the mule

The mood at the service is gloomy, what with the news that the man in Leavenworth will need papers showing that the family of schwärtzen are freedmen before he can accept them.  Evidently the authorities there are being strict with the Fugitive Slave Law.  The family has made it to Kansas, by unknown means, but is currently hiding in a barn, risking capture and return.  Meanwhile the necessary papers have been obtained, but how to get them to the man in Leavenworth?  The Missouri River is too wide and deep to be forded, and the sole bridge is heavily patrolled by grey-uniformed troops who search both wagons and riders very thoroughly.  There is a story that a man who refused to take off his trousers was shot.  Surely any papers would be found and torn up.

After the hymns are sung prayers are offered and the floor is opened.  Women are not allowed to speak, unless asked to, but their thoughts are well expressed by the men who stand up.  Word is going around that a military draft will be instituted and they all vow to resist.  They hardly need to say it; this is a “peace church”.  It is also non-hierarchical; services are opened and closed by a clerk.  This month it is Herr Baumann, who at the proper moment stands up and everyone bows their heads for the final prayer.

The lunch is quieter than usual.  It seems there is not anything to say, though for some reason the men are unusually hungry.  Nudische and the other women have their hands full with serving.  During a lull Trudl comes up to her.  “Nudische, I have an idea.”

What is the idea?  The teenager tells her later, after they have stayed behind to clean up.  “Those little pill boxes Monsieur has left?  Maybe the papers can be fit into one of them and you could secret it next to your -- Gebarmütterhals?”

Nudische, who is a lot taller than Trudl, looks down with widened green eyes.  She opens her mouth as if to speak but then thinks.  She looks down to her pubic hair, or tries to; the view is of course blocked by her breasts.

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It is a closed session, just the elders, Friedrich, and Nudische.  There has never been a closed session with a woman in attendance.  The nude female stands respectfully with Friedrich in his good suit before the drably clothed, seated men.  “Is this possible?” Herr Baumann says.

Friedrich says, “She will demonstrate.”  He holds up a pill box and snaps it open.  “The paper --”

“Papers,” Herr Schreiber says.  “There are two, the Order of Manumission and the Certificate of Freedom.”

“Yes,” the young man says.  “They go into the little box” -- he snaps it shut -- “which is soldered shut by Franz.”  Franz is the town blacksmith.  “Then --”

He hands the box to Nudische, who squats down halfway, opening her legs, suppresses a little grunt, and inserts the box which disappears into her feminine orifice.  Then she stands up and faces the elders, with an impassive face.

The elders look at each other in amazement.  Then they smile.  Herr Baumann says, “Let it be done!”

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Friedrich comes by to the children’s center again, this time with Franz, who has bad news.  “I have seen these documents before.  They are this size.  Behold.”  He has a pill box and a couple of blank pages he has cut.  He folds one up as tightly as he can and with great difficulty stuffs it into the little box.  “As you can see, one box cannot hold both.”

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It was done after much prayer, in the Webers’ parlor.  Mother Weber and Frau Maria watch as Trudl carefully tries out her idea as to “the other space inside” that women have.  Nudische, having flushed her bowels out in the field, is up on the table on all fours.  One pill box is already in her vagina.  The second, lubricated with butter, is slowly inserted into her anus.  Nudische rests her head down on the table, sweating, praying.  Trudl is as gentle as possible as she pushes the lemon-shaped box past the sphincter.  After a moment of intense stretching the box is swallowed up into the nude woman’s rectum.

Nudische is slowly helped off the table.  Still sweating, she faces her clothed companions.  Her breasts quivering, her pelvis full, she takes a couple of steps on twitching bare feet.  Her nipples stiffen and her face flushes as she feels something in her loins that she has not felt since her husband was alive.  But she thinks she can control it.  The Order of Manumission will go into one pill box, the Certificate of Freedom in the other.

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“Oh -- Gott hilf mir -- OHH!  OHH!!”  Nudische, having moved to the back of the wagon next to the bundles of clothes, is suffering through another of her mysterious seizures.  She is on all fours, her buttocks high up in the air, almost touching the canvas roof as her hips buck with such force that the entire wagon lurches a little bit.

Young Hans is frightened and horrified as he looks back from the bench seat.  What is this?  Is she in danger of dying?  With her repeated tremors comes a waft of humid odor, such as he has sensed in the barn when the pigs were mating.  For some reason it causes Hans’s penis, cramped in his now-tight trousers, to expand and harden, such as it does when he has unclean thoughts.

