Wolf Cree

The pain was almost unbearable, but Ada was doing what she could to smile through the suffering, to give him that dreamy look of trust and love and encouragement that she had practiced so many times. This was what she wanted, what she had hoped and schemed for. A bit of pain and a few months until she showed, a scene with the Reverend Albin, her father—a scene she had rehearsed in her mind endlessly—and then this man would take her away from here forever. Take her away from this dreary treeless Natoma, Kansas, smack dab between nowhere and nothing.

Brother Hiram Leffler pushed her arms higher on the splintery, white paint-flecked side of the shed with one strong hand wrapped around both of her slender wrists. His heaving chest was pushing her breasts flat against the boards so that she could hardly breathe, and he was grunted hard at his barely controlled exertion. He was babbling between his ragged pants, telling her how beautiful and nice and sweet-smelling she was and how much he'd dreamed being with her like this.

Well, Ada had dreamed of this as well. She had dreamed of escaping from this ugly patch of ground with its lopsided weather-beaten church, where her father tended an ever-dwindling flock of pitiful souls and terrorized his family as compensation for his own disappointments from a harsh life on the cruel, unforgiving Midwest plains.

She had dreamed of release from Natoma's catch-as-catch-can meager parsonage, stuffed with all of the broken and cast-off furnishings of a tightfisted, poverty-stricken congregation. And she dreamed of freedom from the one-room schoolhouse, where Ada had spent her youth. A schoolhouse to which she had now, in her eighteenth year, returned to lay waste to the youth of another generation of ill-dressed and barely literate children—one day a student and the next day the new schoolmarm, simply by right—and responsibility—of seniority and of being the parson's daughter. Doing what was expected of her with no thought that she could have dreams of her own for anything else.

Although Hiram undoubtedly thought that he had seduced Ada, Ada knew better. But she'd never tell Hiram that. She knew enough of men to know that they needed to feel dominant. But from the moment she had decided that Hiram was to be her deliverer, she had, subtly she hoped, displayed her considerable charms to him and led him to where they now were, making fumbling love behind the hen house.

She had flattered him and cooked for him and given him the praise and admiring glances that had worked so well on her father when she wanted something from him. She had found out which colors Hiram liked best and had endeavored to wear those when he was around. She wore her luxuriant dark hair several ways when he was around at first, and she watched to see which style pleased him the most. And when she saw that special look of favor for a particular style, she henceforth wore her hair down, flowing free to beneath her shoulders—ignoring her father's looks of disapproval. And then the other special looks from Hiram began, and she returned them, demurely she hoped. Hiram was an outspoken man of the Book, and she didn't want to scare him off.

But Hiram was also a man. And she was a young, beautiful, ripe woman. It didn't take much. A few warm apple pies, a dress in cornflower blue, a special smile and fluttering eyelashes. Then moments alone on the porch swing after a good dinner, while her father was inside finishing off a sermon or counseling a distressed parishioner. A few kisses, increasingly ardent, and a well-placed, practiced sigh when, at last, he was bold enough to place a trembling hand on one of her nubile breasts. Slowly, every slowly, but steadily responding to his arousal. Ever modest but always compliant, and then, after having "accidentally" let her hand brush across his crotch, letting him take control—or, rather, letting him think he was taking control—and whimpering that she, indeed, wanted him as much as he said he wanted her, and agreeing, reluctantly, to meet him one night behind the hen house.

Hiram was moving his thing in and out of her now at a rapid pace, and she increasingly was able to accommodate him and the pain was receding into the background. She had been told that she should moan and groan and tremble for him, and so she did. She knew this was how babies were made, and, after thinking long and hard, she knew that the only way she was going to get out of Natoma and escape a life of drudgery in service of her scowling, thin-lipped minister father was to shock the pants off him. To do something that would get her banished once and for all from his sight—and, more important, from the withering looks and wagging tongues of any of his parishioners.

Hiram Leffler had been the answer to her dream, or at least the closest thing to an answer that she'd seen in this dreary town. True he was almost as old as her father, and nearly as stern and serious. But that was a given with preachers. The difference was that Hiram Leffler was an itinerate preacher. That meant that he had come from somewhere and that he would be leaving here and going somewhere else. Ada's fervent wish was to go someplace else, and she had become obsessed with the dream that when he did leave, she would leave with him. She would go as his wife and the mother of his child.

He was almost handsome, tall and sinewy, and he had those big strong hands. It was the hands, with their long, expressive—and dare she even think it, sensuous—fingers that had told Ada that she loved Hiram and wanted to go with him, fingers that she fanaticized stroking through her hair.

