Boryna’s house and farm buildings

Boryna’s house and farm buildings stand at the intersection of wealth, family authority, and agricultural survival in Lipce. The homestead is not merely a dwelling: its rooms, barns, animals, and surrounding land give Maciej Boryna power and security, while disputes over who may live and work there expose the costs of that power. Its changing occupants and uses make the farmstead a domestic stage for inheritance conflict and a working part of the village’s seasonal economy.

The homestead as household and working farm

Maciej Boryna moves through the property as its master and supervisor. One evening, after changing into work clothes, he goes outside to inspect the horses, cows, barn, and pigs. He scolds Kuba for a misdeed and Witek for allowing calves to stray among the cows. The circuit conveys practical oversight: the farm’s authority is exercised through attention to animals and buildings as well as through commands to the people who tend them. When Boryna returns to his room, members of the household are waiting to ask him for something, and he treats their gathering as though it were a court. The house is thus both a place of family life and the seat from which its patriarch hears requests and makes decisions.

That household rests on resources whose value is especially apparent in the village’s cash-poor economy. Before the fair on St Kordula’s Day, families weigh what animals or grain they might sell against the clothes, tools, and farm supplies they need before winter. Taxes, commune contributions, debts, and payments to servants come due together; even households with fifteen morgen calculate anxiously, while poorer families face still fewer choices. Against that precarious background, a substantial farmstead represents more than comfort: it offers productive assets, food, and a measure of security. The contrast between that security and the deprivation of people who leave the property gives the homestead’s material abundance particular force.

Expulsion and the breaking of the household

The farmstead becomes the setting for Boryna’s decisive break with Antek. The morning after their conflict, Antek is still in bed with his face bound in a bloody cloth. Boryna orders him out at once, tells him to pursue his claim through the law if he wants, and sets midday as the deadline. Antek dresses slowly but does not answer. The expulsion turns a dispute within the family into a separation from the home and livelihood on which Antek’s household has depended.

The departure is quiet in its actions and devastating in its consequences. Hanka, Antek, and the children pack their belongings and leave with a heavily loaded cart. Hanka is nearly fainting from misery; Antek urges her to hurry, and their elder boy clings to her skirt crying while she carries the younger child and drives a cow, geese, and two thin pigs. Villagers gather and accompany them, making the family’s removal visible to the community. Antek does not look back at the cottage. The dog Łapa runs after the departing cart, returns to the yard, searches Antek’s room, and finally follows him again. Boryna tells the tearful Józia that the dog will return when hungry, then comforts her and promises to buy her boots when he goes to town. His tenderness toward the daughter who remains contrasts with the uncompromising eviction of the son and daughter-in-law who have been driven out.

The rupture persists beyond the departure. Three weeks later, Antek and Hanka are living in bitter poverty, eating potatoes and salt without even two groszy to spare. Hanka reproaches his refusal to work as a hired hand, while he sits by the hearth or goes out brooding. Their silence is shaped by the injury of being turned out of the paternal homestead: neither has forgotten it, and their resolve remains hard. The lost home therefore continues to organize their life even when they are no longer inside it.

Jagna’s arrival and the display of wealth

When Jagna crosses the threshold to join Boryna, the porch becomes a ceremonial boundary. Boryna, the blacksmith, the blacksmith’s wife, and Józia wait there. Dominikowa brings bread, salt, coal, wax from a blessed candle, and ears of grain blessed at the Assumption. The women follow Jagna across the threshold, scattering hemp threads and hurds to keep evil away and secure good fortune. Their welcome makes the house the setting for a marriage ritual, but the property attached to that marriage is also plainly in view.

Jagna enters not as a dependent visitor but as mistress of a prosperous household. The narrator describes the house as the best in the village: large, bright, and high, whitewashed, floored with wood, and clean. Inside are tools, wares, dishes, and at least twenty pictures behind glass; outside stand byres, stables, a barn, and a shed. The livestock include five cows and a bull, as well as three horses, alongside geese, pigs, and extensive land. The inventory gives material shape to the status Jagna acquires when she moves into her husband’s cottage. It also explains the envy of village women and girls, who look through the rooms and outbuildings, measuring the apparent good fortune of the new mistress against their own circumstances. Their resentment sharpens the distinction between a marriage as a social celebration and a marriage that also brings command of property.

The house itself remains divided by the family’s earlier conflict. On the other side of the cottage, Antek’s former place, Ewka and Jagustynka prepare supper over a roaring fire while Witek brings wood to feed the large pans. The contrast is striking: the home that Antek’s family has left is now occupied and provisioned for the new household and its gathering. The old room is not simply empty space; its reuse records the transfer of domestic place and privilege.

Labor, vulnerability, and the wider farm landscape

The farmstead’s buildings shelter work, but they also expose those who labor there to hardship. When Boryna is occupied with making sure Antek’s family leaves, he fails to notice that Kuba is genuinely ill. Witek brings Kuba water and secretly rinses bloody rags in the stream. Later, Łapa’s barking and tugging alert Ambrozy to Kuba’s condition in the stable: Kuba lies across the threshold, barely breathing, with his leg hacked off at the knee; a bloody axe lies nearby. The stable, normally a place of livestock and routine care, becomes the site where the consequences of Kuba’s hidden suffering are discovered. The homestead’s daily work continues around the injury, but its familiar buildings cannot protect every worker from danger.

The household’s importance is also legible in the seasonal labor that binds Lipce’s homes to its fields. When the men are imprisoned after the forest conflict, the ground lies fallow because there are too few hands to till it. Women face childbirth, calving cows, hatching fowl, farrowing sows, planting gardens and potatoes, draining water, carting manure, tending livestock, splitting logs, and caring for children; the fieldwork still remains. The crisis shows how the productive life of each farm depends on labor distributed across households, and how quickly that balance fails when men are absent.

When neighboring villagers come to help with spring work, the dormant fields revive: carts roll from yards, ploughs travel along the paths, and people gather across the cultivated ground. At the first turning of the ploughs, the workers cross themselves and bend to sow seed, entrusting themselves to the earth. This communal scene extends the meaning of Boryna’s farmstead beyond its walls. The house and its outbuildings belong to a world where land, livestock, household labor, and village cooperation are inseparable; the fortunes of one homestead are bound to the shared work that renews the fields.