Maciej Boryna’s death comes at daybreak, when Lipce is stirring back to work and the fields are ready for spring. His body lies still while wind and rain, birds and insects, and the rising sun gather around him in a scene that makes the loss feel at once intimate and elemental. Afterward, attention turns to the hard-won farm: his heirs must divide it, and the Parish Priest of Lipce urges them to do so justly and in harmony.

Death at daybreak

The morning begins with the familiar noises of village life. Water gurgles, wheat sways, sheep bleat from their pens, geese honk, and gates creak as people rise to their daily labor. In the household, however, the morning has not yet begun. After their troubles and heavy exertions, the family is still asleep, while wind worries the open doors and windows and moves the dead man’s hair. Maciej Boryna, who had been known for rising to work and directing others, now neither stirs nor wakes. The contrast between the village’s returning activity and his absolute stillness gives the death its decisive force: the worker at the center of the farm can no longer take his place in its routines.

The narration marks the change without turning it into a report of illness or a spoken farewell. Maciej lies lifeless, quiet, and unresponsive; the fact of death is first conveyed through the still body and the absence of the movement associated with him. The household’s delayed awakening intensifies the separation between ordinary time and the moment of loss. Outside, day has begun; inside, the dead man remains beyond its demands.

Nature as witness

The scene expands from the room into the orchard and the wider landscape. Gusting wind shakes the trees, and the misty day, the hollyhocks leaning toward the window, and a bee, butterfly, swallow, flies, beetles, and other small creatures are described as if they have gathered to look in. Their motion seems to become a shared lament, and the narrative gives the living world a single cry announcing that Maciej has died. This is not a report of literal speech, but a personification that makes the surrounding landscape participate in the family’s recognition of death.

The outcry is followed by a sudden stillness. The wind drops; everything seems to hold its breath as a large red sun rises through the grey dawn and then disappears behind clouds. Warm rain begins, pattering over fields and orchards, while crops, leaves, trees, streams, and parched earth take in the water. The sequence does not pause the natural cycle for Maciej’s death: spring’s weather continues, and the land receives what it needs. Yet the shift from the creatures’ imagined lament to rain nourishing the earth gives the moment a double movement, from grief toward renewed life. The farm’s world is bereaved, but it is not suspended.

The living burden of the farm

The death follows a winter and spring marked by material strain and shortages of labor. In an earlier winter, Antek and Hanka’s household had been reduced to potatoes and salt, with no money to spare and the prospect of selling their cow. Antek refused to take hired work, while Hanka imagined working herself to exhaustion to keep the animal and carry the family through until spring. Their strained silence and unresolved resentment showed how quickly household survival could become bound up with labor, money, and family conflict.

By spring, the imprisonment of the village’s working men had left women to shoulder an immense range of tasks. They had to manage livestock, births, gardens, planting, drainage, manure, firewood, and children, while the fields themselves remained untilled. The arrival of neighboring villagers changed that immediate crisis: carts and ploughs came out, people spread across the fields, and the first furrows entered the earth. Their work, accompanied by a moment of prayerful silence as they sowed seed, presents cultivation as a shared act of trust in a future harvest. Against that collective renewal, Maciej’s death closes his own working life but leaves its material legacy in a community still dependent on labor and land.

Inheritance and the aftermath

The consequences become explicit when the family considers the division of Maciej’s property. The Parish Priest of Lipce reminds them that ordering a Mass for the dead is a Christian duty and says it will aid the departed soul. He then turns to the inheritance, noting that discussion of the divisions is expected after the octave. His intervention makes the farm more than a store of property: it is the hard-won fruit of Maciej’s labor, and a quarrel over it would injure both the family and the memory of the dead man.

The priest insists that the division be harmonious and just, that any debt be repaid in full, and that Maciej’s decisions about his wealth be carried out. He specifically warns the family not to harm an orphan, observing that Grzela Boryna is far away and Józka Borynianka is still young. Death therefore changes the household’s center of authority and places the living under a moral test: whether they will preserve the farm without turning its inheritance into a struggle among themselves. The contrast with the storm of spring labor is sharp. Fields can be ploughed together in a day of mutual aid; the harder work is to distribute what one man has built without letting grief and competing claims undo it.