Nybacken

Nybacken is the farm where Robert Nilsson’s first service as a hired hand turns the prospect of work into a struggle over time, obedience, and the right to leave. Under Aron of Nybacken, Robert encounters both the customary subordination of farm servants and the limits of the claim that a master’s discipline is legitimate; the farm becomes the point from which he first plans an escape and, later, passes on the way to America.

Setting and Household

Nybacken lies about a mile from Korpamoen. Robert’s father, Nils, arranges for him to serve there for a year, and the contract cannot simply be canceled: under the servant law, Nils has received earnest money, and Robert is expected to fulfill the agreement. His promised pay is thirty daler, a wadmal suit, and a pair of short-legged boots. His parents insist that he is old enough to work for his food and clothing, that the family cannot keep him at home, and that his older sister Lydia has already spent several years in service.

Aron of Nybacken is Robert’s master, but the farm’s hierarchy is broader than the relation between the two. Robert is the youngest hand, and Aron, the mistress, the old mistress, and the maids all direct his work. The farm’s four horses also set the rhythm of his days: he must feed them morning and evening, curry them, clean their stalls, fetch hay and oats, cut fodder, and carry water. The work draws him into constant proximity to the animals, while Sunday brings no release from their needs.

Labor and the Servant System

The service is especially demanding because Aron is lazy and the hired men do nearly all the chores. The food at Nybacken is described as comparatively good against the hardships at other farms, though it can still be spoiled or unpleasant; the account’s comparison makes clear that acceptable fare does not make the service free or easy. Robert’s first evening brings home the contrast between the older farmhand Arvid’s familiarity with such conditions and the younger boy’s inexperience.

The farm’s labor regime controls not only what Robert does but also how his time is counted. Farm servants are bound to their work for 358 days of the year, with only a single free week. As the horses remain tied in their stalls, the hands are tied to the animals through their duties. Robert reaches his decision to escape during his first week, when the routine has already shown him how little control he has over his labor or movement.

Aron’s language of discipline presents obedience as a moral duty: he wakes Robert at four in the morning and urges him not to be idle. When Robert later takes a brief rest while cleaning a ditch, Aron finds him and accuses him of loafing. The yearly examinations reinforce the same principle through Dean Brusander’s teaching that a lazy servant may be corrected with suitable chastisement. Robert has absorbed the belief that a master has authority, sanctioned by God and law, to discipline a servant; he initially understands punishment as something he has earned rather than as a wrong he can contest.

Robert’s Attempts to Escape

Robert’s first attempt to get away from Nybacken fails before he has properly begun his service. Later, he confides in Arvid that he intends to try again in the autumn, when the farm sends oak timbers toward Karlshamn. Robert expects to drive Aron’s old mare with the timber load; once out of his master’s sight, he plans to let the mare return alone and continue to Karlshamn, where he hopes to board a ship for North America. He asks Arvid to join him, imagining that his friend could leave behind the nickname that marks his low standing.

That plan is thwarted when the timber wagons do set out, but Aron goes with his own team because he does not trust Robert to travel without supervision. Robert reads this as another gate closed on the road to America. The frustration is intensified by his experience of the service itself: one earlier punishment leaves him sore, and the next confrontation comes when Aron catches him resting in a ditch after Robert has grown hungry, thirsty, and exhausted. The boy has been imagining the sky above the ditch as freedom, but the master’s appearance restores the farm’s authority over even a short pause.

Robert’s outlook changes decisively after he leaves the farm without permission. When he returns to Korpamoen, his family sees that Aron has beaten him; Karl Oskar refuses to send him back, telling Aron that he will get no more hands from their family. Aron appeals to the authorities, and Sheriff Lönnegren argues that discipline under the servant law does not give Robert a right to desert. The dispute lays bare the collision between a servant’s legal obligation to remain and the family’s refusal to accept Aron’s treatment as a reason to return the boy to his service.

Nybacken on the Road to America

Later, Nybacken becomes a landmark on the emigrants’ journey away from home. As the wagon passes the farm, Robert whistles, now able to give voice to the impulse that had once attracted his master’s attention as evidence of idleness. He imagines that Dean Brusander may continue to record him as unheard from and his whereabouts unknown. His departure is thus not merely a change of place: it leaves him outside the parish’s expected record of a servant’s life.

The farm also remains present in Robert’s understanding of what freedom in America might mean. Aboard ship, he connects an enduring ache and diminished hearing to a blow he received from Aron nearly two years earlier, and imagines that his ear will mend after arrival. More important to his hope is the end of the master-servant relation: in America, he expects, no farmer will call him a little hand, and he will no longer have to serve another person. The narrative presents that expectation as Robert’s belief, not as a guarantee about his future there.

Significance

Nybacken gives the novel a concrete setting for the economic and legal dependence of farm servants. Robert’s contract, crowded workload, restricted free time, and fear of punishment show how service governs both labor and mobility. His plan to escape through Karlshamn, his confrontation with Aron, and his eventual passage past the farm with the emigrants make the place a measure of the change he seeks: from a boy claimed by a master to a migrant choosing his own direction. That freedom is still prospective as the wagon departs, but Nybacken has already defined what Robert hopes to leave behind.