with such incredible hollowness.