Maciej Boryna’s terminal illness and death

Maciej Boryna’s terminal illness unfolds as a gradual withdrawal from ordinary life: he lies unable to recognize visitors, speaks and moves in confusion, and is left increasingly dependent on others for food and care. Yet the narrative’s final image does not leave him merely as a helpless invalid. In the night, he gathers earth as if it were seed and sows it across a field; at dawn, he dies. The movement from a failing body to a farmer’s last gesture makes his death both a private loss and an image of his enduring bond with the land.

Identity and the onset of decline

When visitors find him alone in bed, Maciej is gaunt, his face yellow, his grey beard bristling, and his head still bound. His lips move, but when Kłąb and Balcerek greet him in the name of God, he neither answers nor moves. Asked whether he knows them, he offers no sign of recognition. The scene marks a severe break with the forceful presence associated with the master of the household: the visitors can take his hand and look into his eyes, but cannot reach him through familiar names or greetings.

That silence gives way, briefly and frighteningly, to a loud outburst. Maciej cries, “I’m alone, men! Here, to me! Beat the bastards, beat ’em!” and throws up his hands as if defending himself before falling back. Józka rushes in and covers his head with wet cloths. He then lies quiet, his eyes wide open with mortal fear. The scene presents neither a recovery nor a clear explanation of what he is experiencing; it shows a moment of agitated speech and defensive gesture within an illness that has left him unable to orient himself to the people around him.

Care, neglect, and the slow disappearance

Other people come to visit, but Maciej recognizes none of them. After a time, they stop coming. The Parish Priest of Lipce says that all Maciej needs is prayers for a speedy death, and the villagers’ own troubles soon crowd him from their thoughts. The account makes his isolation cumulative: he is not simply alone in the first room where Kłąb finds him; visits cease, and he comes to be remembered as though already dead.

His physical need is starkly ordinary. Sometimes he goes whole days without a drop of water and might have died of hunger if Witek the Stork-Keeper had not brought him whatever food he could find. Witek sometimes milks a little extra from the cow and gives Maciej the milk. The care is informal and precarious, dependent on what Witek can get away with taking, but it is also a sustained act of attention when others have withdrawn. Maciej’s sickness troubles the young man so much that he asks the farmhand Pietrek whether a person who dies without confession goes to hell. Pietrek answers that this is what the priest says in church. The exchange shows Maciej’s condition shaping Witek’s anxieties about death and the fate of the soul, even as the sick man himself can no longer reliably tend to his own needs.

Hanka, Rocho, and the expectation of death

When Rocho returns, Hanka welcomes him and offers food, but Rocho is already making his way through the orchard to see Maciej. The old man lies in a cart-basket spread with a quilt and covered by a sheepskin. Łapa curls at his feet, keeping watch, while Witek the Stork-Keeper’s stork wanders among the trees. The orchard offers a temporary place of care: Maciej is outside the house, beneath dense branches, with a dog beside him and the signs of the farm still moving around him.

Hanka asks whether her father seems a little better. Rocho does not encourage hope. He compares the apparent flare of strength near the end of life to a lamp burning brighter just before it goes out, and says Maciej seems to be approaching that end. Maciej is so wasted that Rocho finds it strange he is still alive; Hanka adds that he will sometimes refuse even milk. Rocho tells her to be ready, because death may come any day. Their exchange gives the illness a household dimension: Hanka is watching for signs and preparing for the loss, while Rocho interprets the apparent persistence of life not as recovery but as the brief brightness before extinguishing.

Confusion and last hours

Later, Maciej’s behavior becomes more visibly disordered. From early morning he frets and mutters, starting from bed to search for something beside him. Hanka, leaving for the meadow, tells Józka to watch him closely. He appears peaceful when she checks on him, but at dinnertime he begins shouting. Sitting on the cart rails, he demands his shoes. Even when Hanka and the others lay him back on the quilt, he insists that he is merely dizzy and asks whether Antek is in the field. His questions and attempts to dress or go somewhere make it difficult for those around him to know what he understands.

Hanka recognizes that the end may be near and orders that Maciej be brought into the house. She sends for the priest, who arrives with the Lord Jesus and anoints him with holy oil. The priest says that Maciej needs nothing more and may fall asleep at any moment. That expectation of a quiet passing is not quite what the narration next gives: late in the night, as the first cockerels begin to crow, Maciej suddenly shifts in bed. Moonlight falls across his face. He sits up, tries to speak, and can only gurgle; then he looks about vacantly and fumbles in the light, as if trying to gather the shimmering moonbeams in his fist. The failure of speech and the futile reaching turn the final hours into a sequence of bodily gestures where intention can no longer be clearly understood.

The last sowing and death

The account turns from the bed to the fields, where the crops are described in their different stages of growth. Maciej kneels on a patch of ground and holds out his shirt, gathering earth into it as though scooping grain from a sack prepared for sowing. When he has gathered so much that he can barely lift it, he crosses himself, swings his arm, and begins to sow. He bends under the weight and scatters handfuls of earth along the field in a slow, sweeping motion. Łapa follows him, darting away from beneath his feet and returning to his side.

The gesture fuses the material substance of the land with the labor of planting: Maciej sows earth itself, not grain. The passage does not explain the act as a deliberate statement, but its place at the end of his life makes it an image of the farmer’s identity persisting through illness and disorientation. After the sowing, he gives thanks to God and falls face down before the Most Holy Majesty. He dies in that moment, as dawn rises; Łapa howls. The ending joins religious language, the field, and the animal who has remained beside him, closing Maciej’s life with the land at the center of its final action.