Hiram, in fact, had used these fingers to calm Ada down when they had met in the dark and had reached and then, both all atremble, surpassed the limits of their earlier fumbling love making. He hushed her shaking down by stroking fingers through her long, dark hair with one hand while the other guided his member to what he sought until he had gained purchase there. That hand was now palmed across Ada's belly, holding her pelvis to his. They were in the bushes, against the wall of the hen house, on the side away from the house, where the Reverend Albin was reviewing his sermon for the next morning following a dinner where his itinerate associate, Hiram Leffler, had been a guest.

The Reverend Albin assumed that Ada had withdrawn to her own room and Leffler was safely tucked away in the small storage room at the back of the church hall that had been made over into living quarters for him. But that wasn't so. Ada, the tail of her skirts lifted above her waist and her pantaloons down around her knees, had been pushed up against the splintery boards of the hen house, her cheek and breasts against the wall. And Hiram, fully clothed, but his fly unbuttoned and gaping, was dominating the young woman with his insistent body—and pumping his virginal conquest with a raging cock that could no longer be denied. He was in a world of his own, mindlessly reciting scripture and making little mewing sounds as his member sank deeper and deeper into her honey pot. He became lost in his conquest, forgetting to be gentle, pumping and pumping her with increasing ardor and boldness until his fury and shame were released deep inside . . . her ass canal.

Three evenings later, a mumbling Hiram Leffler was at the parlor door, satchel in hand, giving his halting good-byes to the Reverend Albin and doing everything he could to avoid eye contact with Ada. Right up until she'd seen Hiram and that satchel, Ada had been glowing. She had received the advertisements she'd sent for. It was the year of the biggest world's fair of all time, or at least the year the fair was supposed to open in St. Louis, only one state to the east. The advertisements she'd received said that the fair could not open now until next year, 1904, because of all of the new buildings that would be built there. But Ada hadn't cared. She was sure she was pregnant now with Hiram's baby and that he would take her away from Natoma. She had convinced herself in her awake dreaming that the first place he would take her would be to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the world's fair in St. Louis. She was aching to see the world and to see it as Hiram's wife. The man of the world, Hiram, with those sensuous hands.

Ada sat paralyzed, her dream world collapsing about her, as her father and Leffler briefly talked of Leffler's leaving. He was going farther west, into the new Colorado territory. Not east. He was leaving. He was leaving without her, and he was going west, not east—to the even more primitive wilds than dreary Natoma, not to the opulent, lively cities of the east.

Hiram hadn't gotten a foot off the front porch, however, before Ada let out a wail of betrayal and despair and ran past her father to the door out onto the porch, spewing out all that she and Leffler had done and that she was sure that she was pregnant by him now and that, as a man of God, he surely understood that they were already man and wife.

Still not looking at her, Hiram covered his embarrassment with his own raging.

"Man and Wife?" he blustered. "I have not lain with you in the eyes of the Book, woman. We have not fornicated within the biblical context. I did nothing in your womb. That would be a sin. You cannot possibly be with child. You cannot get with child from what we did. And if you be no virgin, it isn't by my doing. Besides, you enticed me. You are a Jezebel. That is why I am leaving. To put you and your wiles behind me. You would have led me astray. I am withdrawing from the temptation of you while I can."

And then he was gone. And Ada's father had heard it all. So, in the end, Ada got what she wanted from Hiram. She got expelled from Natoma, Kansas—before the small town's tongues could start to wag. Hiram was not there to loosen those tongues, and neither Ada nor her father were about to speak of her folly publicly. But the Reverend Albin knew now. And he was not the kind to either forget or forgive.

Thank goodness, though, that she had an aunt on her mother's side in Slater, Missouri, who was far less judgmental and far more understanding and forgiving than the Right Reverend Albin was. Two weeks after Ada's dreary world in Natoma had collapsed, she was on the stage headed east, to Slater, which happily had an opening for a school teacher and which even more happily was nearly three quarters of the way, in almost a direct line, between Natoma, Kansas, and the St. Louis World's Fair.

Ada was an optimistic soul at the foundation. She refused to be daunted by what had happened to her in Natoma. Even with the disaster she had left behind, she was headed toward her dream, toward what the St. Louis Fair represented in her life. And she refused to be cowed by what she had learned of men from both Hiram Leffler and her father. After the initial pain, she had enjoyed what Hiram had done to her. And she would not let him think that all of the pleasure to be had from that was his or that she didn't account for anything. Hiram had allowed himself to be overwhelmed by her despite his strict religious taboos—even though he was only fooling himself about those—because of who she was and what she had brought about herself. She had enticed him; he had not be lying about that part. She had wanted him to do what he did, and she had arranged for the opportunity and the motivation of their coupling. She knew she needed to learn much more about what happened between a man and a woman, but she knew equally that she could orchestrate what that would be. And she was determined now never to couple with a man on unequal terms—to receive generously for whatever she choose to give, and, yes, to enjoy the giving as well.