He has asked Herr Baumann, sitting next to him, what was happening, and was puzzled when the old man told him not to be worried.  Not to be worried!

The old man, of course, knows exactly what is happening.  Yes, it is sinful, but not something the woman can control.  He can well understand that.  To be forced into sin, over and over, thrown into the Devil’s pleasure, must be a hellish ordeal for such a virtuous woman.  With every climax, he says a silent prayer for her.  He also prays that the road ahead will turn less bumpy, and that passage over the bridge will be quick and easy.

Alas, it is not to be.  If anything the road, more trafficked as it gets nearer the bridge, becomes worse, and the wagon jolts and sways and lurches more and more.  The road gets increasingly congested.  And now, with easily a quarter mile to go, they have to stop.  There are dozens of wagons ahead of them, each no doubt waiting to be thoroughly searched.

Nudische herself is no longer lucid, her mind far gone into a haze of sensations such as she has never felt, not even with Erhard, who made their marriage bed very happy.  She was sitting in between Hans and Baumann at first, but when the wagon turned out onto the Kansas City road, and she felt that first jolt from the unspringed undercarriage, she knew that this journey would be a trial, requiring all her powers of self-control.  The two little pill boxes bumped and jiggled and bounced and rubbed in a hundred secret pleasure spots, a few of which she remembered but most she never knew existed.  She was able to push back the first crisis, and then the second, but could no longer endure the hard cushion under her butt, and had to excuse herself to the flat bed behind.  With her butt in the air the jolting was cushioned by the rest of her body, but this actually made the rubbing and jiggling more subtle and more insidious.  It seemed the two boxes were competing with each other as to which could punish her more.

Now, having to wait for the other wagons to move, it is even worse.  She is on the very brink, then is jostled some more as the wagon moves ahead thirty feet, bringing her to the brink again, then stillness as she takes deep breaths and tries to force her addled mind to pray and not succumb.  Then another thirty feet of jolts . . .

As they get near the bridge Baumann sees that the searching by Confederate guards is, as they have been told, thorough and savage.  People are being pulled from their wagons, bundles ripped open and rummaged through before being thrown back in pieces.  Obviously no Schwartze can escape such searching, but they are looking for papers too.  Every pocket is poked into if not ripped open.  Men are asked to take down their trousers.  There are few women but they are searched even through their petticoats.  Baumann sweats as he suddenly realizes a flaw in their plan.  Yes, there are bundles of clothes in the back -- but only his and Hans’s.  There are (of course) no women’s clothes.  How will they explain the presence of the always-naked Helga?

“Zhhhh --- zhhhh ---”

Baumann hates to hush her as she devotes all her energies to staying on the brink without going over, but he has to.  She must be quiet as possible.  Now it is their turn.

Rogers, their hired driver, is a man of steel nerves and quick thinking.

“Where are you headed?”

“Kansas City.”

“For what purpose?”

By this time Herr Baumann and Hans have been yanked out of the wagon.  Now a dusty draft hits Rogers’s face as the back of the wagon is ripped open.  He quickly changes his planned story.

“We have a sick woman who needs a doctor.”

“And what doctor would that be?”

“George Randolph, West Eleventh Street.  He is expecting us.”  Rogers can concoct fictions on the spot.

“Oh Lord!!”  This is the corporal, blinking his eyes at something he has never seen in broad daylight, the nude hindquarters of a woman.  “C - captain!”

Rogers calls back to what are now two startled Confederate faces.  “You see, she is feverish.  We had to take her clothes off.”

The captain regains his composure.  “You ain’t joking.”  And without further searching, Baumann and Hans are pushed back in.  A few minutes later, the wagon passes over the river into Kansas.  Behind, they hear a rifle shot, presumably aimed at someone who did not cooperate.

There remains the two hours -- thirty miles -- to Leavenworth.  The road is hardly better here in Union territory.  The wagon finally pulls in to the Douglas ranch at six p.m.  The astonished family of well-off landowners sees the body of a nude woman being pulled out of the back of the wagon and carried like a dead weight into the house.  Her eyes are rolled up into her head and she trembles, then stops, then trembles again.  Dr. Hudson is waiting with his careful forceps.  When both pill boxes have been extracted Nudische is left to rest on the big bed.  The doctor takes her pulse and drops her wrist as if it were on fire.  He has never detected such a fast heartbeat except in infants.  This patient needs immediate water but she is not conscious enough to drink what they put to her lips.