Editor’s Note: This is the 24th installment of an upcoming book by Tuckasegee writer Thomas Crowe. The book is a memoir about a time he spent living alone in a cabin in the woods along the Green River in WNC. The memoir, Zoro’s Field, will be published by the University of Georgia Press in the spring of 2005.

Will death be flying in the morning

Forever on to something new?”

— Jesse Stuart

It’s been a long, slow year, my fourth, here in the woods, and time has, quite literally, from equinox to equinox, stood still. Last fall, Zoro died. And then this spring Mac followed him to an old mountain farm in the sky.

During the autumn days and weeks preceding Zoro’s death, I spent most of my time over at the Guice’s. When Zoro was first diagnosed with terminal cancer and feeling the effects of the disease that was ravaging his body, I went around regularly to help with jobs around the farm and house, and to keep Zoro and Bessie company. Not that they didn’t have plenty of company and help from family and friends, but there were certain things I could do, and was in the habit of doing over the years, that others may not have thought of and that seemed to be important and reassuring to Zoro and Bessie in terms of keeping certain routines regular. Things like getting in firewood for the cookstove, end-of-year garden work, miscellaneous maintenance and upkeep of the property and house.

As the disease progressed, and as Zoro was able to do less and less, I spent more and more time indoors, keeping him and Bessie company and just being around in case there was anything I could do. If ever there was something that you could call “The Real Work,” this was it! To watch a man who was vital and vibrant brought so quickly to his knees was a humbling, if not stunning, thing to witness, not to mention that this same man was something of a local legend to most folks around here and certainly much more than a mentor to me. I’d never been around someone who was dying, and my first experience was with a man whom I held in almost super-human esteem. I think the whole declensional process was humbling for both of us. For Zoro, it was having to accept the fact of his own mortality, and for me it was to witness this unnerving transition for the first time and from such close proximity.

As things got progressively worse for Zoro and as he became pretty much bedridden in the final few weeks of his illness, I would sit with him in the old wooden straight-back chair beside his small wrought-iron bed in the little guest room right off the living room. Zoro had decided not to stay in the bedroom. “I’ll not lie in my own bed if I’m going to die, as Bessie will be here, alone, when I’m gone and she’ll need a clean place to sleep. It won’t be fittin’ for her to have to sleep in the same bed where someone has died,” he confided in me one day. He seemed to like me there, as he knew that I wasn’t much of a talker and rarely had anything to say unless it was prudent. He liked the fact that I respected his desire that he not be bothered with endless, painful questions, and that I was there as a supporting presence, neither making small talk or expressing un-poetic sentimental grief.

Sometimes, after we’d been sitting together in silence in the little side guest-room, he would turn his head to the right and his eyes would twinkle and he’d say something short and teasingly profound, like: “You still here?” or “What you think about a man in such a mess?” But as his days reached their end, Zoro had less and less that he wanted to say, as the pain from the cancer — which even the painkillers he was taking couldn’t completely over-ride — made it increasingly painful for him to do anything, including to talk. When he did want to communicate something, which wasn’t often, he would do it through his eyes, or with a slight smile, or with only a single word or two. “Dang,” he’d say, as I watched a wave of pain roll over his outstretched body. “Sheiiitt,” he muttered once or twice when he heard someone who had come to visit and pay their respects saying something about him or his situation that he disagreed with or didn’t particularly like. “Not true,” I heard him say once to something that a local preacher had uttered in the next room, aping a particular cliche-ridden phrase of protestant dogma.

During those last days, something happened between Zoro and me that hadn’t been the case, before. We bonded. Instead of being teacher and pupil, or old man and young man, we simply became friends. Age and experience melted away into the over-riding necessities of silence and quiet companionship. Maybe he saw a little bit of himself in me, sitting there in my coveralls and my long, flowing beard, that reminded him of his youth. Or maybe it was just that he knew that I knew he didn’t want to talk and didn’t want a lot of people around him making a fuss, and that I honored that request, giving him time and space to confront death on his own terms and to do it in his own way, with dignity. Whatever the case, the communication between us, even though it was not often expressed through words, was profound, and I felt privileged to be in his presence and to be allowed to be with him at the end.

I can clearly say, now, that my experience watching Zoro die alleviated any fears I had regarding death. Watching Zoro die as he did, with such relative grace (even though he was in a great deal of pain), was maybe the greatest teaching, the greatest gift that he gave to me over the few short years that we spent time together. Along with all the practical things I learned from him, he also taught me, by allowing me to watch him work through his own death, a great spiritual lesson.

