The Chrome Suite by Sandra Birdsell Page A

here. No place for a girl,” he said.
    I crossed the road that bordered the cemetery; beyond it was the golf course and clubhouse. I set the camera down on top of the stone wall enclosing the cemetery and searched for Alf, the grounds-keeper, but the grass appeared to be freshly clipped so I knew Alf had already been and gone. I hiked up the wall and dropped down inside the cemetery and the air felt immediately cooler. I walked among the hard stones and smooth columns of marble and granite headstones. In the golf course beyond a red kite climbed unsteadily into the cloudless sky. Two boys. Cam and Gord, I recognized, a year older than I was. Their backs were brown, impervious to the sun. They looked up at the kite, pulling on its string as they walked backwards, coaxing it to fly higher. Behind me at the front gate of the cemetery stretched the highway and I heard the sound of vehicles gearing down as they approached the town’s speed limit. There was a lot of traffic around Carona then. Transport trucks moving in and out of town, bringing dry goods, groceries, television sets, washers and dryers. The merchandise was transported from the city to the town where it would be uncrated in the stores, the shelves stocked, banners painted to proclaim coming sales. The merchants were anticipating another record harvest, the mounds of silver coins in the callused palms of the men who stepped from the beer parlour – while inside it was the click of billiard balls amid the raucous roarof male voices, all saying the same thing in different ways, congratulating themselves and sometimes God for the absence of hail among the pillars of clouds at night, for the heavy rainfall at the right time, grain prices, the record-breaking yields per acre, and all of them loving to love the prime minister, “Dief the Chief.”
    The hinges on my grandparents’ fence squealed. I stood still for a moment, watching for movement behind the curtain at the window. Grandfather Johnson would be sitting at the table spooning sugar into strong coffee. I dropped down behind a row of dogwood shrubs, unrolled the camera from the towel, and waited. All at once the back door opened and the elderly woman stepped outside. Her loosely woven garden hat, tilted at an angle, cast a latticework of shadows against her face and I worried that her features would be hidden. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs to pull on a pair of gardening gloves, jerking each finger down into place with the same determination that shaped all the movements of her life. I picked up the camera, held my breath, and waited. She slid rather than bent to her knees in front of the flower-bed. I framed her in the viewfinder. She wobbled forward and her straw hat became a flat beige circle as she leaned over the flowers. Then what I waited for happened all at once. She started, and leapt to her feet out of view, darting towards the house, holding up a green bottle. She held it away from herself as though it stank, not stopping to realize that it didn’t make sense for my grandfather to hide it where she was bound to find it, or that the fluid inside the bottle was not port but clear water.
    I thought of how Timothy complained that it was strange the way you couldn’t get people to stand still for an ordinary camera but with a movie camera you couldn’t get them to move. My grandmother’s voice inside the house was sharp and accusing, my grandfather’s injured-sounding. I felt discouraged and disappointed. I had anticipated Timothy’s laughter at the sight of the usually staid and primwoman running across our dining-room wall waving a port bottle.
    I left their yard and cut back through the cemetery, feeling the mystery of the place in Alf’s carefully tended graves, rectangles of bright flowers or crushed stone marking out where people lay, waiting. Their silence brushed against my legs as I skittered along narrow pathways between headstones. On the golf course, Cam and Gord were still