Black Hills

by Dan Simmons

  Remembering the long telling of Limps-a-Lot’s final story to Robert, Paha Sapa is reminded of that same long-ago time in 1890 at Chankpe Opi Wakpala. While searching the faces of the frozen, snow-covered forms in that field for Limps-a-Lot’s corpse, he had, for the first time, reached into the black place where Long Hair’s ghost had resided those fourteen years, babbling away in English about his pornographic memories of his wife, and dragged that ghost kicking and screaming to a place behind his, Paha Sapa’s, eyes, forcing it to watch and to look and to see, forbidding it with his own Voice of God to say nothing.

  After Limps-a-Lot’s burial, Paha Sapa threw Long Hair’s ghost back into the silent, lightless place where it had resided until then. He did not speak to it again (or allow it to speak to him) for another eleven months, but the oft-interrupted conversation began that day. Custer’s ghost was later to tell Paha Sapa that he, Custer’s ghost, was certain that he’d arrived in Hell and that his punishment would be to look at such sights as the field at Chankpe Opi Wakpala for all the rest of eternity. Paha Sapa immediately reminded Long Hair’s ghost that the snowy field and the frozen dead men, women, and children could just as easily have been at Washita.

  It was another year before he and the ghost spoke again.

  The ghost has said nothing this night. Of course, he has not spoken at all in the past three and a half years, not since the trip to New York in the spring of 1933.

  Paha Sapa skirts the parking lot and cuts downhill through the woods to where he has hidden the Dodge truck. Advocatus and Diaboli seem almost too weary to climb the ramp up into the truck and then are too weary even to chew on the straw.

  The moon has disappeared to the west; the eastern sky is already growing light. Paha Sapa checks his old watch. Almost five a.m. He has time to drive back to Keystone, load Robert’s motorcycle into the back of the truck with the donkeys—there was room to load it with the dynamite crates earlier, but Paha Sapa was stupidly sentimental about not blowing up his son’s machine if the nitroglycerine detonated—and then make the trip to Deadwood to return the two tired beasts to Father Pierre Marie and the Dodge truck to Howdy Peterson’s cousin. He’d come home on the motorcycle and have time to make some breakfast for himself before coming up the hill again to start a long Saturday of work supervising the drilling of the face in preparation for tomorrow’s—Sunday’s—demonstration explosion for the president, honored guests, and newsreel cameras.

  Paha Sapa is so exhausted that far more than the cancer hurts him this beautiful but hot morning. Everything hurts, down to the marrow of his bones. He knows that this night, Saturday night to Sunday morning, even with the moron Mune’s help, he will have much more hard labor to do through the night than merely walking donkeys up a hill and canyon a few times and transferring twenty-one relatively light crates of dynamite. And he will have to start earlier to have any chance of finishing the placement of the charges and wires before sunrise, and this on a Saturday night, when everyone stays awake partying until late.

  Driving the heavy Dodge truck down the bumpy road toward Keystone, flinching for no reason every time the wheels hit a deep pothole, he tries to think of a prayer asking Wakan Tanka or the Six Forces of the Universe or the Mystery itself for strength, but he cannot remember the words for any such prayer.

  Instead, he remembers a Grandfather Chant that Limps-a-Lot taught him when he was very little and he sings it now—

  There is someone lying on earth in a sacred manner.

  There is someone—on earth he lies.

  In a sacred manner I have made him walk.

  Then he comes out of the forest just as the sun rises over the hills to the east, temporarily blinding Paha Sapa—who has to fumble in the tangle of junk in the lidless glove compartment to find his sunglasses—and he remembers and sings a song that the Sun himself taught his people—

  With visible face I am appearing.

  In a sacred manner I appear.

  For the greening earth a pleasantness I make.

  The center of the nation’s hoop I have made pleasant.

  With visible face, behold me!

  The four-leggeds, the two-leggeds, I have made them to walk;

  The wings of the air, I have made them to fly.

  With visible face I appear.

  My day, I have made it holy.

