Ghosts of the Southern Mountains and Appalachia

The Angel of Death

The Angel of Death Mountains, South Carolina Patty McCoy was chilled to the bone, but it was not the September night as much as the words she had just heard: "Beware of the cemetery gates, for they will bring death!" She was terrified, for the gates of the cemetery were opposite the McCoy house. The only light in the room came from the kerosene lamp. The witchwoman's skin was seamed and leathery. One eye stared fiercely straight ahead and the other veered off into space with a fiercely malevolent look. "I see you as a child full ofjoy," said the woman , "Then as a young girl, when you first met your husband. You wore a blue crocheted shawl the night he asked you to marry him. Isn't that so?" Patty nodded. "He's still a likely-favored man. Is he not?" Patty's eyes filled with tears at the thought of him sitting at sundown on the porch, his banjo in his 143 144 Ghosts of the Southern Mountains and Appalachia lap, playing the tunes he loved. He had been ill for almost a year and that was the reason she had come here for advice. Today Bradley was to go to the hospital . "There is one thing you must never let happen ," warned the old woman in her rasping voice, head thrust forward. "I know your homeplace well and the gates of that cemetery are right across the road from it. When they take him to the hospital, don't you let them open that gate. If you do, he's going to die. For what's inside those gates will never rest until it gets him." Patty put her hand over her mouth to keep from screaming. People had always said, "That Patty , She ain't afeard of nothin'." But now she was afraid. She put a fifty-cent piece in the woman's hand and left. All she could think about was whether they had come yet to get Bradley. She had been gone for almost two hours. The witchwoman had prepared bits of bone, feathers, roots before she would- tell her what to do about Bradley. Patty had no sooner reached the edge of the woods and the open field across which she could see the house when she gave a shriek. For out in front of the porch was a small, dusty ambulance to take him to Louisville. She began to run. Her breath came fast and her heart pounded. She was halfway up the road to the house when the front door opened and two men bearing a stretcher with Bradley carried it down the front steps and placed it in the back of the ambulance. She screamed out at them, "Wait! Don't take my Bradley 'til I tell ye about the gate." The men The Angel ofDeath 145 looked at her strangely but waited. Now she stood beside them and for a moment was too breathless to warn them about what the witchwoman had told her. She looked at Bradley lying so still on the stretcher, his face the color of putty. "Kin ye holp him?" asked Patty. The ambulance driver, a tall, red-haired man with watery blue eyes, looked down at her expressionlessly and nodded . "Well, there ain't no turn-around up here," said Patty. "And when ye git that ambulance down to the road, whatever ye do, don't open the gate of the cemetery to back in. Do ye hear me?" The driver and his helper got in the ambulance and Patty watched as they backed it down the narrow mountain trail. When they reached the road they must have tried three or four times to back and cut sharp so the ambulance could head out. One of the men finally stood by the side of the road hollering at the other, "Ifn you'll just open that gate, we won't have no trouble." But Patty had taken down the shotgun from over the fireplace just as a precaution , run down the road after them, and now stood squarely in front of the gate. The driver of the ambulance looked at her and at the shotgun, cut the wheels of the ambulance hard, and this time he made it. Patty stood with her back against the cemetery gate and watched the ambulance until it was out of sight. Then she turned and...