Black Hills: A Novel

by Dan Simmons

  Paha Sapa realizes that he should have said to his son years ago—I am no warrior and never will be. I lack the ability to willingly hurt people.

  It was true, he sees now. Despite the necessary fistfights he’s had in his long life, including those in his early months on this job five years ago, he’s never willingly acted to hurt or kill another human being. Even when he’s fought in self-defense or to stop some racist bullying at his expense, he’s done so with the least force necessary—while at the same time knowing, from both Crazy Horse’s vivid memories and from the rants of Long Hair’s ghost, that there are times when the greatest force possible is the answer.

  But he knows now, as he sits on this crate of dynamite with both detonator boxes within easy reach, that he chose not to throw himself and Gutzon Borglum out of the rising tramway bucket because he refused to kill Borglum if he had any choice left. And he does have a choice. At least for the next few minutes.

  There’s a ripple of noise from below, then applause, and the motorcade is pulling into the parking area. Other vehicles pull to one side or the other but one long black touring car, men in dark suits now walking ahead of it protectively, bounces down the new road and comes to a stop in front of the viewing stands with the microphones just outside the front passenger-side door.

  A man gets out of the backseat of the open car and receives a wave of cheers. Paha Sapa steadies the binoculars. It’s South Dakota’s popular cowboy governor, Tom Berry. The governor leans over and talks to the man sitting in the front passenger seat for a few seconds and then steps back and waves to the crowd again.

  Now the high school band is playing “Hail to the Chief ”—Paha Sapa hears it twice, once regularly and the second, tinny time through all the microphones hooked to loudspeakers—and Franklin D. Roosevelt, still seated in the front passenger seat, of course, wearing no hat, his head thrown back, sunlight glinting on the gold frames of his sunglasses, raises an open palm and turns away from Paha Sapa and the waiting Borglum and waves at each part of the semicircle of the crowd, including both those seated and those standing. The standing crowd is relatively quiet but the VIPs on the closer reviewing platform respond so enthusiastically that the last notes of “Hail to the Chief ” are drowned out. Three radio reporters are babbling wildly into their bulky microphones, but those devices aren’t hooked up to the natural amphitheater’s loudspeakers. All Paha Sapa can hear, delayed and overlaid like a ghostly stutter, is the somewhat tepid applause and soft cheers of the crowd. It is, after all, a mostly Republican South Dakota audience.

  Then the overlapping loudspeaker squawk, emphasized by the natural echo basin of the curved cliff face above his narrow granite ledge, becomes even more garbled and irritating as William Williamson launches into his welcoming speech.

  Paha Sapa pulls the smaller of the two detonator boxes closer and carefully takes the ends of the two wires, from which he’s stripped back the insulation with his pocketknife, runs his thumb and forefinger up each to clean it of dust, and then threads each of them through a hole in each post and carefully wraps the excess around the two threaded terminal posts. When he’s sure the contact is clean, he screws the Bakelite terminal post coverings down tight onto the wire.

  “I met one of these four presidents you’re about to blow up, you know. Shook hands with him. He talked to me about my graduation from West Point. Later, he met Libbie at a reception and said, ‘So this is the young woman whose husband goes into a charge with a whoop and a shout.’ ”

  Long Hair’s voice in his head almost makes Paha Sapa fall off the dynamite crate. Almost three years of silence from the damned ghost and he chooses now to begin babbling again?

  “It was Old Abe, of course. The fellow whose cheek you’re leaning against. In ’sixty-two, the other officers and me serving under General McClellan in the Army of the Potomac talked seriously about marching on Washington to replace that incompetent gorilla with our choice of war dictator, Little Mac himself.”

  Paha Sapa paws at the air as if swatting away a gnat.

  —Be quiet. You’re dead.

  “I’m just waiting to see if you’re going to do this thing or if you’re going to lose your nerve… again.”

  Paha Sapa has heard this Custer-laughter many times before. The Wasicun obviously did not have an especially charming laugh even in life—it sounded too much like a mischievous boy’s nervous cackle—and sixty years in the grave has not improved it.

