Widening the Road

Fred Bonnie’s previous collection, Detecting Metal, was included in Booklist’s Top of the List for 1998. We believe that you will find this collection as deserving. Bonnie is a writer who’s not afraid to use plot in his stories, and he is a writer who is clearly on constant lurk for character and characters. His stories convey a delightful sense of humor wherein the protagonist is often enough hoisted by his or her own petard. These stories combine two previous Canadian-published collections, Squatter’s Rights and Displaced Persons. Mr. Bonnie has revised all the stories, which will appear in America for the first time in book form.

      I was once father to forty babies. I was thirteen at the time, theoretically aware of the basics of procreation, but unconvinced that people actually committed such a vile act, even in the noble goal of perpetuating the human species. The prissy girls in my eighth grade class certainly didn’t exude any species-perpetuating awareness, but on those evenings when Sister Lilian and I stood in the doorway of the orphanage nursery surveying all the cribs just before we flipped the light switch and a soothing ultraviolet tint fell over the sleep-bound babies in their cribs, I began to sense exactly how the species survived, and my role as after-school daddy to the babies felt, at moments, vaguely erotic.
    The only problem was that Sister Lilian couldn’t be the mother—she was a nun. I’d grown up thinking that nuns came prefabricated from some nun factory, probably in Massachusetts, and that they were distributed about the state of Maine pre-aged at about fifty. I assumed that the factory did not bother to install species-propagating equipment on its products. Nevertheless, Sister Lilian was the youngest nun I’d ever seen, and she was the first nun I ever found beautiful, although that judgment was based on nothing more than a startlingly warm smile in what was probably a very ordinary face. I came to think of her as my own age, more or less, and my assessment of her as terrifyingly and yet comfortingly beautiful was based, as I said, on her smile, the deft movements of her hands as she changed a diaper or negotiated a spoonful of peach mush into a baby’s evasive mouth, the light-stepping, boyish swagger in the way she walked—and what little of her eyebrows and chin her stiff white habit pinched out for the world to see.
    During the day as I sat through classes, I wondered if Sister Lilian would eventually turn out as ugly as Sister Geraldine, our teacher, in her old age. Sister Geraldine was the oldest nun in the school, over seventy, very kindly but also a bit senile. Her face was pale and cracked and seemed to have been pulled forward by the eruption of her enormous nose. The eighth grade boys, not a group noted for kindness, had nicknamed her “The Beak.”

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