Slight Betrayals

by Peter Rock

I. Courtship

He claimed that the cornea he'd acquired by surgery had once belonged to a beautiful young woman; he said it brought him new memories, insights into female anatomy that even he found shocking. He was 75 years old and kept a strip of foil-wrapped condoms in the glove compartment of his pickup.
      He'd been separated from his wife for 15 years, and they never had divorced. She owned the house, half the vehicles, and all the sheep. She'd tackle a ram twice her size, stay up all night untangling the legs of a lamb still in the uterus, fix the dryer with a makeshift fan belt of pantyhose.
      There were two bedrooms in the house, and she let him stay in the other one. They had split everything evenly-this reduced their reasons for arguing. When they did fight, he'd try to include me. Never marry a managing woman, he'd warn. You'll feel the bit in your mouth every single day.
      He'd kept the cattle, half the land. I worked for her, technically, but he could borrow me or trade something of like value for an afternoon. We'd mend fence together. He'd stalk ahead, the fence- stretcher over one shoulder, quoting Ovid, never quietly, in Latin. Other times he'd raise one gloved hand and repeat his favorite saying: The hand of man-here he'd pause for emphasis-the hand of man is rarely raised for good. He'd stretch the broken ends of barbed wire together, and I'd twist the loops, make the splices. Tears running out from behind his sunglasses, he'd tell me you had to be careful these days, how the cure for crabs would make your hair fall out. He knew this from experience.
      When his transplant became infected, he began to have trouble with depth perception. She would help him climb and ...