THE FIRST TIME I saw him, Mother was down in the cellar washing clothes. A knock came at the door and this rugged old man in a pair of black suit pants, a suit vest, and a white shirt buttoned to the collar with no tie, asked if my father was home.
“No, he’s at work,” I said.
“How ’bout your mother?” The old man smiled red-eyed at me. He had bristly raven hair parted down the middle, a liver-spotted complexion, and no teeth. His hands looked like a boxer’s, square.
“Jake!” Mother exclaimed, tugging at her apron. “Joe’s not here. Was he ’specting you?”
The visitor turned and pointed to the single tree in our backyard, a knotted antique apple tree. “It will give you a better harvest if you let me tend to it.”
“Jake . . . why, sure,” she said.
“Joey wouldn’t mind. Can I borrow a saw?”
“James, run down to the cellar and get the saw.”
Soon Jake was climbing up into the twisted branches of the great apple tree with our dull handsaw hanging off his old leather belt like a scabbard. He shimmied, pulled, and swung his way to the very top. For the rest of the morning and that afternoon he worked his way back down, never once stopping to either accept Mother’s offer of a bologna sandwich or the bathroom.
“It’s your grandfather,” she whispered.
I was dumbfounded. “What’s he doing here?”
“God only knows. Probably down at the corner saloon then wandered up here. I just hope your father gets home before he’s done,” she said. “What am I supposed to do when he climbs back down?”
I went upstairs and observed him from my bedroom window. How facile, this seventy-five-year-old moving through its tortured branches. Now and then he’d smear his brow with his yellowing dress-shirt sleeve. Earlier at the door I didn’t smell whiskey, but a sweet and rancid odor rose off his stooped frame.
Before Father came home from work, Jake knocked on the door again. Even I could tell he’d taken off too many of its branches.
“Katherine, you tell Joseph I’ll finish the job first thing tomorrow morning.” Smiling guilelessly at me, he waved to Mother who stood just inside our screen door. He was off and back down the road.
“Oh God, he’s coming back tomorrow.”
“Where’s he going?” I asked.
“Back to Piesto’s.”
That night my father crashed about in the backyard asking what in God’s name happened to the great apple tree, accusing me and my friends of having taken hatchets and saws to it. Mother quickly alerted him to Jake’s visit.
“Jake! What was he doing here?” Father burst.
“He’s coming back tomorrow, Joe.”
“To do what! Trim the fucking doors?”
Actually I was impressed. I hadn’t ever seen anyone work so diligently with the clarity and skill as to what my grandfather’d done. He might have killed the tree, but by God it no longer looked arthritic.
But Jake never showed.
That spring not one cluster of white buds or a single green leaf emerged from what by now’d been christened Jake’s Apple Tree. Just a black-barked hulking sculpture stood spectrally out of our backyard. Mother twisted a silver eye hook into its trunk to which she tied one end of her clothesline, the other into the corner board of our house. Father had it chopped to the ground that winter.
I still clearly see agile old Jake slicing his woody foe to the damp ground below. The vanquisher in sodden black wool, beaming back at the house to me—a wondrous progenitor of my father, Circus Mark, Dancer Agnes, and Holy Father Ray. This creature with burled hands the age of the tree he just killed. Why, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the bushel baskets of ripe apples lying under its newly trimmed bows next August! Jake the steeplejack. Going from neighborhood to neighborhood hunting down his offspring. “Tomorrow I’ll visit Agnes. Then Mark. Why, Raymond must have a whole orchard backside the chancery. He can go fishing while I fly about in his trees,” an old Jake-bird leaping from limb to limb with a dull handsaw and madness.
I hadn’t the least idea where Jacob Daugherty was even buried.