Once I Went to a Wake
Stephen D. Gibson
After Jorge Soto Sanchez’s El Velorio de Oller en Nueva York, 1974, revised 1984, hand-colored screenprint
We started drinking before lunch on a broiling beach. The sand, the wind, the shade, it was all heat, and the whole wake was franticly dedicated to hilarity. We moved into the house, and I was no longer in my head. Speech and the barking of dogs looked like black spray and I raced through the rooms, unsure if I shrieked to laugh or cry. Everyone’s bodies still radiated the heat of the sun, though dusk came and went. The deeper the night, the more yellow the candlelight in the house, turning our skins orange and lime. No one wore clothes except the oldest woman, hunched over her cane. A man in only a pava hat tried to play guitar among the sounds of dogs, fighting children, and our trying to out-talk and out-laugh each other. We all had to be heard and the loudest was a roasted pig, carried in high on a skewer like a banner, its squeals loud enough to numb my ears.
The boy’s parents and the people who raised him clustered around the young, pale body, spread out among thousands of red and white blossoms right on the dining room table. One scent hid another. I told them, finger in each face, he should have been buried days ago. I told them what they already knew: the boy, drunk, forced another car off the road. He screamed at the driver in the rain and reached into the car, and, I said, was pinned there by the window rolled up tight. And then, I said, the driver began, slowly at first, to drive.