Aban's Accension

Chapter 21: The Pruning

Chapter 21: THE PRUNING

by Shireen Jeejeebhoy

Aban sits up, stretches her arms wide, yawns, and swings her legs to the floor. She's feeling good, still savouring the memory of the bread from the day before. She pads over to the window to see what position El is meditating in this morning. But he’s not there. She furrows her eyebrows in puzzlement at the unexpectedly empty spot; she leans forward to take a harder look. No, still not there. Aban moves her head this way and that, hunting to the far-off sides of the yard, close to the house, and finally toward the back where the evergreens are. She spots a ladder leaning against a straggly tree she hadn't noticed before. She squints and finds El hidden in its shade, his arms disappearing into the shadows of the branches, pruning the tree with long-handled pruners.

“Wha –!” It’s the heat of the summer. He can’t prune at this time. The tree will die. It’s already half-dead. Doesn’t he know this? First the seeds, and now this. And he thinks he’s so smart.

Memory of the sweet bread banished by her anger, Aban turns to her dresser and scrabbles around for a clean T-shirt and a fresh pair of camouflage army pants. “He should’ve pruned that tree in the spring,” she snarls as she pulls on her blue T-shirt with the saying running down the middle, one word per line, “Body-Centered Listening Resolves Conflicts”. The sticky air doesn’t slow her down in her rush to the back deck in her bare feet.

“What are you doing?” Aban yells at El as she slams open the back door.

Clip. A large branch flops down, bouncing gently once before its parched leaves sigh into the ground.

“You can’t prune now! Don’t you know anything!”

Clip. Another branch falls.

Aban puts her hands on her hips and frowns. This must be another of his confusing things. And he’s rude, not answering her.

Aban stomps down the steps to see better. El has started at the top where the new growth is. He’s chopped almost all of the new growth there, what little there was in this drought. He’s now pruning the previous year’s growth where leaves are growing and not as limp or shrivelled as on the new growth. But he isn’t being gentle; he’s pruning hard, right back to where a branch has branched out from the trunk in some cases. The pile on the ground swells as thin branch, small branch, long branch, main branch get clipped and fall down onto it.

Aban shrugs. It’s his tree. Suddenly, she realizes it’s her tree. Her tree. Given to her by her grandmother. How could he prune her tree? What kind of tree is it anyway? Maybe it should come down. All of it. Aban strides across the hard ground toward his ladder, but stops far enough away so that the pruned branches won’t hit her. El has climbed down a few rungs since she first saw him. She hopes he knows she’s standing there. He’s acting as if he doesn’t. Yet that man has eyes in the back of his head and around corners too. And he always seems to know what she’s thinking...or feeling...in a way Mom and Dad never did, her classmates didn’t, or that girl in grade ten, or her teachers. And he seems to know who is where. All the time. She’s never seen him surprised or startled by a person creeping up on him. She shivers suddenly and steps back.

“Why are you afraid?”

She jumps. “I’m not.”

“Why do you persist in denying the obvious. You shivered with fear.”

“How did you see that? You didn’t even know I was here.”

“I always know where you are Aban.”

Aban shivers again in fear of him, in fear of what he knows about her, about how somehow, in ways she doesn’t understand, he knows the real her, and she’s afraid to tell him all that. And so she says instead, “You didn’t answer my question. Why are you pruning this tree? You should’ve done it in the spring or before it budded late last winter. What kind of tree is it anyway?”