  22

  The Six Grandfathers

  Saturday, August 29, 1936

  THE WORKDAY PROCEEDS IN A WHITE HALO OF HEAT. THIS LAST week of August finally has seen temperatures drop out of the high nineties in the Black Hills but the carved, white-granite inward curve of Mount Rushmore continues to focus sunlight and heat like a parabolic mirror and drives temperatures back up into the triple digits for the men hanging there by hot steel cords. By ten a.m. men working on the face are taking their salt tablets. Paha Sapa realizes that he is seeing halos of white light around not just the rock noses and cheeks and chins jutting from the granite, but also around the tanned and lip-blistered faces of the other workers.

  He knows this illusion is just a by-product of fatigue and lack of sleep and does not worry about it. The effect is more pleasing than disturbing as men with their pneumatic steam drills and sledgehammers and steel spikes each move within their own white nimbus, the pulsing coronas sometimes merging as the men lean close or work together.

  The fatigue-induced white halos are not a problem for Paha Sapa; the pain from his cancer is becoming one.

  He grits his teeth tighter and sets the pain out of his thoughts.

  All this Saturday morning he has been directing Palooka Payne on drilling the holes for the five charges to be detonated in tomorrow’s “demonstration blast” for the president and other VIPs. Everyone loves a good explosion. This one, as with all the demonstration blasts on public occasions, has to look and sound significant enough to give the civilians on Doane Mountain and in the valley below a sense that it is doing some work on the mountain while not being big enough to lob rocks or boulders at them.

  One crew of men is rigging the extra crane arm over the Jefferson face, ready to drape the gigantic flag—sewn years ago by old ladies or FHA students or somesuch in Rapid City—to conceal Jefferson, and also rigging the ropes and cables that will lift the huge and heavy flag even while the crane swings to one side. But the flag itself will not be draped until tomorrow morning. Although there is not a breath of wind in the blazing heat of this late morning, a stiff breeze might tear the flag, tangle the cables, or otherwise ruin the draping. A special crew will drape the flag the next morning, not too long before the guests are scheduled to arrive.

  The president’s train is supposed to be pulling into Rapid City late this evening of the 29th, but already word is coming up the hill that the president will definitely be arriving here tomorrow, Sunday, later than originally planned; FDR has added a longer-than-originally-scheduled service at the Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Rapid City and a luncheon with local Democratic leaders at the Alex Johnson Hotel (still the only air-conditioned hotel in South Dakota) before coming up to Mount Rushmore in his motorcade.

  This has made Borglum apoplectic. He is swearing to his son, Lincoln, to his wife, to June Culp Geitner, to supervisor Julian Spotts, to worried Democratic politicans who make the mistake of taking his phone call, to William Williamson (head of the delegation in charge of greeting the president), and to unsmiling Secret Service liaisons that President Roosevelt will have to change his plans back to arrive earlier, as Borglum had directed and as Roosevelt had originally promised, or the shadows on the faces will be in the wrong position and the unveiling of the Jefferson head will be ruined. The president’s and governor’s people explain to Borglum that the president has expedited his arrival as much as possible and expects to arrive no later than 2:30.

  Gutzon Borglum growls at the gathered men.

  —That’ll be two and a half hours too damned late. The unveiling of the Jefferson figure and the dedication ceremony are going to happen exactly at noon. Tell
that to the president! If he wants to be part of it, he’ll have to get here about fifteen minutes before the unveiling.

  Then Borglum walks out of the studio where the group is gathered and takes his tramway up to the tops of the heads.

  The few old-timers who’ve been working here since Borglum talked President Calvin Coolidge into taking a horse-drawn wagon (which broke down, forcing the president to make the rest of the trip by horse) up to this isolated spot to “dedicate the site” of the as-yet-totally-untouched Mount Rushmore on August 10, 1927, just shake their heads. They know the Boss will wait for this new president.

  Between drillings, chief pointer Jim Larue informs Paha Sapa that Coolidge wore totally dude-ish new cowboy boots, fringed buckskin gloves, and a Stetson big enough to shade half of west South Dakota when he rode up the hill. Earlier in that trip, he had allowed some not-quite-local Sioux Indians to dress him up in a war bonnet that hung to his heels, and they gave Silent Cal the official name “Chief Leading Eagle”—Wanbli Tokaha in Lakota, which most of the white locals decided actually meant “Looks Like a Horse’s Ass.”

