That Particular Silence, 1963

“Sophie was splitting wood when she heard. She had not needed to split wood. Joe kept the woodpile stocked by a man who came every October with a truck and a chainsaw and left behind two cords of seasoned mesquite, neatly racked against the back fence. But Sophie liked splitting wood. She liked the weight of the maul in her hands and the crack when the grain opened clean and the two halves fell away from each other. She liked the smell of it, the dry sweet dust that came off the rounds when the steel hit true. It was a thing she could do with her body that made sense, and on a Friday afternoon in November with the air cold enough to justify a fire, she had carried half a dozen rounds out to the block beside the stable and gone to work. The radio was on in the tack room. She had left it there that morning while she groomed the horses, tuned to KOMA out of Oklahoma City because it came in clearest on cold days. She was not listening to it. She was listening to the maul and the wood and her own breathing, which were better things to listen to.”

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