My neighbor splits wood every Saturday morning at seven which is too early and I have told him this and he has agreed it is too early and he splits wood every Saturday morning at seven. The sound comes through the wall the way all sounds come through walls which is to say diminished and also somehow more itself, the way a word you overhear from another conversation carries more weight than a word spoken to your face. Thock. Then a pause. Then thock. He is either very methodical or very slow and I cannot tell from this side of the wall and it doesn't matter because what matters is that I am awake now and the coffee is not ready and the sound continues and will continue until the pile is done or until whatever is in him that requires the pile to be split at seven on a Saturday has been satisfied, which is not the same thing as the pile being done, and I suspect he knows this, and I suspect the wood knows this, though I have been told the wood knows nothing, and I have been told this by people who have never split wood at seven on a Saturday morning when they could have slept.
His name is Frank and he was an electrician for thirty-one years and I know this because he told me once while I was getting the mail and he was stacking the split pieces along his fence in a pattern I would call obsessive and he would call correct. The pieces go bark-side up so the rain runs off instead of pooling in the grain and I know this because he explained it to me without my asking and I have retained it the way you retain the directions to a place you will never visit: completely, resentfully, and with a growing suspicion that the information will outlast everything else you've learned that year. Bark side up. Because the rain.
Some Saturdays the sound changes. I don't mean the thock becomes a different thock, though it does — there's a sharper report when the wood is dry and a duller, wetter sound when it's been raining, and there's a sound I can only describe as agreeable when the piece splits on the first strike, and a sound I can only describe as personal when it doesn't and he has to work the blade out and try again — what I mean is the rhythm changes. Some Saturdays it's thock-thock-thock like a man with somewhere to be and other Saturdays it's thock and then nothing for so long I think he's stopped and then thock like a man who's forgotten what he's doing and then remembered, or like a man who knows exactly what he's doing and is doing it at the speed the doing requires which is not the speed I would choose but I am in bed and he is the one with the axe so the question of speed is not mine to adjudicate.
My wife says I should buy earplugs. My wife is a practical woman who solves problems by removing them from her sensory field. The squeaky door got WD-40. The barking dog got a white noise machine. Frank gets earplugs. I have explained that the sound is not the problem. The problem is that a man I know by name is doing something he does not need to do at an hour he does not need to do it and the sound of him doing it is — not pleasant, not unpleasant — present in a way that refuses to be background. She says that is the definition of a noise complaint and I should file one. I say I am not complaining. She says I have been talking about it for eleven minutes. I say talking about something is not the same as complaining about it. She says I should buy earplugs.
The thing about Frank is he has enough wood. I have seen the shed. I have been in the shed because last November the power went out and he offered us his generator and I went to the shed to get it and the wood was stacked floor to ceiling in rows so precise they looked structural, as if the shed were not containing the wood but the wood were holding up the shed. There is enough wood in Frank's shed for three winters. We live in a place where winters are mild. He does not have a wood-burning stove. He has baseboard heating, same as me, and I know this because when the power went out he said these baseboard heaters are useless without power which is why I have the generator and I wanted to say Frank why do you have a shed full of wood you cannot burn but I did not say this because I was cold and he had the generator.
I think Frank splits wood because Frank splits wood. I think the pile is an excuse the way a path is an excuse for walking, the way a question is an excuse for the voice to go on speaking. The wood is real and the splitting is real but the purpose Frank would give you if you asked — getting ready for winter, keeping the pile stocked, you never know — that purpose is the melody, not the bass line, and the bass line is something Frank could not name and I could not name and the wood could not name if the wood could name things which it cannot because it is wood, though there are mornings, lying here, when the thock sounds less like something being done to the wood than like something the wood and the axe are doing together, and those are the mornings I do not mind being awake, and those are the mornings I do not tell my wife about because she would say I need earplugs and she would be wrong in a way I cannot explain to a woman who has never lain in bed at seven on a Saturday listening to someone else's useless discipline and found it, against all preference, beautiful.