Zoro wasn’t much of a church-goer in his later years. He’d come to a place regarding his religious beliefs and convictions that was, like his life-style, self-sufficient. He didn’t have any use for the social and economic structures inherent in present-day religions, nor in preachers who were paid or were “kept” by their church congregations. In this sense, and not unlike the distinctions between church and state as set down in the Constitution of the United States government, his spiritual politics embodied a true separation of church and economy. After many years of being a respected member of a community Baptist Church on Macedonia Road where his family had gone to services, attended home-comings and buried their kin, he left the flock when the church began paying their preacher a salary. Zoro didn’t believe that spiritual beliefs had a price, and thought that a man who was “called” to preach or spread the word of God should do it purely and without pay. So, when the Macedonia Baptist Church began paying their preacher, Zoro walked away, and never returned.

Even after such an theatrical and controversial public exodus, Zoro was buried at the old church on Macedonia Road, alongside other kinfolk and relations, although with no grave marker or tombstone—which was one of his last requests. The little church was full to overflowing on the day they held the burial service. On an unseasonably warm, sunny day, as if it had been ordered by the Divine especially for the occasion, I watched and listened to the service from out on the front steps of the little church. Somehow this seemed more appropriate to me—to be there, outside, where Zoro had spent the majority of his life. A man of the field and the woods, Zoro seemed almost out of his element within the walls of any building, even his own home. Wild, yet beautifully refined in that wildness, he belonged to the out-of-doors, and was a prince there. Of course, to me he carried a saintly shroud to his grave. He was my inspiration and my role-model. And for almost three-and-a-half years he had taught me how to live.

I have taken the long walk up Macedonia Road more than once these last several months to visit Zoro in his new digs. To get his quiet counseling and friendship through a kind of grave-side osmosis. To keep, in what some people might think a strange way, our correspondence alive. Sometimes, when the breeze blows over the roof of the little church and through the gravestones, I can feel his presence. And as I sit there in the churchyard, next to the plot of grass where he was buried, thinking lofty thoughts or wondering about anything that has to do with people and what they do or say, I can hear him say, with a windy voice: “Not true.”

It seemed like no sooner had Zoro died than Mac followed him, abroad, to the other side. With both my woodsman-mentor and my “Emerson” now gone, the social structure of my little world in the woods was being undone by time and the processes of entropy. For years, I’d watched the way things had returned, full circle, back to the loamy world of composted soil, and had studied it and accepted it as the inevitable way of all things. But I found it a little different when my own kind, my friends, began their entropic fall. To watch a bird decay, lying alone in a leafy sepulcher, or an old jack pine rot as it laid in state somewhere in the woods, is somehow different than when a member of one’s family or community dies. And now I had, suddenly, lost two of the locust posts that had been holding up the foundation of my life in the woods.

Unlike Zoro’s slow descent into silence and the churchyard earth, Mac died rather suddenly, and in an odd sort of way, perhaps willfully. I had been over at his place tightening up the wires on the bean trellises for his half-runners while he was finishing up with his spring planting of corn on one of the upper terraces of the garden. I had finished tightening the tension wires on the trellises and was sitting on the small bank by the edge of the cornfield having a drink of water that I’d gotten from the well-water spigot and blowing the soft white seeds off a dandelion flower while watching Mac drop kernels of silver queen seed corn into the furrowed rows. As I watched him standing there in the plowed earth, something he had said many months before popped into my mind. “I want to die in my garden. But I don’t want to go until I’ve planted the last seed of the last crop in the spring.” At the time, I took what he was saying to be nothing more than the kind of philosophical platitude he was fond of uttering as part of normal conversation. As I watched Mac working the next-to-last row of the upper terrace, the last terrace to be planted, and as I sat there on the bank remembering his apocryphal words, I noticed a grimace had come over his face, and suddenly his hands and forearms jerked and pink-colored inoculated seed corn went flying in every direction. Shaken from my spring reverie by the sight of Mac’s sudden spasm, I jumped to my feet and went over to him as he stood there clutching his body as if he were checking it to see if it was still there, while, at the same time, searching for something to hold on to. When I asked him if he was ok, all he said to me was: “It’s just this damn angina, again. Promise me you won’t tell anyone.” I assured him I wouldn’t, but then noticed that the grimace and the clutching became more pronounced, and he dropped to his knees uncharacteristically as if in prayer. “I did it. I got in all the corn,” was all he said, kneeling there in the dirt.