  Doane Robinson, who was a big part of this wooing of Coolidge, once told Paha Sapa that the most devious thing done by the local whites was to dam up the little stream near where the president was staying at the Game Lodge in the Hills, bring down hundreds of fat, disgustingly liver-fed, stupid breeding trout from the hatchery up in Spearfish, and release these torpid creatures, a clump at a time, into the hundred yards of stream where Coolidge—who had never tried fishing before in his life—was standing uncomfortably, still dressed in suit, vest, tie, stiff collar, and straw boater, awkwardly holding the expensive trout-fishing rod Robinson and the others had given the visiting president as a gift.

  Incredibly, Coolidge caught a fish in the first five minutes. (It would have been almost impossible not to, said Doane Robinson. One could have all but walked across the creek on the back of the fish released there without getting one’s shoes wet.) And he kept catching these slow, fat breeding trout, released every hour on the hour from the newly built little dam just upstream. Coolidge was so delighted with his fishing prowess that he not only went fishing for hours each day he was at the Game Lodge, but insisted on serving the dozens upon dozens of trout he caught every breakfast and dinner at the lodge.

  The locals, who could taste the rotted liver from the slaughterhouse in Spearfish that these trout had been fed on for years, gamely smiled and tried to swallow as Coolidge beamed at everyone at the table and urged second helpings of his trout.

  PAHA SAPA and Palooka have the five blasting holes drilled by ten a.m. and Paha Sapa has run and secured the detonator wires in their protective orange guides across the face of the cliff under the Jefferson head and the white rock now ready for the Teddy Roosevelt fine drilling. For safety’s sake, he will not install the dynamite in the holes until tomorrow morning after everyone else is off the face.

  But he has Palooka continue drilling for him well into the blazing noon and tells the driller to join him after the lunch break for more work.

  —What’re these slots for, Billy? They’re not even blast holes. They’re more like… well, big slots.

  It’s true. Paha Sapa has shown the driller where they’re going to expand niches under rock ledges and cliff lips and in crevices all along the face of the cliff, from Washington’s right shoulder to the farthest west, then east up and around the bend in the swooping saddle between Washington’s lapels and Thomas Jefferson’s right cheek, then down under Jefferson’s chin, then east again to the left of the undifferentiated mass that is Jefferson’s parted hair, beneath and to both sides of the tabula rasa of prepared granite ready for the carving of Teddy Roosevelt, then farther to the right into the shadowed niches between the Roosevelt granite field and the busy working face of Lincoln, then down under Lincoln’s still-emerging chin and beard where scaffolds are clustered, and finally even on the just-blasted cliff face to the southeast of Lincoln’s unseen left ear. With Paha Sapa supervising exact placement of these excavations, he and Palooka will be working all day on these holes.

  The slots aren’t blast holes. Palooka guesses that they’re going to be support insets in the stone for still more scaffolds to join those still on the face under Washington (where his cravat and lapels continue to emerge) and under Jefferson (where more work has to be done on the neck), across the exposed granite prepared for TR, and on both sides of and beneath Lincoln’s head. Those portable scaffolds that can be cranked up on pulleys will be removed by tomorrow to clear the way for the crowd’s viewing, but many of the other working walkways and scaffolds rest on sturdy posts with drill holes not unlike these horizontal niches Palooka will be drilling all the rest of this Saturday.

  Paha Sapa does not say that these aren’t support holes for future scaffold pilings.

  On another scaffold nearby, Howdy Peterson is beginning the honeycombing process on the lower TR carving field. This has been the procedure on the previous three faces—as blasting gets down to the last inches of clean rock before the “skin” of the faces emerges, drillers like Palooka and Howdy lean their weight into the drills (thus the scaffolds rather than bosun’s chairs) to drill hundreds upon hundreds of parallel holes, honeycombing the rock. Then carvers like Red Anderson come in with their large hammers and cold chisels and break away the stone in sheets, exposing the smooth face that will later be buffed and shaped and worked as actual sculptures.

