Rocho helps Lipce villagers while the men are imprisoned

With Lipce’s men imprisoned, Rocho becomes a roving helper to the households left behind. He carries practical skill, advice, humor, and comfort from cottage to cottage, but the more closely he sees the village’s condition, the clearer it becomes that individual kindness cannot make up for an entire community’s missing labor. His rounds turn mutual aid into both a daily necessity and a measure of how much Lipce is losing.

The Village Without Its Men

At first, Lipce seems to settle after a disturbance: the most obstinate villagers still argue in scattered farmyards, while most people disperse to prepare the noonday meal. Then, despite a tiresome gale, activity gathers again across homesteads, gardens, cottages, hallways, and chambers. The people working outdoors are women and girls; the few boys who appear are too young for much beyond tending livestock, while the older ones are confined indoors with their fathers. The village’s labor has not stopped, but it has been thrust onto those who remain at liberty.

Easter is approaching, and Holy Tuesday has arrived with work already piled up. Each cottage needs tidying, children must be made presentable, and wheat must be taken to the miller. The women must also prepare the blessed baskets and find money for necessities, inspecting their stores to decide what can be sold at the inn or taken to town for a few groszy. Some leave after dinner with goods hidden beneath straw in their carts. Rocho’s assistance unfolds within this pressure: the crisis is not an interruption of ordinary work so much as the removal of the people who would usually share it.

A Circuit of Practical Help

Rocho goes toward the Voyt’s house, but his journey becomes a chain of stops at cottages along the way. When he sees Gulbasowa passing in a gale behind a wretched nag scarcely able to stand, he warns her to watch for falling trees and then turns toward her cottage. There, girls are stuffing gaps in the walls but cannot reach above the windows. Rocho helps them, mixes lime for whitewashing, and makes a large brush from straw before setting off again.

At the Wachniks’ household, two girls are carting dung toward nearby fields, but much of the load has shaken through the cart’s planks onto the road. Their horse will not heed them, so they have to tug it by the halter. Rocho packs the dung firmly onto the cart and uses the whip to get the horse pulling obediently. The small repair matters because spring work cannot wait for better circumstances: the girls have to keep the task moving with the animals and equipment they have.

At another cottage, Marysia Balcerkówna is sowing peas in well-manured black earth beside a fence. She has wrapped her head in a scarf and put on her father’s long capote to keep her skirt from blowing in the wind, but she struggles to manage the sowing. Rocho steps onto the patch, encourages her, and corrects her spacing: the peas have been planted too close together and may tangle and collapse when they sprout. Her cheerful reply invokes the saying that peas sown on Holy Tuesday will yield a sack for every mug. Rocho leaves with a promise to tell her father at Easter how diligently she has worked.

At the Płoszka household, two young cousins of Stach are trying to plough a potato field. One urges on the horse while the other handles the plough, but stones make the plough jump, the mare strains toward her foal, and the boys quarrel and swear as they take turns whipping her. Rocho takes the plough, cuts the first ridge, and shows them how to drive the mare. The elder boy boasts that they will manage a whole furlong by nightfall, then glances around to see whether anyone noticed Rocho helping. After Rocho leaves, the boy imitates his father by sitting on the plough with his back to the wind and smoking a cigarette. The episode shows assistance passed on, but also how little strength and experience the village’s remaining young workers can bring to the fields.

More Than Labor

Rocho’s work extends beyond visible farm tasks. He marks where help is needed, soothes quarrels, appeases feuds, gives advice, and takes on heavy jobs. At Kłąb’s, he chops wood when Kłębowa cannot manage the gnarled stumps; he carries water from the pond for Dominikowa and urges disobedient children to behave. When a household is sunk in sadness or complaint, he uses jokes to make people laugh. He speaks with girls about their concerns and the boys, and with women about children, troubles, and neighbors. His attention is particular rather than mechanical: he judges whether a person needs laughter, prayer, a wise rebuke, or a warning.

He also spends nights beside sick people without waiting to be asked, sustaining them with his kindness. This care earns him a respect that the narrator says exceeds even that given to the priest, and he comes to seem to the villagers like a saint bringing mercy and comfort into their homes. Yet the account does not present him as a miraculous solution. His compassion can ease a household’s immediate burden, but it cannot feed every hungry person, heal every sick one, or provide enough hands for the work.

The Limits of One Helper

Rocho labors beyond what one man can do, while remaining only a crumb of help for a whole village. Lipce has more than fifty cottages, extensive land to cultivate, livestock to tend, and many mouths to feed. With the men taken away, the community is held together more by divine Providence than by human effort, and each passing day brings more poverty, distress, and agitation. Rocho has long known that hardship is spreading, but only by going from cottage to cottage does he grasp the extent of the decline.

Fields lie fallow; ploughing, sowing, and planting are neglected or attempted with childlike ineffectiveness. Damage to homes and boundaries makes that labor crisis tangible: fences collapse, laths and rafters protrude through torn thatch, broken gates bang against walls, and cottages lean without anyone able to shore them up. Stagnant pools and knee-deep mud impede passage. Cows bellow with hunger, while horses stand surrounded by dung because no one is available to muck them out. These accumulating signs show the consequences that exceed any single dramatic confrontation: imprisonment drains labor from the village, and the resulting deterioration spreads through fields, buildings, animals, and daily life. Rocho’s rounds offer relief and preserve human ties, but they also reveal the painful distance between a neighbor’s generous effort and the needs of an entire community.