“Let him be!” Mother had run out of patience. “He’s not even married yet. He’ll know what he has to do without being told. Just don’t drink, son. And be good to her.”
Father suddenly felt silly, he hung his head and sat there, half thinking about something, half just staring at the floor.
“Maybe I should go feed the dog?” he said after a bit.
“He just ate!” said mother, still annoyed.
So he took his tobacco from his pocket and started rolling a cigarette, and when he’d wet the paper he said:
“I’m not asking anything of him. I’m just giving him advice. He was never interested in the land, and here he’s got fifty acres coming his way. Fifty acres, do you know how much that is? It’s like if you took Socha’s land, Maszczyk’s, Dereń’s, and Sobieraj’s, and ours, and joined them all together. Five farms, and one farmer to run them. Who else is going to give him advice? Besides, do you think he’ll listen? He’ll do whatever he wants. He knows better than his mother and father. You say one thing, he does the opposite. You want the best, but he doesn’t give a hoot what you have to say. Or he’ll take the whole lot and let it all go to waste, and go off drinking and gallivanting. What does he care about the land. He never did what he was told even when he was small. Besides, let him do whatever he wants. We’re going to be dead either way,” he said angrily, as if we’d been quarreling.
But I hadn’t said a word. I’d just been sitting there listening to his advice. I even regretted telling him they had so many acres. Where did I come up with that number? No one in our village had that much land. I should have said eight or ten tops, and leave out the brother with the consumption. Or there could have been a brother, but maybe a cripple that had to be looked after for the rest of his life. Mother would still have said what she said, but the most he’d have said would be:
“The Wronas have got that much. And they want you for their daughter as well. That way you could stay here in the village, you wouldn’t have to move all the way out to Łanów. A person should die where they were born. They’ll never get as used to a different place. Jagna’s a hardworking girl. And they’ll probably give her a cow, cause they have two.”
I didn’t think he’d believe they had so much land.
“That many acres,” he’d say, “you’d have heard about it. Winiarski in Boleszyce, he has thirty-five and everyone knows him. And he was a councilman before the war. The priest and the squire would always be visiting him. At the harvest festival it was always Winiarski made the speech. He sent his son to study to be a doctor, and his daughter was a schoolteacher. Those people wouldn’t want anything to do with you if they had so much land. The drink’s making you imagine things. Keep drinking and you’ll end up like Pietrek Jamrozek. He calls his own mother a whore when she won’t give him vodka money. And his hands shake like leaves in the wind. The priest is always on at him from the pulpit. They take him away but then they bring him back and he starts drinking again.”
But maybe it wasn’t so much that he believed me as that he believed himself. And when he asked me how many acres they had, he only wanted me to agree with what he was saying. And I did, I said fifty acres, let him have that many if that’s what he wants, let him at last have his fill of land, let him get dizzy from it at least once. I got carried away. I wanted to needle him, but the way it came out it seemed like God had finally answered his prayers.
In the end, though, he must have realized it was all made up, because from that time on he never once brought up those fifty acres. And he never asked once if I was getting married. Nor even if we were still seeing each other. Besides, it looked like he was starting to get a bit confused in the head, and after mother died he stopped talking almost completely, he’d only say something every once in a while. He didn’t even worry about our fields anymore, what did he care about me getting married. There was just one time, when I’d stopped working at the administration, I came back from mowing and I was sitting there exhausted on the bench, and suddenly he asked:
“Is it harvesttime already?”
“Sure is.”
“Are the children old enough to help yet? You should bring them one day. I’d forgotten they’re my grandchildren.”