Free Plenty by Ananda Braxton-Smith Page B

wanted her daughter to put one back – but Nana said to let her eat.
    “Not enough cake stop you growing,” she said and offered Grace the fairy cakes too.
    They settled under a ragged manna gum spreading its limbs over the riverbank. There was nothing like eating cake in the bush. Maddy thought it was the perfect mix of sharp and sweet: in the nose, the sharp smell of the bush; in the mouth, the sweetness of icing. One made the other even better.
    “Tell Maddy about the What, Mum,” Grace said, picking off lumps of each cake and then putting them into her mouth together.
    “Oh, she doesn’t want to hear that,” said Mrs Wek.
    “Mum tells us these stories. So we won’t forget,” Grace said. “Right, Mum?”
    Mrs Wek looked at Grace with her face full of love and a certain distance.
    “I wasn’t always a woman for these old stories,” she said to Maddy apologetically, like Maddy might think her childish. “But I changed when we left home.”
    “But Maddy wants to hear,” said Grace, simply. And Maddy realised she really,
really
did.
    She shifted closer to Mrs Wek, who seemed heartened by it.
    “I’ve been thinking lately,” Mrs Wek said. “About how all that’s left of anything are stories. About how the What story reminds me. It reminds me about what’s important.”
    Down by the river, three women planters had taken off their boots and were dipping their toes in the cool water. And close to Maddy, two more sat knock-kneed on a log, holding mugs of Nana’s even worse than terrible thermos tea. One of them had a pink bandaid strip across the bridge of her nose. Two men, one with long grey hair pulled back in a ponytail and one entirely bald, sat at the edge of the clearing. They were waiting for the story.
    Mrs Wek smiled nervously at Maddy.
    “When God made the first people,” she said, “he gave them a choice between two presents. The first choice was the cow. You know how cows give food and clothes? Everything from a cow can be used by people. It was a useful present.
    “The second choice was a thing called the What.”
    The two women on the log stopped eating. They muttered, “Pardon? Did she say What?”
    “The first people asked God exactly like that,” said Mrs Wek, opening her eyes wide in mock surprise at Maddy. “They asked God, ‘But what is the
What
?’ God looked mysterious and wouldn’t say.”
    Mrs Wek took a slow bite of her lemon slice, chewed it and swallowed.
    “It could have been anything, you know,” she said. “Or it could have been nothing. Nobody knew. So the first people did the only sensible thing. They chose the cow.”
    She put the rest of the slice in her mouth and chewed.
    “Is that it?” asked the ponytail man and looked around like he’d missed something.
    “Oh yes,” said Mrs Wek, wiping crumbs from her mouth. “That’s it.”
    “But what
was
it?” asked the bald man, irritably.
    The lady with the bandaid said, “Well, that’s the point, isn’t it, Derek? They didn’t know and God wasn’t saying. These first people had to choose for everybody, forever.”
    “But what if the What was better than a cow?” insisted Derek.
    “Surely,” the bandaid lady said with a tone developing, “it’s better to choose something you know than something you don’t.”
    Mrs Wek was disturbed by the fuss the What had caused.
    “Please don’t bother yourselves,” she said. “It’s only an old story.”
    “Why is the What so important to your mum?” Maddy whispered to Grace but Mrs Wek overheard.
    “It’s not the What itself,” she told Maddy. “I mean, it’s a good story but that’s not what makes it important. It’s important because there are so many stories in this country. You could get lost in them. This story’s important because it’s come a long way with me. We travelled together.
    “It’s important,” said Mrs Wek. “Because it’s mine.”
    “And mine?” Grace said.
    “Yes,” said Mrs Wek. “I give it to you.” She popped