  —You can’t stop me, Long Hair.

  Again the insufferable laughter.

  “Stop you? I don’t want to stop you, Paha Sapa. I think you should do this thing. Have to do this thing. It’s long overdue.”

  Paha Sapa closes his eyes for a few seconds to block out the white glare, the heat, the maddening literal double-talk of the noise from below repeated in its amplified echo. He wonders if the wasichu ghost is trying to confuse him… trick him… or perhaps just distract him at the coming crucial moment.

  “None of the above, old friend,” Custer whispers to him. “I’m serious. No man—especially no man bred from a warrior people—can keep receiving these insults and injuries for so long without striking back—and striking back boldly. Do it, Paha Sapa. Blow these damned stone heads to hell today, right in front of the cameras and the president and God himself. It won’t change a damned thing—your people will still be defeated and irrelevant and forgotten—but it’s a warrior people’s answer to such humiliation. Do it, for God’s sake. I would.”

  Paha Sapa shakes his head, more to free himself of the voice than in reply.

  Up until now he has felt no fatigue or pain while he’s spent the long morning and interminable afternoon on this thin ledge, in this intolerable heat. Now the pain flows in as if Long Hair’s ghost has opened a door for it. Paha Sapa is suddenly so tired he wonders if he will have the strength to crank the handle against the resistance of the detonator box’s coils to charge it, or find the strength to raise the plunger against that friction and push it down.

  “See what I mean, Paha Sapa? You’ve gone two nights without sleep and have been working on this hill three solid days and nights without a break. You’re going to pass out and your body is going to tumble down the cliff here and be a footnote in the history of this dedication ceremony—the White House will send Borglum a note expressing its sadness at the terrible tragedy of the death of one of his workers—and these damned Heads will still be here. Blow them now. What the hell are you waiting for?”

  Paha Sapa raises the binoculars. A fat man he doesn’t recognize is speaking into the main microphone. President Roosevelt is smiling. Borglum is leaning casually against the president’s touring car and he doesn’t have his hand on the red flag yet.

  When Paha Sapa speaks, it’s in a stilted whisper. If someone from below is looking at him through binoculars, he does not want it to be seen that his lips are moving.

  —You’re cursing, Long Hair. Didn’t you promise your wife that you wouldn’t curse?

  The ghost’s laughter echoes in Paha Sapa’s skull again, but it is not quite so grating this time.

  “I did, yes. I made that vow in eighteen sixty-two, in Monroe, Michigan, shortly after Libbie and I had been introduced at a Thanksgiving party and only one day after she had, regrettably, seen me inebriated on a public street there in Monroe. I prayed and I admitted sin and I vowed that I would never touch liquor again as long as I lived, nor would I take the name of the Lord in vain or use ungentlemanly language ever again, no matter how frequently my occupation and mean comrades urged me to. But I did not make the pledge to Libbie that day, oh, no—I made it to my older sister Lydia, who, in good time, conveyed it to young Miss Elizabeth Bacon, who had indeed seen me in my unforgivable condition while spying out through the drapes of her upstairs window there from Judge Daniel Bacon’s home. But Libbie is dead, my Indian friend, as is your own dear wife, and all our vows have expired with them.”

  —Shut up. You just want me to die. You just want to be released.


  Long Hair laughs again. “Of course I do, damn you. I’m no soul waiting for Heaven, no ghost waiting to pass upward and onward, just a memory tumor of Paha Billy Slow Horse Slovak fucking Sapa. We’re both tired of this life, this world. Are you just waiting for more pain and loss? What are you waiting for, Paha Sapa? Trigger the goddamned fucking detonator now.”

  Paha Sapa blinks at the shouted obscenities echoing in his aching skull. Has the ghost finally gone mad?

  Then again, why is he waiting? He fully intends to set off the demonstration blast, then listen to the dedication, and only then—after detonating a single stick of dynamite to get the crowd’s and cameras’ attention—only then set off the twenty-one crates’ worth of explosive.

  But the ghost has a point… why wait?

