Hästebäck

Hästebäck is the farmstead where Jonas Petter gives Robert refuge after Robert flees service, turning a temporary hiding place into a threshold on the road to America. Its kitchen offers protection from the sheriff, but the household is marked by a hostile marriage, while Robert’s injured ear carries the memory of his former master. From Hästebäck, Jonas Petter joins the emigration, and Robert’s solitary escape becomes part of a larger departure.

Shelter for a Fugitive

When Robert feared that he might be forced back to Nybacken, Jonas Petter offered to take him to Hästebäck and hide him if the sheriff came looking. Karl Oskar urged his brother to accept. Robert obeyed, leaving with the neighbor rather than return to the farm or risk drowning himself in the mill brook. The shelter mattered because Robert had become socially exposed as well as legally vulnerable: after deserters were rebuked from the pulpit, he had avoided public places and spoken only with Arvid, himself disgraced for different reasons.

The sheriff never came to search Hästebäck during Robert’s three-week stay. There, Jonas Petter treated him not as a child but as a man: at supper he poured them equally tall drinks of brännvin. Robert was eager to drink, perhaps two or three, because the liquor seemed to quiet the humming in his left ear. He had nearly lost his hearing on that side, yet the sound persisted, an echo of Aron’s box that he feared might remain for life. The refuge therefore sheltered Robert’s body without erasing what he had endured.

A Troubled Household

Hästebäck was not a peaceful household simply because it offered Robert safety. Jonas Petter and his wife, Brita-Stafva, lived on bad terms. When Brita-Stafva came in from the byre carrying wooden milk pails, Robert noticed the beard on her face and felt uneasy; Jonas Petter’s own bushy beard did not frighten him in the same way. Her appearance marked her as outside the norm in Robert’s eyes, but the sharper sign of the marriage’s condition was the hatred in the look she turned on her husband.

The couple’s silence had its own history. After a major quarrel, they had spent three days without speaking; on the fourth morning, Brita-Stafva answered Jonas Petter only by continuing her work. Robert heard Jonas Petter mutter that a man could sharpen a knife, but could not understand the insinuation or know what would happen between the couple the following day, after he had gone out. The narrated episode, titled “Story of a Man Who Sharpened a Knife,” keeps Robert outside the coming event: he is present in the household, but not a witness to what follows. The tension at Hästebäck thus belongs to the setting’s life, not to Robert’s knowledge of it.

From Refuge to Emigration

Jonas Petter’s own departure took shape while Robert was staying at Hästebäck. The planned crossing was practical as well as aspirational: spring offered milder sea conditions and enough time to reach the settlement and sow for a fall harvest. Karl Oskar and Robert had arranged passage for six on the Charlotta, paying a down payment of one hundred daler, and Robert was to seek a contract for Danjel as well if space remained. Jonas Petter’s decision extended that chain of arrangements beyond the original group. One evening he told Robert that they would travel together to America on the same ship as the others. A third America chest was then prepared in secret in the region.

Hästebäck’s role in the migration is therefore both local and connective. Jonas Petter first helps Robert evade the sheriff, then makes his own choice to leave; the farmstead becomes a point at which protection enables movement. The larger migration had begun through rumors of fertile land, passed through neighbors and households, and required actual passage to be arranged. At the meeting at Åkerby Junction, the emigrants numbered sixteen—nine adults and seven children—with three drivers returning from Karlshamn. Jonas Petter drove his own one-horse wagon; Robert joined him, and Arvid traveled with them too. The two former farmhands from Nybacken were no longer setting off alone or in secret.

A Threshold, Not an End

The movement away from Hästebäck did not immediately deliver the travelers to freedom or firm ground. On the road, Robert repeatedly jumped down to open gates and counted them, including winter-opened gaps in pasture fences, as gates on the America road. At the harbor, after the wagons’ long night journey, the emigrants faced water with no land visible across it for the first time in their lives. Once aboard the Charlotta, Robert and Arvid measured the cramped deck: forty paces long and eight wide, space for nearly a hundred passengers to live and sleep. Later, contrary winds stretched the crossing into a succession of days, making both the homeland and the hoped-for destination seem immeasurably distant.

Against that expanding geography, Hästebäck remains a small but consequential stop: a place where Robert is hidden, where his lasting injury is felt in ordinary company, and where Jonas Petter’s decision joins one household’s troubles to the group’s uncertain voyage. Its shelter is real but provisional. The route out runs from a kitchen and a three-week reprieve through counted gates, a cold harbor, and the confined ship, so that departure appears not as a single leap but as a chain of choices and passages.