One Final Gift

Day laborers still in their work boots doff their caps and sidle into pews in Apostoles y Profetas church at Nicholson and 14 streets NW. Soccer teammates arrive, soul mates from the recovery program, organizers from the immigrant rights movement, plus assorted friends and family. Maybe 80 people in all attend the seven-hour vigil.

Argueta is laid out in a silver-colored casket on the altar, wearing a black suit, his hair slicked back.

Tamales warm in the church kitchen as Monday slips into Tuesday, nine days after El Chino scored his last goal.

"We are all immigrants," Marino Cordoba, the lead day-laborer organizer, says quietly in Spanish during the formal presentation of the bulging envelope. "We have to be together in life and in death. The only way we know to keep everything together is by working together."

Cordoba presses the soccer medallion into Banegas's hand, while Nelson Argueta receives the cash.

It isn't enough for the trip home, but the community has given more, including $1,000 that night at the vigil and $1,200 on the soccer field. Still, in the end, Nelson knows he will have to cash the $400 in quarters that he has been collecting for years and years.

Kevin scampers around the sanctuary, his smile seeming wider than his face, tousled black curls flying. He cares as little about the proceedings as any boy of 2 years and 8 months.

In his circumnavigations, Kevin passes near the coffin, but not too near. He glances out of the corner of his eyes.

"It's Poppi," Kevin's mother says in Spanish. "Do you want to see him?"

"Poppi?" Kevin still doesn't quite believe it.

Now the boy spies something else on the altar. It's one of the cardboard boxes, about a foot cubed, with a ragged slit cut in the top, ready for more donations. Taped to the box is the photo of the man flashing a squinty smile. His hair is wavy, not slicked back. He's wearing a soccer uniform, not a black suit.

"Poppi!" cries the boy. He sprints past the coffin, careening toward the cardboard box with open arms and happy triumph on his face, until the adults intercept him. He climbs into his mother's lap in the front pew. She tries again: "We are seeing him for the last time," she tells her son. "Poppi is going away."

Unlike her fiance and her son, Banegas does not yet have "papers." She cannot leave the United States to witness his burial Thursday and expect to return. She cannot count on ever visiting his grave.

"Today is the last night," she sighs.

The end of four years together: "He said I was the woman who had been able to make him happy, because I was the one who gave him a son," she says.

Now begins an uncertain future: "I don't know what we will do."

It is time. Without a word, a man from the funeral home approaches and turns out the light over the coffin.

Banegas places her hands gently on the body of her son's father and begins sobbing. "I won't see you forever," she says.

She steps back and the man firmly, finally, closes the casket.

Banegas trails the coffin into the night. Her cries echo in the quiet neighborhood: "Please, don't leave me!"

Nelson Argueta tries to console her as El Chino begins his journey home. "He will be with us forever."

Against the chill air, someone slips Kevin's knit cap over his curls. On the front it says, "God Bless America."

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.