  He realizes, blushing, that it’s because he wants to hear if President Roosevelt will speak after all, even though he’s not scheduled to, and if he does, what he will say. He realizes that he’s worked five years blasting and helping to carve this monument and wants to hear what the president of the United States thinks of it. He realizes, through fatigue as real as the granite under and behind him, that he wants the president and guests today to be proud of the work done on Mount Rushmore.

  “Oh, that is so goddamned pathetic… ” begins Long Hair’s ghost.

  Paha Sapa ignores him. Borglum has begun speaking to the president and guests and has the red flag in his hand.

  The detonator boxes, chosen by Borglum himself, are made in Germany and are a little more complex than the old wire-it-up- and-push-down boxes that Paha Sapa used in the mines.

  First he takes the handle of the demo-charge detonator box and cranks it four times to the right, charging it. Then he clicks the handle to the left, releasing the plunger safety, and raises that plunger against considerable friction. It is ready to send the current to the detonators in each dynamite crate.

  Borglum is finishing his short talk about the combined use of explosives, drills, and chisels on the giant sculpture that is Mount Rushmore, emphasizing, as he always does, the sculptor’s tools that have, in truth, done less than 3 percent of the actual work of removing rock.

  Borglum turns his back on the president and the crowd and theatrically raises the red flag. Up on the ridge above the flag-covered Jefferson head, Borglum’s son, Lincoln, on the phone with someone down there, raises his own red-and-white flag.

  At the last second, Paha Sapa glances down to make sure it’s the five-stick demo-charge detonator box that he’s charged, and not the box linked by gray cables to twenty crates of dynamite. But his vision is foggy with fatigue and he has to look back through the binoculars quickly or miss the signal.

  Borglum drops the red flag with a dramatic flourish, as if he’s a flagman at the Indianapolis 500.

  Paha Sapa pushes the plunger all the way down.

  HE HAD NEVER FELT AS ANGRY as he did the day in May of 1917 when his son, Robert, told him that he had joined the United States Army and was prepared to go fight in Europe.

  Robert had graduated from his private Denver school in December of 1916 and spent the spring months living with his father in the shack in Keystone and then in Deadwood, finishing applications to various colleges and universities, and generally being lazy. Paha Sapa had disapproved when Robert had spent too much of his savings on the almost-new Harley-Davidson J. (A rich classmate of Robert’s in Denver had received the motorcycle as a graduation present and immediately smashed it up. Robert had purchased the broken 1916 machine for a few cents on the dollar, had shipped the pieces to his father’s address, and spent the majority of January through April happily rebuilding it.) Despite his original disapproval, Paha Sapa had pitched in to help Robert on Sundays and other odd hours when he wasn’t working in the Homestake Mine, and he had to admit to himself that he loved the quiet hours working next to his son in the shed they were using as a garage. It was the kind of mostly silent, mostly working separately, but strangely close activity that perhaps only fathers and sons could share. Paha Sapa thought of it often in the years to come.

  Robert’s grades—which Paha Sapa had always known were good but had little idea of how good—along with enthusiastic recommendations from relatively famous faculty there in Denver had, by April of 1917, earned the boy eight scholarship offers. In Robert’s usual inexplicable (to his father) way of doing things, he had made separate applications to the same colleges and universities under two names, both of them legally belonging to him due to the quirks of various state and federal registrations—Robert Slow Horse and Robert de Plachette. The latter applications had stressed his connection to his late mother and white grandfather, as if Robert were an orphan, and listed the Denver boarding school as his address for the past nine years. The former applications specified his living Lakota Sioux father and listed the Pine Ridge Reservation and Paha Sapa’s shack in Keystone as Robert’s former homes.

  By late April, Robert could inform his father that Robert de Plachette had not only been accepted by Princeton, Yale, and three other top Ivy League universities, he had received generous scholarship offers from those top schools. Robert Slow Horse, on the other hand, received scholarship offers from Dartmouth College, Oberlin College, and Black Hills State University in nearby Spearfish, South Dakota… the little town Silent Cal Coolidge’s liver-fed trout had come from.

