Of course Miss Tynes knows just what I am doing; looking back toward me from the playing field where she is refereeing the kickball game, does she think she really ought to come and get me? If so, she never does, though she tells my mother, who also doesn’t seem to mind.

Miss Tynes teaches us everything, except for Spanish, which takes place in another room, down the hall, where the vivacious Señorita Fernandez teaches us to count, sing, and engage in charmingly stilted conversations: Como estás, Marcos? Muy bien, Señorita Fernandez, como está usted? Every other field of enquiry is the desmesne of Miss Tynes. She makes no secret of her dislike for math, which I don’t care for either; we get through it dutifully. Science is better, since it lends itself, at least in her hands, to the investigation of materials, the splendid stuff out of which we might make. For my Science Fair project I mount a study of natural dyes; I collect leaves and bark from the desert, boil them until they yield their colors, dip spun wool into the tinctures, add a fixative, and voilà!—earthy little samples of yarns in a palette of desert shades, pale sienna, russety purple (from onion peels), yellows and sage greens. I mount them on a large poster, and win a ribbon, some consolation to my mother, in whose saucepans I’ve been stewing foul-smelling concoctions of creosote and bear claw, cholla and mesquite. My dyes are the sort native peoples might have used, though I don’t, like them, use urine as a mordant, interested as I am in the idea.

We talk, in class, about native peoples. Miss Tynes brings in a weighty necklace of Navajo silver, a garland of sculptural pomegranate blossoms. She spins yarn with a Navajo spinning wheel, a single stick with a little wooden disk partway up its length, pulling the hunk of carded wool away with one hand, using the other to spin the stick and catch and twist the long fibers, turning an amorphous cloud into a winding ball of thread. She brings to school—in a wrapping of cloth—a mysterious roll of Indian flatbread, an astonishingly thin grayish product you can see through, its color and texture not unlike the glassine envelopes in which I’ve been buying stamps for my new collection. The bread, she tells us, lasts forever in the desert air; rolls of the bread, like this one, have been found in the ancient dwellings, perfectly preserved, ready to nourish.