Maciej Boryna’s funeral transforms a private death into a village-wide act of remembrance. Through the Mass, procession, burial, and customary wake, Lipce honors Boryna as a farmer and Catholic whose life belonged to the community. Yet the funeral is not a simple reconciliation: while the villagers mourn together, their gossip about Jagna shows how grief and social judgment occupy the same public space.

Preparation and the funeral Mass

Rain fell through the night and did not stop until daylight, when people were already making their way to the funeral service. The following morning brought no sun. Instead, a dust-grey mist lay over the green fields and orchards, and water streamed through the landscape as the birds, dogs, and children filled the village with sound. The earth seemed newly vigorous, an image of life continuing around the dead man’s final rites.

In church, the priest celebrated a votive funeral Mass with the parish priest from Słupsk and the organist. Boryna lay elevated on a catafalque among a white forest of burning lights, while the village knelt around him. The Latin hymns moved between lament and a more heavenly register; their changing sound gave the mourners room for both terror at death and hope beyond it. The service lasted about an hour. When it ended, Ambrozy distributed the candles from the catafalque, while the priest swung a smoking censer over the coffin and sprinkled it with holy water.

The procession through Lipce

The church broke into sobs as the first farmers lifted the coffin and carried it to a cart with a wicker bed strewn with straw. Jagustynka slipped a loaf of bread wrapped in clean linen into the straw, hiding it so that the priest would not see. The small, private offering accompanied the formal church service as the coffin began its journey through the village.

Bells tolled, a black banner was brought out, and Stacho carried the cross as the priests sang. The procession advanced slowly along the poplar road, with the coffin raised high enough for people to keep it in view. Boryna’s family followed, keening, and the entire village crowded behind them. As the graveyard drew near, the funeral’s scale widened in the villagers’ perception: the cemetery seemed an opening into which the living world, burdened by generations of loss, was being drawn.

The squire caught up with the column near the graveyard, climbed down from his carriage, and walked beside the coffin through the crowded, narrow path. At the grave, the first farmers carried Boryna between crosses and flower-covered tombs to a freshly dug plot beyond the chapel, in hazel and lilac thickets. The squire helped bear the coffin. His presence among the carriers made the burial a rare public convergence of village and estate, though it did not erase the conflicts that had divided them.

The priest’s eulogy and the burial

With the mourners gathered around the grave, the parish priest addressed them as Christian people and called attention to the man they were burying. He described Boryna as the first among farmers, an honest man, and a true Catholic. Speaking as someone who had known him for many years, he recalled his praise of God, confession, communion, and aid to the poor. The eulogy made religious observance and practical generosity the measures of Boryna’s standing in the community.

The priest also connected Boryna’s death to the villagers’ shared hardships, saying that he had fallen on behalf of them all. He called the people to accord and justice, and warned them to restrain themselves in sin, since no one knew whose final hour would come next. The appeal turned the graveside speech into more than praise: it urged the living to consider their conduct and their obligations to one another.

When the priests had finished and left with the squire, the coffin was lowered. Sand striking its lid brought a fresh eruption of crying. Józka, Magda, Hanka, relatives, and strangers all wept. Jagna seemed to grieve most bitterly, collapsing onto the sand in misery. Her sorrow, however, did not silence village suspicion. Someone muttered that she was crying only after the merry dance she had led Boryna, and Płoszkowa suggested that she wanted to win mercy so she would not be turned out of the house. The episode sets Jagna’s visible bereavement against a community that interprets her through rumor even at the moment of burial.

The wake and communal remembrance

After the grave was patted down and a black cross fixed at its head, the mourners began to disperse. Some remained to pray or wander among the tombs; others went reluctantly home, expecting the customary wake. Hanka and the blacksmith invited people to share it, carrying the rites of mourning from the cemetery back into Boryna’s household.

In Boryna’s chamber, tables lined the walls beside long benches. The men sat down to bread and vodka, drinking quietly and gravely. The organist read from a prayer book, and the company sang the litany for the dead, pausing when the blacksmith passed the bottle and Jagustynka brought more bread. Across the house, the women gathered at Hanka’s, where they drank tea, ate sweet cake, and sang under the organist’s wife’s direction. Their song was so plaintive that it carried out to the orchard.

The wake made mourning a shared practice: the villagers ate, drank, prayed, sang, and remembered Boryna together. Its customary hospitality offered a final communal setting for the farmer whom the priest had praised as both devout and generous. Yet the earlier remarks about Jagna remain part of the funeral’s meaning. Lipce can unite around Boryna’s death without setting aside its judgments of the living; the rites hold communal affection and exclusion side by side.