From Jonny Appleseed. Published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2018.

When I was thirteen we had something called Culturama at school. Everyone was divided into groups and assigned a country, and then learned about its terrain, its population, and its foods. Ours was Sweden. I was with three keeners, all of them white. Brooke, a blonde-haired girl who liked to wear glittery silver headbands, took charge of our group, claiming she was an expert on Sweden because her room was outfitted with IKEA furniture. She used IKEA-speak with words like “Malm” and “Hemnes,” and described her colour schemes such as “bone white” and “mahogany brown.” She looked me dead in the eye when she said the word “brown.” I took some pride in the discomfort it caused her.

We each had to prepare a Swedish dish. “I’ll make Swedish meatballs,” Brooke announced. “I’ve had authentic ones before, you know, when my mom took me to IKEA.”

Brooke then decided who would make what.

“Carol, you’ll make gingersnap cookies. Tammy, can you do crêpes? And—”

Before she could finish, I interrupted her. “I can make rice pudding, my mom makes it all the time!”

It was true—my mom did make the best rice pudding. She’d make it for me as a reward whenever I came home with good news, like the time I had won our monthly spelling bee competition. I used to practise in my room at night to learn how to spell. I flicked my tongue at the harsh “T” in trade and puckered my lips into a kiss to lull out the “O” in goat. There were all kinds of strange words that I knew how to spell then, like P-e-r-co-c-e-t and i-n-s-u-l-i-n.

My mom made her rice pudding with wild rice and smoothed it out with fresh milk. Then she added vanilla and cinnamon to it, which made it soft brown in colour. Raisins were next, and I liked to watch them fatten up in the froth of milk and cinnamon.

I also liked to help with the stirring. “Constant movement,” she used to tell me, “helps to blend all of the flavours together and thicken the liquid. If you keep the rice and the raisins moving, they’ll really fill up with milk.” So I kept on stirring that pot. Which was hard; my biceps weren’t half the size of my mom’s—heck, mine were more the thickness of a hind’s feet.

Whenever I complained that my arms were getting sore, my mom would take over. “Boy, you’re slack,” she’d say, and playfully slug me on the shoulder. To celebrate the day I finished high school, she made an entire soup pot full of rice pudding. As she stirred it with one arm, she pulled me in close with the other. She held me like that for what seemed like forever. I could feel her deep breaths on my hair, which sounded almost animal-like, but her touch was soft, and she rubbed the top of my head with her chin.

“Heck, I’m just proud of you m’boy,” she said.

“Thanks Mom,” I said. She didn’t say that very often.

That night, all of our neighbours and family came to visit. My mom had cooked enough rice pudding for the entire rez. She ladled out bowl after bowl of pudding for the elders and kids who lined up first, and then again for everyone else. Some of my aunties brought bannock, and another had hamburger soup. My uncles brought moose meat burgers and grilled them up, and my kokum served her jello cake. Almost everyone I knew had come and were dressed up to some degree, which meant blue jeans instead of sweatpants. Someone brought a fiddle and played music. My mom and Roger danced on the grass outside, and my kokum swayed along with my younger cousins. We ate our feast and held each other into the wee hours of the night, until we couldn’t see each other in the thickness of the dark.

Brooke had insisted that I bring Swedish rice pudding to Culturama, but when I showed up with mom’s version instead, she gasped and shook her head. “Nonononono,” she said. “This isn’t Swedish rice pudding— why are there raisins in this? Why is it all brown? No, Jonny, you messed this up. We’re all going to get an F because of you!”

I came home crying that night. “That’s just the way it is,” my mom said as she consoled me. That was the only answer she had whenever there was a problem. When I showed her the folder containing all the research we had done, she was really impressed. “Heck, they eat reindeer? Maybe we have more in common than I thought,” she said. When she flipped to the last page, which was about the Swedish tradition of blood pudding, she started laughing, which echoed throughout our house. “Here, m’boy, I have just the thing,” she said, and got up.

She pulled out all the frozen cherries she had in the freezer, and every packet of red Kool-Aid she could find, then threw them all into a pot along with some homemade raspberry jam and ketchup. When it came to a boil, she mushed the mixture until it was smooth and poured it all into a big plastic bowl.

“Here, you take this tomorrow instead,” she said.

“The heck is this?”

“You tell them that if it’s tradition they want, then this here is as close as it gets.”

When I brought it to class the next day, everyone in our group gasped. “Here,” I said to Brooke, “it’s blood pudding, like the one we wrote about.” I scooped a spoonful of the thick, maroon-coloured paste and held it near her lips. “Try it,” I said, “it’s a delicacy in Sweden.” When she put the spoon into her mouth, she promptly spit it out all over our table. The map of Sweden that we had coloured was stained with cherries and ketchup.

“This tastes like shit!” she screamed. Our teacher immediately stormed over and handed us both pink slips to see the principal. Brooke’s tongue and lips were stained red; I laughed as she pawed at her mouth. “It’s not just red,” I told her, “It’s NDN red.” I wondered if that was what Sissy Spacek felt like when she torched her high school gymnasium—it was my Carrie moment.

Both Brooke and I were suspended for the remainder of the week. When I got home and told my mom, I thought she was going to give me a good spanking, but instead she smiled and high-fived me.

I wished with everything I had that the food colouring would stain Brooke’s mouth forever, because redness was their lord’s way of chastising you.