The church bells let everyone know it was ten in the morning. However, Genevieve didn’t hear a thing.
The local neighborhood knew Genevieve as a very kind old woman. In her youth, she helped as a lunch lady at the nearby high school. The kids who went to school all knew Genevieve and her kindness, she would usually give them a little more pudding than the other lunch ladies would.
She was an elderly woman who lost her hearing when her late husband hit her in the head one too many times. Everyone on the block knew how it all happened but no one talked about it for Genevieve’s respect. Even though she couldn’t hear a thing they said. Her son had tried to get her a hearing aid. In her own words “the damned thing never stayed in her ear.”
At first it was extremely difficult to get by. Her favorite thing to do was to listen to an old Pavarotti record on Thursdays as her husband sat in his chair reading the paper with the radio on. One of the things she missed most was hearing him turn the pages of the paper and smacking his lips. It was a simple thing that others wouldn’t even consider to be of importance but to Genevieve it was.
Her husband passed away several years ago due to liver cancer. When the people read in the obituary about her husband’s passing, they expected that she would have been happy in some sort of way, but at his funeral, she cried harder then anyone expected her to. It seemed her heart was immune to feeling hatred.
Ever since Genevieve was young, she could never dislike someone. She was kind to everyone she met. Because she was kind to everyone, everyone was kind to her. Genevieve’s mother taught her to treat others how you want to be treated. A thing every parent should say to their child, but Genevieve took that piece of advice to heart. There was something about her husband that didn’t apply to that though.
He had always been one to take to the demon drink when times were hard. Genevieve would usually be the one he would take his anger out on. Her son would try to defend his mother but there was nothing he could do when his father was on a drunken rampage. After years of abuse, Genevieve’s hearing began to go.
Genevieve’s husband wasn’t always abusive to her. They had first met before he was drafted. They wrote to each other while he was overseas fighting in Europe. Genevieve could tell that he was a changed man when he finally returned home. He could still be loving but as the years went by, the nightmares got worse and the worse things got for poor Genevieve. So whenever he was abusive and horrid, Genevieve would think of all the good times they had together when he didn’t have a bottle in his hand.
Genevieve was asked by her close friends why she took the abuse. She would always avoid the question by saying it was out of love or how it wasn’t that big of deal. Truth is, Genevieve did love her husband but she loved her son more. She thought that if she divorced her husband, it’d be a bad experience for her son. Genevieve didn’t want her son to grow up without a father plus she didn’t want him to think divorce as a good thing. It was a terrible thing to her.
Genevieve believed that marriage is a sacred thing. It wasn’t because she was religious and it was against her beliefs, it was because it hurt her heart to hear that a husband and wife were splitting up because of some foolish reason to her. To Genevieve, you could only get married once and had to stick with your partner, you had to deal with the problems that a married couple comes across, and that was that. There wasn’t no going back after the priest officially made Genevieve and her husband a married couple.
Quite a shame for the poor lady. Every Sunday morning Genevieve would take the red wood cane her recently deceased son got her several years ago from the side of her bed. She would get dressed, put on the wool coat she always wore on Sundays that smelled of mothballs and move about her house doing her regular routine.
The police officer stood on the street corner and saw Genevieve walking up the church steps to attend early morning mass. She looked at him, smiled, and continued up the steps. The officer tipped his hat and continued to watch her.
Genevieve walked into the church and proceeded up to the front. She moved into one of the pews and sat down and watched the people around her sing. She looked at the stained-glass windows and looked at the details carved into the glass.
A young man who helped Genevieve sat down next to her, wearing dark red clothing. He smiled at her, she nodded and smiled back.
About a year ago when Genevieve’s hearing finally left her and her son moved off to college, the young man saw her in the supermarket, being yelled at by some rude teenagers. He scared them off and went to Genevieve’s side. She looked at him and smiled, she hadn’t even noticed that she was being heckled by the teenagers.
The young man took Genevieve’s side like white on rice. He was at her house almost every day, helping her with daily activities. She kept a notepad on the kitchen counter that had a list of groceries she need and he would go to get them for her. The young man didn’t want anything in return from Genevieve, but out of kindness, she cooked for him. Genevieve wouldn’t have felt right about the young man not having a warm meal in his stomach.
She noticed the bruises on his dark skin and touched one. He winced and removed her hand from the bruise. Genevieve looked into his dark eyes and saw pain. She lowered her head and saw his knuckles bloody and scuffed. She knew when he had gotten in a fight; she had to help clean up the young man more than once after he had gotten into one.
The service ended an hour later and the young man led Genevieve out of the church and towards her home. Genevieve watched the birds fly overhead and above the building rooftops. She saw their beaks moving but couldn’t hear anything; she only imagined that she could hear the beautiful bird songs.
The young man slowed Genevieve down and he squeezed her hand. She looked at him with gentle eyes and saw hate in his. She looked forward and saw a group of large men, wearing dark blue clothing, coming at them. The young man quickly moved her into a store and yelled something at the store clerk. The young man then ran back out of the store and didn’t return.
Genevieve got to her feet and looked out the store window and saw the young man being beaten by the group of men. He cried in pain but his cries weren’t heard by Genevieve. She picked up her cane and left the store and went over to the men fighting. She began hitting one of the men with her cane and he turned to see the little old lady. Genevieve was frail and she was barely tapping the man with her cane and he saw the sadness in Genevieve’s eyes.
The man pulled away the other men who were still beating on the young man and Genevieve saw his lips moving. The men walked away and they all had their eyes on Genevieve who was standing there, by the young man’s side.
Genevieve sat down by the young man, who was bleeding on the side of the street. She began to tug on his shirt, trying to move him off the street. Tears rolled down her face.
The police officer, who stood on the corner by the church, came running over to Genevieve. He moved Genevieve away from the young man and began speaking into his radio. He looked at Genevieve and saw the extreme sadness and felt nothing but guilt. The law enforcer moved the young man off of the street and Genevieve cradled the body in her arms. She rubbed his cheek and the young man’s eyes slightly opened, and looked at Genevieve.
His hand moved to his torso, where Genevieve saw several small holes in his side, spilling blood onto the pavement. Genevieve put her hand on the knife wounds and the blood felt warm and wet on her frail, bony hands. She looked into his eyes and tears rolled down from them.
The young man stopped breathing and his eyes looked up at the sky. Genevieve’s tears fell down onto his lifeless body. Her heart broke from the loss of her son. No, she had not given life to the young man but the bond they formed was like a mother and son’s relationship.
She closed the young man’s eyes as more police arrived on the street.
