They sat about the kitchen table facing their father, watching him. The kerosene lamp flickered and sputtered, casting leaping shadows upon the wood ceiling. He called for more light. Corrine brought another lamp and placed it on the far end of the table. This lamp glowed brightly, lighting his features. His face, so familiar to his children, had not changed much over the years. His busy eyebrows, now gray, hid the green of his eyes. His jaw-line retained its firmness but his skin, brushed by wind, sun and time, had changed from a burnished tan to the color of faded leather.“Well, I tell you…” The one with the fat neck and rumpled suit said, looking to the others. “I wish I had been there at the Welfare Office. I would have straightened this out. Know what I’m saying?”

“Hah!” Jenny twisted her mouth towards him. She was the oldest of the children, tall and square shouldered. “That’s the story of your life, Norman. Woulda, coulda.”

“Come on, you all. Let’s not fight again.” The younger woman said. “Poppa?” She asked. “It’s the property, isn’t it?”

“Ole 27.” Norman interrupted before his father could speak. “It hangs over all of us- in good times and bad.”

H was silent as he sat there, looking at them but his thoughts were of another time. The hurricane had come that year. A big one. It didn’t miss. He was standing by the barn, looking out onto his flattened fields of sugar cane. Emily suddenly appeared beside him. He could feel her firm hand slipping into his, offering her warmth, her understanding. “It’s pretty bad?” She asked.

“It’s bad, Emily.” His eyes swept the fields. “First thing when I woke up, I got into the pick-up to hear the radio. They say the winds passed through here at one hundred miles an hour. Every sugar cane field in Lafourche Parish is laid flat. Hear what I’m saying? Every cane field laid flat.”

They were silent, looking at their fields. They were thinking of the bills they owed, the needs of their children. “We’ll make out. Somehow…” Emily’s voice trailed off into a soft moan.

His eyes were riveted on the flattened fields. He said nothing.

“Ole 27 will pull us through.” She offered up as a prayer.

“It will have to. We got nothing else. I mean nothing else.” His voice was flat and numb.

That winter, on the 27 acres of swamp and woods, a small miracle did occur. Pa-Billy trapped more mink than ever. The sale of the mink skins saved them. He remembered bringing the money home to Emily. They laughed and danced around the kitchen table, dollar bills floating about them. Their small children begin to laugh and dance with them. “Ole 27 did it again.” He said.

“God did it.” Emily said, her laughter fading. “God told us to buy that strip of land when it came up for sale. Everyone said we shouldn’t. Even Dad. But we bought it. That’s God’s land. And we can’t help but feel its goodness.”

He said nothing. He knew he would feel foolish of he did. He was not the kind to say things like that. He’d let Emily say it for both of them.

Jenny was saying. “He’s not eligible for the Old Folks Pension because the 27 acres is worth more that five hundred dollars.”

He listened as the voices floated above and around him like butterflies twirling in a March wind. “Why doesn’t he just sign it over to us? We will inherit it anyway. Know what I’m saying?”

“Giving away a resource would make him as ineligible as if he still owned it.”

“How about the house and land here?”

“The house and adjoining property are exempt under Welfare Policy.”

“Well, bully for the ole Welfare Department.” Norman sneered, his fleshy jowls glowing in the lamp’s reflection.

“So,” the younger brother picked it up. “All he has to do is sell ole 27, spend the money and then he’s eligible for the pension?”

His older sister agreed. “And for hospital expenses and payment of most of his medicine and doctor bills.”

All four now understood. They looked at the familiar figure in the golden glow of the kerosene lamp. He sat straight, his suspenders a blue Y-line on the back of his white long johns. He had removed his work shirt. He always did when he came in from the fields at night.

“How about it, Poppa?” The younger girl asked gently.

He said nothing. The pain was in his chest again. It picked at his chest bone, and then raced up and down his left shoulder and arm, like a hot than cold needle, stitching painfully. His fingers were numb. He gripped his left knee, hidden beneath the table. Gripping and feeling- but it was his knee and not his fingers that had feeling, telling him he was still alive.

The pain first caught him near the barn on Christmas Day. It was after the noon meal. All of his children, except Norman, had come for the traditional family meal. Corinne cooked a good one. Afterwards, when everyone was sitting on the sun-splashed porch, his grandchildren all about him, he had felt a strange, unfamiliar nausea rising within him. He became alarmed, not knowing if he was about to throw up or have a bowel movement. He arose from his chair. Holding onto the rail, placing his feet carefully, one step at a time, he walked weakly away from the laughter of his grandchildren. The pain struck with terrible suddenness.

