Maciej Boryna’s death after night sowing brings his attachment to the land to its final, literal expression: in the last hours of his life, he gathers soil in his shirt and sows it across the fields before collapsing at dawn. The scene makes farm work at once a remembered duty, a sacred rite, and a futile labor. Its vision of the earth as a home that calls Boryna back is inseparable from a more troubling image of land as a power that holds and consumes those who belong to it.

The Night of Confusion

The episode begins in a village quiet enough for breathing to seem to drift from its walls and orchards. In Boryna’s room, a cricket chirps in the fireplace; Jagna Borynowa lies asleep, her breathing compared to a butterfly’s wings. Late in the night, as the first cockerels begin to crow, Boryna abruptly stirs. Moonlight falls across his face as he sits up, but he can make only a gurgling sound. He looks around without understanding where he is, fumbling for his clothes and the shoes that usually stand nearby.

His returning memories do not form a clear account of his life. Tasks, old events, and traces of his illness come to him in scattered fragments, each seeming to surface only to dissolve before he can hold it. The narration compares his inner confusion to dry trees dreaming in early spring, ready to release sap and begin life again without knowing that their effort is barren. His movements, meanwhile, resemble those of a horse that has spent years walking a treadmill and continues in a circle even when free. The image binds mental disorientation to habitual labor: Boryna’s body keeps moving according to the routines that have shaped it, while his grasp of the present fails.

The Hayrick and the Fields

Boryna’s fragmentary sense of purpose repeatedly returns to sowing. He says that it is time to sow, forgets, and says it again. Moving around the shed through the farmyard, he comes upon the hayrick that was burnt down in winter and rebuilt. At first he tries to avoid it; then a moment of recognition brings back the force of an old grievance. He pulls up a fence stake, brandishes it like a pitchfork, and rushes at the supports as though ready to strike and kill. Before he can hit anything, however, the stake falls from his hands. The sudden flare of past conflict gives way to helplessness.

Beyond the hayrick, Boryna sees the field and its crops: rye bent under its ears, wheat standing tall, and oats and barley just sprouting through the mist. He kneels and uses his shirt to gather earth as if it were grain from a sack prepared for sowing. After crossing himself, he swings his arm and begins to scatter the soil over the field. The act is physically demanding; he bends under the weight and proceeds step by step, sowing handful after handful. Łapa follows him, darting from under his feet and returning to his side.

Boryna continues across the fields, blessing each clod and stalk as he goes. He trips over ridges and holes and sometimes falls, but remains unaware of the falls, governed by what the narration calls an overwhelming need to sow. When the soil he has gathered runs out, he collects more; when stones and shrubs block his way, he turns back. He calls out to Kuba to draw the harrow gently, as if the dead farmhand were still working beside him. The ritual is therefore built from the details of ordinary farming, but its substance has become impossible: Boryna is sowing earth rather than seed.

The Final Sowing and Death

As night fades and the stars pale, Boryna begins to sow with an empty hand, no longer stopping to gather soil. The narration presents the gesture as if he were sowing the last of himself into the fields of his ancestors: the days of his life, returned through labor to God. This image gives the scene a sense of completion, but not of recovery. The work has no harvest to follow; it is described as barren and futile even as Boryna performs it with unwavering purpose.

The surrounding land then seems to turn against him. Grass, wheat, furrows, clods, trees, stones, and wind press in, obstructing his movement and frightening him. The world cries, "Stay with us! Stay with us!" The words make the fields seem to ask him to remain, but the call also echoes the novel’s larger portrayal of land as a force that binds people to a fixed order. In another account of this image, the earth’s demand is connected to Antek’s return and capitulation: the same call that once fails to hold the dying Boryna is repeated in the language of the land’s authority over the living. Here, Boryna is no longer able to resist or answer through ordinary action.

A flash of lightning opens his vision to God the Father seated on a throne of sheaves, reaching out to him as a weary farmhand. Boryna hesitates with his hands spread as they are during the Elevation, then replies, "Thanks be to God!" and falls face down. The narration states plainly that he dies. The religious vision completes the field’s transformation into a sacred place, yet the body is still brought down by the work of sowing: Boryna’s final passage to God is imagined through the agrarian life that has defined him.

Discovery and Meaning

Dawn finds Łapa howling beside Boryna. At the house, the dog’s barking and frantic behavior make Hanka uneasy; she sends Józka to see what he wants. Łapa leads her to her father’s body. Józka cries out, and the household rushes to the field. Boryna lies face down where he fell, his arms outstretched in the form of a cross. They carry him to the cottage and try to revive him, but he is already dead.

The scene of mourning fixes the material details of his last act. On the bed, Boryna lies rigid, his mouth smeared with soil and handfuls of sand clenched in his fists. The earth he had been scattering is now on his face and held in his hands. Hanka screams; Józka throws herself against the walls in grief; Witek, the children, and Łapa also lament. Pietrek, after lingering briefly, looks toward the sunshine and goes to sleep in the stable, a sharp contrast to the family’s immediate anguish. Word spreads through the village, and people arrive to lift the sheet, look at Boryna, kneel, and pray. Their mourning frames the death as a sign of God’s dominion over human life.

The episode’s force rests in the tension between sacred belonging and engulfment. Boryna’s labor on the ancestral fields gives his final night the shape of a rite, and the vision of God among sheaves makes his death legible through Catholic faith and farm life. But the earth is not merely a consoling home: it obstructs, traps, and finally takes him. The scene thus resists reducing his death either to a simple blessing or to a purely natural end. His body, the soil in his fists, the cross-shaped fall, and the villagers’ prayers hold those meanings together, while his last sowing turns a lifetime of attachment to land into a final, fruitless act.