Four Bells: A Tale of the Caribbean

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

Presently Palacio picked up his cane and wandered along the slope to inspect his garden patch of beans and peppers. It was a continual skirmish to save the beans from the forays of the other goat, Lolita, who was a young creature of feminine caprices and often possessed of a devil. Palacio’s rebukes, even the threat of making goat’s-meat of her, left Lolita’s heart untouched.

In the grass beside the garden patch, Palacio was startled to perceive a large object which had not been there before. Cautiously he backed away and leaned on his stick while he scrutinized the phenomenon. It was a man asleep or dead, a man of prodigious bulk and brawn whose clothing was no more than dirty tatters. His skin was criss-crossed with scratches and smeared with dried blood. A stranger to Palacio, and a man so strange to this part of the world that he might have dropped from the skies!

Timidly the caretaker approached the body in the grass and knelt to touch its cheek. The flesh was warm, even hot and angry. Gaining courage, he tugged at the man and rolled him over to discover any serious injuries. He found a knife wound in the back and a lump on the head as big as a tangerine. If the man had climbed the hill of La Popa, it was a miracle. Where had he come from? It was the divine influence of Our Lady, whose shrine was in the chapel, that he should be found alive in this place.

“What a thing to stumble on when I lead my goats out in the morning!” said Palacio, both hands in his beard. “Never has a wonder like this happened to me. I am at the end of my poor wits. If I go down to Cartagena to find a doctor, it is slow walking for me with my lame leg on the rough path—and this enormous man may die in the grass. Soon the sun will be too hot to leave him without a roof over his head.”

In his agitation Palacio limped to and fro. Could he roll this man over and over like a sack of coffee, as far as the threshold of the convent? Then perhaps he might drag him into the hut. It could do him no more damage. As it was, he looked as if he had fallen off the cliff. In spite of his lameness, Palacio was tough and sinewy. When in his prime he had been a laborer on the quay, carrying heavy freight on his back.

The goats had cropped the grass until it was a green sward. Palacio grunted and began to roll the man like a cask. A groan dismayed him. This would not do. It was more merciful to try to drag the body a little way at a time, like a burro hitched to an ox-cart. Nobly Palacio hauled and panted until he had progressed as far as the stake that tethered Mercedes. She trotted over to nuzzle him. It was an expression of sympathy. He felt much encouraged. Lolita, the jade, was waiting to rear on her hind legs and butt her master behind the knees.

“Horned offspring of perdition,” he told her, “do not add to my troubles. Poor Palacio is almost breaking himself in two for the sake of love and charity. Butt me again and the dust shall fly from your speckled hide.”

A back-breaking task it was, but Palacio managed to drag his burden to the hole in the convent wall where a door had been. A bed of straw and a blanket on the floor of his hut was all the comfort he could contrive for the unbidden guest. So fatigued that his legs were like two sticks, the anxious Palacio mixed a little warm goat’s-milk and rum in the tin cup and forced it between the man’s lips. It seemed to trickle down his throat. Then he dosed him with a bitter draught from a bottle, a tincture of quinine and herbs which had assuaged his own spells of fever.

With a singular deftness, Palacio washed the patient and tore up a clean shirt to bandage him. That wound in the back was alarming, so livid and inflamed, but it might heal if kept cleansed and dressed.

“A man like this is very hard to kill,” he said aloud. “To look at him you would say he had already suffered several deaths. The air is cool and healthy up here on La Popa, and there is the sweet presence of Our Lady. I will light a candle at her shrine and a fresh one as soon as that is burned down, poor man though I am. The life of this enormous stranger with the hair like gold belongs to me. It is a gift of God.”