  Paha Sapa was irritated at the games his son had been playing with something so vitally important as a college education, but he was also proud. Then he became irritated again when he heard that Robert, who had long stated his intention of going to school not only out of state but away from the West, was considering the lesser known of the schools that had accepted him.

  —Where are Dartmouth and Oberlin colleges, Robert? Why even consider them when Princeton and Yale have offered you scholarships?

  It was late at night and they were working on the final reconstruction touches to the Harley-Davidson J’s sidecar when this conversation came up. Robert had flashed that wide, slow grin that made him so popular with the girls.

  —Dartmouth’s in New Hampshire and Oberlin’s in Ohio, Father. Could you hand me that three-eighths socket wrench?

  —But what makes them contenders compared to the Ivy League schools?

  —Well, Dartmouth is Ivy League… sort of. Founded in seventeen sixty-nine, I think, with a royal charter from whichever governor was representing George the Third at the time, chartered with a mission to educate and Christianize Indians in the region.

  Paha Sapa had grunted and wiped sweat from his face, leaving a streak of grease on his cheek.

  —And how many… Indians… have they graduated since then?

  Robert’s smile was wide and bright under the hanging bare sixty-watt bulb.

  —Almost none. But I like their motto—“ Vox Clamantis in Deserto.”

  —“The Voice of the Climbing Flowering Plant in the Desert”?

  —Almost, Father. “The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness.” I can sort of relate to that.

  Paha Sapa had arched an eyebrow.

  —Oh? Do you consider your home here, the sacred Black Hills, a wilderness?

  Robert’s voice had turned quietly serious.

  —No. I love the Hills and want to come back here someday. But I think that the voice of our people crying out here has gone without answer for too long.

  Paha Sapa had stopped what he was working on and turned his head toward his son at the sound of that “our people”—he’d never heard that from Robert before—but his son was frowning at the bolt he was trying to tighten.

  Paha Sapa cleared his suddenly tight throat.

  —And what’s the appeal of the Ohio college… what’s the name… Oberlin? Do they have a catchy motto?

  —Probably, but I forget what it is. No, I just like Oberlin’s style, Father. They admitted Negroes in eighteen thirty-four or some year around there… and women before that. After the Civil War, Oberlin graduates led the way to go down and teach in the
Freedmen’s Bureau schools all over the South. Some of them were killed by night riders for doing it.

  —So you’re telling me that you want to go teach Negroes in the South? Do you have any idea how strong the reconstituted Ku Klux Klan is getting? Not just in the South but everywhere?

  —Yes, I’ve paid some attention to that. And no, I don’t want to teach—in the South or anywhere else.

  —What do you want to do, Robert?

  It was a question that had haunted Paha Sapa much more than had Custer’s ghost in recent years. His son was so bright, so good-looking, so personable, and such a fine student that—if he dropped the Indian last name that wasn’t really his father’s anyway—he could be anything: lawyer, doctor, scientist, mathematician, judge, businessman, politician. But Robert, who had always been curious about everything but who refused to focus on one single area of interest, seemed maddeningly indifferent to careers.

  —I don’t know, Father. I guess I’ll have to go to Dartmouth for a few years…. It’s liberal arts, so they don’t demand you decide on a major of study or career path right away. In truth, I want to be just like you when I grow up, but I don’t know how to do that.

  Paha Sapa had frowned and stared at the top of Robert’s lowered head until his son looked up.

  —Let’s be serious about this, Robert.

  Robert’s eyes—his mother’s eyes—were as darkly serious as Rain’s had been when she was saying something very important to Paha Sapa.

  —I am serious, Ate… Atewaye Ki. I want to become as good a man as you have always been. Mitakuye oyasin! All my relatives!

  So Robert had accepted the offer from Dartmouth in New Hampshire and had finished his motorcycle and gone on long rides down prairie dirt and gravel roads every day—and often in the moonlight—and then on April 6, one month and a day after his second inaugural, President Wilson, who had been reelected for promising to keep the United States out of the European war, went to Congress and asked for a declaration of war against the central powers of Germany, Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria.