Olivia laughed along with him, but all she could think about was the ride
home, her sitting behind him on that horse. Did she still want to put her arms around him?
“Well, I’d better get Ernest done up.”
He slipped the bit into the horse’s mouth, smoothed a blanket over its back,
and hoisted himself up. Then he turned and offered Olivia his hand.
“I think I need you to go over by one of those stumps,” she said.
He wore the expression of a man who is being patient with a lesser being as
he clucked for Ernest to take a few steps. Then he grasped Olivia’s hand while
she put her left foot on the stump and swung her right leg over the horse’s back.
Settled close behind Jeremy, she breathed in his woodsy scent.
She spent most of the ride home wondering if there was a woman in
Northville. It was a long way to go every two weeks just to lose at poker. She held her back painfully rigid and her knees clamped so hard around poor
Ernest’s flanks, she worried she was going to break his ribs. To her surprise, the
urge to put her arms around Jeremy was not hard to resist.
“Are you a Democrat?” she asked, unable to think of anything else to say.
“You can bet I don’t vote Whig.”
“Not even for Harrison? Son of the Middle West?”
“Not even. Course, there’s nothing to say Tyler will be any better. I’ll give him one thing – that log cabin bill he wants to pass is all right.”
“What’s that?”
“Haven’t you heard about that either? It would let a settler claim 160 acres of
land before it’s offered for public sale. Then later, once he’s scraped the money
together, he can buy it for $1.25 an acre.”
“In Michigan too?”
“I guess everywhere. It’s a federal law.”
“For coloreds too?”
“Don’t remember it saying anything otherwise.”
She quickly figured in her head. This sounded like a far better deal than the
one she was offering Mourning. After a long silence she changed the subject, asking Jeremy if he would vote for an abolitionist party.
“I don’t believe in one human being owning another, no matter how black his
skin is, but no, I wouldn’t vote for the abolitionists.”
“Why not? How do you think the slaves will ever get freed, if people don’t vote for a political party that wants to free them?”
“I vote for a man, not a party. And no one but naïve women like you trusts reformers of any stripe. They get carried away with themselves, do more harm than good. Think their cause justifies whatever they feel like doing.”
“What harm could the Abolitionists do?”
“Spoken like a truly naïve woman. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard what your
abolitionists have been spouting lately about ‘wage slavery’?”
“No. What’s that?”
“They say that the first battle they have to fight now is against the low wages
paid to white men. Ending Negro chattel slavery would only throw millions of coloreds on the labor market and drive low wages even lower. So the white
slaves have to be freed before the black ones. And most of your reformers would
just as soon ship your beloved free Negroes off to Haiti, which I don’t suppose