When he left the hospital, he carried three prescribed medicines (one to place under his tongue whenever chest pains occurred). He was advised to hire someone to help Tee Man, Corrine’s husband, work the farm.

“Don’t you all know why he won’t sell it?” The younger brother asked, looking at his siblings.

“Because Mama’s buried there. We all know that.” Jenny said, trying not to become impatient. “But I spoke to Papa about that. We can have her moved to the cemetery in town.”

“If he had listened to us, Mama would not have been buried there in the first place.” Norman said quickly.

“That’s enough! You know how Papa feels about that.” The younger woman said. She was losing her patience as tension hummed around the table.

They had all been against him when he told them. He saw the shock in the grief-filled faces, their eyes red veined and puffed from the fierce flow of tears. He was the only one who had not cried, had not bent his body before the gale aching rend of sorrow. His body stood straight and firm. “Your Mama wanted to be laid to rest on ole twenty seven. On the ridge where she planted the jasmine. Now she told me that.” His voice sounded muffled-dry as the flap of a broken-winged hawk futilely beating his wings against the ground, knowing it will never fly again. “She said that and that’s the way it’s gonna be. Know what I am saying? Listen to me on this.”

He led the procession up the ridge. He walked stiff legged in his blue Sunday suit, his shapeless crowned hat tall in the clear, blue sun. He was silent through the burial service. His eyes followed the lowering of the silver coffin. The muted, anguish cries of his children spilled over him. The smell of jasmine hovered in the air.

He remained behind while the others wandered down the hill. He watched the three men bury her coffin with the soil of ole twenty-seven. A crow cawed in the distance. Then he finally was alone with Emily. The evening breeze blew softly across the ridge and dusk settled into blackness about him. One by one the stars began to appear in the sky and soon the moon, turning golden, began to rise. The earth, the grass, the vines, the flowers suddenly were dusted with silver-gold moonbeams.

A mockingbird sang in the night, its piercing dithyrambic melody antiphonal as the smooth dirge-like music of the wind drifted, slow-winged and lugubrious, above the trees and along the ridge.

The pain flickered in his chest and then was gone. He knew the damn pain would return.

“Poppa?” Is something wrong?”

He looked at the faces around the table, the faces of his children- of Emily’s children. And he loved them, each one. He knew their vulnerabilities, their weaknesses. “No.” He said. “Nothing wrong.”

“We only want what’s best for you.”

“Yeah, Papa.” We only want you to get the proper care.” The younger brother said.

“How about it, Papa?” Norman pushed. “You’ll sell ole 27?”

They all watched him as his eyes receded behind his thick eyebrows, hidden from the bright flame of the kerosene lamp. Is this how it ends? With Emily gone? Every day I wake up and look for Emily in the kitchen but she’s not there. The nights are not for loving and sleeping no more. They’re for emptiness. You children look at me like I’m too old to understand things and your understanding come from another generation. Time for me has not passed. You don’t see that. The heartbeat of my life is in the frequent ring of memory. All I hold precious is fused to memories; memories of Emily, her love, her body, of you children being birthed, the happiness in your eyes when you stretched your hands up to me. And the sight of sugar cane on our land, the smell of Emily’s flowers on the ridge and a million other small memories, some so painful they are hard to remember, yet so much a part of this life, this living and breathing and loving and anger and cussing and praying. You don’t understand. You take me to beg for a welfare pension I don’t want, and the Welfare tells me to sell ole twenty-seven when I’d rather cut my arm off. This pain in my chest will not go away but comes right back every time I walk in my fields or up on the ridge. Is this how it ends? When everything that’s good, you want to take away from me? You just don’t understand.

The pain was back and he could hear the wheeze in his chest. His nostrils strained for breath. Is this how it ends? Is this how it ends? With pain like a bright flick of flame that sputters and jumps on the wick? You all will sell it one day. You’ll take Emily and me into town- to lay us side by side next to strangers.

The pain receded. His breath returned like a wind in autumn, rustling through fallen leaves. That day ain’t come yet. Aloud, he said. “As long as I can make it…” he paused for emphasis, “make it to the court house in December, I ain’t selling one inch of my land. Why can’t you see that?”

He stood up, the hat brim still shadowing his face. “Well,” he rumbled, looking around at his children. “Night all. Time for bed. I got my work to do tomorrow.”