  Meanwhile, back down at the hoist house—the closest to the cliff that the tourists can wander—Edwald Hayes and the other hoist operators have an example of the flaked-off “honeycomb” nailed to the wall of the hoist house and acknowledge to the curious visitor that, Yep, we get a few of these real, actual honeycombed mementos of the mountain carving intact. Not many. They’re real rare. That’s why the fellows keep this one here as a sorta souvenir. The tourists invariably ask if Edwald (or the other operators) could see fit to part with that interesting honeycomb. Don’t hardly see how I could, sir (or “lady”). Y’see, it belongs to another guy. He might be real mad if I sold it, since it’s so rare and all…. ’Course, if you really want it, I might see my way clear to sell it to you and just take my chances with the owner.

  The going price for the largest honeycombs is six bucks. The tourists take off with the chunk of honeycombed granite tucked in the husband’s jacket, almost running to their cars as they chuckle about the fast one they’ve pulled, and then Edwald or the other operator will phone up the mountain and say—Okay, boys, send down another one.

  The honeycombed souvenirs are priced according to size—two dollars, four dollars, and six dollars—and the price is always in multiples of two, Paha Sapa knows, because moonshine in the area sells for two dollars a pint. Thousands of “rare and unique and one-of-a-kind” honeycombs have changed hands here over the years.

  Borglum has driven off after his confrontation with the president’s people (perhaps, the workers buzz, to go confront FDR with his be-here-on-time-or-else ultimatum), and his son is in charge, but Lincoln focuses his supervision on the crane and flag-pulley preparation over the Jefferson head and the new drilling all over the emerging Lincoln head and pays little attention to Palooka and Paha Sapa and their seemingly innocuous small-time drilling on various parts of the cliff. Lincoln knows that “Billy Slovak” has to prepare for tomorrow’s demonstration blast and for much more serious working detonations in the week to come as Teddy Roosevelt’s skin and head shape are finally exposed.

  When the noon whistle blows (without the deeper, louder blast-warning whistle that often follows, since Paha Sapa and the other powdermen do their blasting during the lunch break and after four p.m., when the workers are off the face), Paha Sapa heads up to the winch shack to fetch his metal lunch pail—he only had time in the morning to toss in some bread and old beef—and walks into the shade of the main boom and winch building atop Jefferson’s head.

  It’s hot in the shed but a group of men, including Paha Sapa’s
fellow powdermen Alfred Berg and Spot Denton, are huddled there with their lunch pails. Part of the space in the shack is taken up by a hollow five-foot-tall bust-mask of a clean-shaven Abe Lincoln, part of some earlier sculpture that Borglum did years ago and which he normally has set out along the scaffolding trail around the base of the emerging Lincoln head so that men can touch it with their hands while working there and “feel” the Lincoln that is still in the stone. Borglum ordered it brought in during the blasting.

  Whiskey Art Johnson pats a place on the stone floor near the Lincoln face.

  —There’s room here, Billy. Come in and set a spell, get out of the sun.

  —Thanks, Art. I’ll be back.

  He picks up his lunch pail and the little Coke bottle he keeps his water in—heated almost to boiling by now—and walks back out along the ridge and then out onto George Washington’s head until the slope becomes steep enough that he feels he’s about to slide right over Washington’s brow to the boulders three hundred feet below. It’s a comfortable place to sit, half reclining, and there’s a small niche in the president’s forehead, carved to give a sense of a wig, where Paha Sapa can rest his pail and bottle without worrying about them rolling over the edge.

  As he munches his bread and meat, he looks to the southwest and toward the summit of Harney Peak.

  Doane Robinson once loaned him a new book that said that the granite on Harney Peak was 1.7 billion years old. Billion. The Natural Free Human Beings have no word for billion or for million. The biggest number that Paha Sapa remembers encountering when he was with his people was in the phrase Wicahpi, opawinge wikcemna kin yamni, which had to do with the three thousand stars visible in the sky on a perfect viewing right.