Vilhelm Moberg - The Emigrants

“You’ve earned a good thrashing, my little hired fellow. But I shall let you off with a small box on the ear.”

And he gave his servant a box on the ear.

Robert was pushed backwards against the wagon wheel, and the world around him shook for half a minute, but he did not fall. The master’s hand could no doubt have hit him much harder, Aron could have given him a real box on the ear. Robert could hear, and he understood: it was only a small box he had received.

And so the farmhand rode back with his master, the whole stretch of road he shouldn’t have taken this morning, the whole road wrongly followed.

And when they arrived at the bridge over the mill brook, where in the morning he had taken the left road, the wagon now followed the right one.

So ended the day when Robert Nilsson tried to take his first steps on the road to America.

— 1—

The farmstead Nybacken had a master and mistress, plus an old mistress on reserved rights, three maids in the maids’ room, and two farmhands in the stable room. Aron’s hired men lived in the barn next to the horses’ stalls. Their room had a deal table, a bench for each of them, two beds filled with straw, and a horse blanket each. In walls and beds lived bedbugs in great numbers, and they increased in undisturbed bliss, filling all holes and cracks.

Arvid, the elder farmhand, was grown, and sturdy and strong of limb, although a light, silky boy-beard still covered his chin. He had a reddish skin and old frostbites on his nose, which bled in cold weather. Aron called him his big hand; Robert was his little hand.

Arvid seemed slow of speech and shy with people, but the very first evening after they had gone to bed on their straw bundles in the stable room Robert began to ask his comrade in service about the master and mistress. What kind of place was Nybacken for a servant?

Before he went to sleep that night Robert had obtained from the elder boy a fair picture of their situation: Aron was hot-tempered, and if he became angry he might give his hands a box on the ear or a kick in the pants. Otherwise he was really a kind, decent soul who would harm no one. The mistress was less considerate: she hit the maids, and her husband as well, and Aron was afraid of her and dared not hit back. Both master and mistress were afraid of the wife’s mother, the old mistress who lived in a “reserved room” in the attic. She was so old she should have been in her grave long ago, if the devil had attended to his business; but apparently he too was afraid of her.

The service was demanding because the master was lazy; the hired men had to do nearly all the chores. The food wasn’t restricted in good years and they could eat as much bread as they wished. During lean years the farmhands and the maids must live on what they could get, here as everywhere else.

It was salt herring at every second meal — but in many places they had to eat herring every meal the year round, except Christmas Eve, and in many places the mistress herself cut the bread and portioned out the slices. So you couldn’t complain about the fare in Nybacken. Of course, it might happen that the bread was mildewed, the herring rancid, the milk blue sour, and the cheese rat-eaten, so they could see the marks of the small teeth. But only once had they found rat-dirt in the flour porridge; Aron himself had picked out the small black pebbles. Arvid had served at other farms where the bread was nearly always mildewed, the herring always rancid, the milk always sour, and neither’ the mistress nor the master had bothered to pick out the rat-dirt from the porridge. So one need not belittle the fare at Nybacken, he said.

So much the “little hand” learned from the big one during the first evening. And every evening thereafter Robert tumbled into bed tired and exhausted, and slept like a gopher in his hole, unconscious even of the biting bedbugs, until morning came and Aron awakened him, shaking him by the shoulders: “My little hired man, hurry on up! It’s four o’clock! My little hand, you know idleness is perdition! Don’t lie there and be lazy. Hurry up to your work!”

Arvid was accustomed to the ways of the farm, and when he said that the service was hard he might as well have said it was hard to harness a horse or to carry a bucket of water.

Robert was the youngest on the farm, and all had chores for him to do: Aron, the mistress, the old mistress, the maids. All lorded it over him, sent him hither and yon, corrected him, hurried him, scolded him. Everyone on the farm was his master. Even the animals: the farm’s four horses needed constant attention. He had to get up early in the morning to fill their mangers with fodder, in the evening he must fill them again before going to bed. And the horses must be curried, they must have their stalls cleaned, hay must be brought down from the loft for them, oats fetched from the granary, fodder cut in the barn, and water carried from the well. Robert lived his farmhand’s life in close quarters with horses, smelling horses, horse manure, horse sweat, leather and harness. Sundays and weekdays alike, the horses required attention.

The animals were bound in their stalls and the farmhands were bound to the animals. And the service year of a hired hand was three hundred and fifty-eight days, discounting his one free week a year.

During the very first week of his service at Nybacken Robert made the decision that he must escape from all his masters, human as well as animal.

— 2—

The little hand who was bossed by all had good ears and quick eyes. He listened to and observed all that happened on the farm, and picked up its secrets. He heard all insinuations, he saw all winking eyes, as when there were hints and whispers about the white heifer which had been butchered at Nybacken last fall; a fine heifer — ready to calve — had gone to the slaughter bench because Aron dared not let her live. Why dared he not let her live?

Robert collected one word here, another there: The white heifer was with calf without having been with a bull. It was said to have happened that cows had borne calves with human heads and faces — horrible monsters, half beast, half man. That was why they had slaughtered the white heifer before her calving time was near.

Robert now wondered how the heifer had become pregnant without having been with a bull. It was answered, he had better ask Arvid. No one but Arvid knew, and he could surely give information.

So he learned gradually that the farm folk were directing a horrible accusation against his comrade in service.

Nothing was ever said in the open, everything was half said. All sentences ended in the middle, they were broken off as soon as they touched the accusation itself. The maids whispered and tittered; no one could speak aloud about such things. Robert asked, and he too made a half sentence: “Did they accuse Arvid of. .?” No — no one accused Arvid of anything; but anyone wanting to know more must go to him; he was the only person who knew the truth about the white heifer. They repeated only what the old mistress had said.

It had all originated with the old woman in the reserved room in the attic. One day last summer she had happened to see Arvid drive the white heifer into the cow barn. It was in the middle of the day, no other person was in the byre, no one had asked the hired man to drive in the heifer, and she could not understand why the animal should be taken into its stall at that hour. The old mistress had seen nothing more, nothing more than this: Arvid had driven the animal into the stable. She had not accused him of any forbidden or horrible deed with the heifer, she had merely said this to the maids: what he did with the white heifer in her stall, only he and God knew.