So long to ‘the heart of Dixie Chopper’

On a humid gray Mother’s Day, a stubborn morning mist choked every cubic inch of air outside Jean Evans’ bedroom window. Below that window, where the back yard sloped into a small copse of sycamores, a tiny creek cut its way south. No wider than a golf cart, the chocolate colored water raced torrentially, filled to the brim, lapping the edges of the banks, taking every little bit of dirt it could as it traveled to its inevitable point of confluence.

Inside the house, Evans rested fitfully, grabbing her own bits and pieces of air. Purposefully taking every last breath because, even in the end, she wasn’t going to leave this life on any terms other than her own.

I met Jean in 2010 a few weeks after I started dating her daughter, Wendi. Even then, I could spot the signs of age and illness which were beginning to take hold. But in those early years, I also saw the Jean Evans who everyone around me knew all too well.

The Jean I knew was kind. Gregarious. Empathetic. She sat at her desk in the office of Millgrove Campground, taking long draws from the Virginia Slims 120 Lights tucked carefully between her index and middle fingers. She had barely known me a day, yet she was asking me about my kids, referring to them by name. She wasn’t filling conversation, either. She wanted to know.

Sure, she may have been sizing me up. Any wise mother would do that, and any wise mother whose daughter was dating me would absolutely do that. But in her own way she was doing something else, something vastly more important and significantly more human: She was letting me know I was welcome, letting me know that all I had to do was not blow it, not screw the whole thing up, and I would have a place in her heart.

As I watched her myriad afflictions weave into her body, slowly robbing her of her ability to breathe and then to stand up, I also saw glimpses of the Jean Evans I didn’t know. I saw the Jean Evans who provided Dixie Chopper’s backbone, propping up a multi-million-dollar company. I saw the Jean Evans who fed and housed more than 200 families. I saw the Jean Evans who could hug a weeping employee at 2:30 in the afternoon and handle a tedious stack of purchase orders hours after everyone went home.

As her son, Wes, says it, “She did all except build mowers. She did HR, real HR (not like today). She knew every employee by name and nickname, plus she knew each spouse and all their kids’ names. She would meet with the bankers to make sure payroll was met. She paid all the bills and ran most of the board meetings. She was truly the glue to the Dixie Chopper family. Without her none of the dealers or employees would have ever been on the trips she made happen.”

Those trips Wes Evans refers to—taking entire families to the Bahamas, to Las Vegas, to Hawaii, to the Grand Caymans—those were perhaps the singular events that made working at Dixie Chopper more than a job. For many families, those were the first (and only) trips to places that, otherwise, they would have only seen on Google Earth.

I’ve lost track of the number of times a former (or then current) employee would refer to Jean as the “heart of Dixie Chopper.” It didn’t take me long to figure out that she was the one who lifted the company to its heyday. That behind the epic mower race on “Home Improvement” and the eventual appearances in reality TV… all of that happened because she put that company on the financial and emotional footing to make it happen.

Everyone in Putnam County reaped the benefits of her work. From the jobs the company provided, to the international attention and reputation it offered, Jean’s work at Dixie Chopper offered one more reason why living in this part of Indiana was better than special. She was, for every practical sense of the word, the Matriarch of Putnam County.

But again, when I met her, Dixie Chopper was behind her. The first night I spent meaningful time with her was on Independence Day in 2010. We gathered around her son’s pickup truck and her golf cart, watching the fireworks go off over Millgrove’s pond. The family told all their trademark stories: one involving a cougar in the basement, another describing the night a few teens went joyriding with the family car.

I loved every one of those stories, and every new and different version that followed it. But I savor my own examples of what can only be described as that eclectic Evans life. From shooting guns off the deck on Christmas Day (it turns out I’m pretty deadly with a .45…provided the target is stationary) to all the weird homemade tree ornaments she insisted we create (I made a banana, and she absolutely loved it). Everything she controlled was brilliant. Everything she orchestrated was epic.

Near the end, when Wendi and I would sit with her in her atrium, she would still take those long, but more shaky, draws on her beloved Virginia Slims, and she would speak wistfully about the life she left unlived — the travelling, time with her very close friends, one or two more opportunities to raise a little polite and discrete hell for the fun of it.

I don’t know if she wanted me to see the titan that she once was. Jean was always humble, always self-deprecating. But that’s what I saw. I saw a woman — someone who once hoisted the greater part of Putnam County on her shoulders and said, “stick with me” — fighting to go out like the leader and the boss that she was always meant to be.

So, when she left us, some eleven hours after we had gathered to say our goodbyes, she did so on those aforementioned terms which she had drawn out herself.

A couple hours after she had passed, I looked out the window again and cast my eyes on the creek below the house. Under streaks of late evening sunlight, the water flowed calmly. Clear. Shallow. Moving peacefully to the larger tributary awaiting it. On Jean Evans’ last day on Earth, she turned rain into sunshine, turbulence into peace, just as she had done for an entire community for most of her life.

Donovan Wheeler is a senior English teacher at Greencastle High School, as well as owner, writer and editor at National Road Magazine and contributor to “Indiana on Tap.” He also happens to be married to Jean Evans’ daughter Wendi.