New Border Voices: An Anthology

Ojos de Dios

Ojos de Dios TAMMY MELODY GOMEZ The sticks are the easiest part they’re free on the ground broken from the mesquite and ironwood trees so prevalent around. The sticks are hard to tie together unless there’s another hand to hold them steady while I loop the colored yarn. Red and yellow are the colors that Mama buys at the Wal-Mart in town, she doesn’t know why she just buys, and I loop them myself with thick knots in the beginning, later it gets to be too much trouble to tie them double-knotted and dense. I wind and wind round and round sometimes so fast that my fingers get caught in the weaving and I have to stop and start all over from halfway before. When they’re finished, I wish to have a cigar box to keep them in but there are no such boxes here, only coffins and shoe boxes, that’s what Daddy knows to bring. ♦ ♦ ♦ Ojos de Dios ♦ 45 I stack them close, side by side, and smile at the brilliant color inside the carton before putting the lid over them, my little eyes of god, or ojos de dios, like the teacher said, the one who reads from books from her house, who lets us run our hands over the colored pictures, whose ideas ring so different from what the other maestras say to us at the school. I have made more than twenty-two eyes of god, colorful magical good luck charms, so much power in only sticks and yarn when the eye comes together and looks at you and looks beyond you and beyond. There are many things out there across the land and I know it could be dangerous with no eyes of god to help you see your way. I hang them from the tree, only one at a time. I cannot bear to have my box go empty so fast and quick after all the work of my hands, they grow their magic stacked up in the box, sitting in darkness beneath my bed. Eyes of god, ojos de dios, with more of the yellow yarn, I tie one to a lower branch, and when I see a brother, hermano, tío looking so much with longing to the far beyond on the other side of the border, I pull him by the hand to my special tree and point up to the dangling charms, saying my brother, my tío, I have made this for you. 46 ♦ Tammy Melody Gomez So many in my family and not family are trying to go where their eyes lead them so far beyond, para el norte where there are dangers and unknowable things. And I tell him, this is for you, you must, you have to carry it with you. It’s small and will not take so much space, in your pocket or around your neck, let it be carried to help you. No matter who gets one of my ojos, he always smiles. It might be a crooked teeth smile or a burnt skin smile, or a wrinkly face smile, but it never comes with words. It is hard to know what to say when you do not know the future. I make these ojos de dios to help them see their way, but the next thing I will learn someday is the mouth of god, boca de dios, so we can try somehow to speak the right words, giving courage to lips, for hopeful things to say as they leave. ...