After a couple minutes, and in obvious pain and discomfort, Mac forced himself to his feet with my assistance, and said, once again: “I’m ok... I got the corn planted,” and ambled out of the cornfield, disappearing onto the screened-in back porch where he loved to sit each day, at dusk, smoking his pipe and sipping a large yellow plastic glass of Scotch and water while contemplating his garden and planning his work for the next day.

This was the last time I saw Mac. It wasn’t more than fifteen or twenty minutes until a red and white ambulance drove up the drive to the McHugh house as I was covering over the corn rows to bury the seed. The ambulance took him to the Hendersonville hospital, where he would ultimately die from a massive heart attack which he’d suffered immediately after entering the house and from which he neither recovered nor awoke. His last words to me seemed like a verification of prophesy from some ancient text. In hindsight, and looking back, now, over these past several weeks since his death, it seems to me as if he chose to die when he did, and that after planting the last row of corn (which in actuality he came up just shy of doing—being short of his goal by a row and a half) he had put an exclamation point at the end of the long, unpunctuated sentence that was his life. And closed the book.

While “death-letters” were sent out announcing Mac’s death, and his memorial service drew a crowd of a couple hundred, only a small gathering of family and friends assembled in his memory to scatter his ashes over the apple orchard, as he had wished. Mac was not fond of organized religion or its dogma, so this post-pagan ritual seemed realistic, seemed right. It was a bright, but blustery, day, with the wind whipping through the orchard and bending the pine trees at the edge of the woods. The ashes, as we scattered them beneath the drip lines of apple, plum, cherry and apricot trees, blew back on us—got in our hair and on our clothes. It was as if a part of Mac wanted to remain here in the Polk County mountains, living vicariously and disembodied through us. I was ok with the idea that maybe some of this wise and traveled man had become a part of me by inhaling his ashes into my lungs or having the white soil of his bones marry with the follicles of my hair. What ashes didn’t come to rest around the fruit trees or on us, blew up into the air and off into the woods, everywhere. Even in death, Mac was cutting a wide swath. Leaving his mark and part of himself scattered through memory and the old mountain-top farm that he so loved.

With Zoro and Mac gone, things around here are not the same. I feel a little like an orphan—truly a “babe in the woods” without the two wise old men around. It’s an eerie feeling. Almost ominous. Maybe I’m being melodramatic, or overly-sensitive, but it feels like something, some kind of energy or aura, has disappeared from these woods. Like a protective scrim has been lifted—letting in all manner of goblins from the world outside. It’s been a long year. A year which began with an almost fatal kundalini release that left me struggling to just get through each day, and which lasted for weeks before I could, finally, do even the most cursory of chores. Then, in the fall, Zoro’s illness and demise. And now, Mac. With these two, and old Walt Johnson also being gone from these immediate hills, a whole patriarchal cultural tradition has now disappeared. All of the viable role models of this way of life have left and, in leaving, left the rest of us at the top of the Green River Cove community to our own devices and vulnerable to the modern world. “Who will separate, now/the wheat from the chaff?/These men whose sweat/watered grain./These women/whose milk was the strength in human bone.” I recently wrote in the blue notebook on my cabin desk, as part of a poem—a mourning poem for a generation and a tradition gone. No longer will we see oxen and mules pulling plows across slopes and along bottomlands here in these hills. No longer will there be families making their living by what it is they can make, build and grow. I have witnessed and been part of a watershed moment here on the upper end of the Old Howard Gap Road community. A transition. With one kind of life being traded out for another, for better or worse.

With these three old mountain men gone, things will irreparably change. Certain skills will vanish. Certain mores will melt into a greater mono-cultural ethic. Certain customs will cease, and a way of speaking become lost in the under-toe of an in-coming tide of a common English speech. With this passage, a great deal of the diversity I have known and witnessed, here, will be diminished. This will all happen quickly, as “the seeds saved/ from great grandparents to be given/to children not yet born/are eaten by the fiery incinerators of banks.” This, I’m afraid, will be the ultimate destiny of this community and this landscape. It is only a matter of time, I fear, until this prognostication becomes evident. “All is change,” and “all things must pass.” Bits of sage wisdom from time immemorial and from great books. As my life has been altered with recent events and I am left with the sound of some of the music gone from the symphony of these highland fields, I plant my seeds this year in Zoro’s field—my dreams and body full of foreboding, my memories of these halcyon years pushing away my fears.