Black Hills

by Simmons, Dan

  Come, wilt thou see me ride?

  And when I am a-horseback, I will swear

  I love thee infinitely. But hark you, Kate:

  I must not have you henceforth question me

  Whither I go, nor reason whereabout.

  Whither I must, I must, and to conclude,

  This evening must I leave you, gentle Kate.

  I know you wise, but yet no farther wise

  Than Harry Percy’s wife; constant you are,

  But yet a woman; and for secrecy,

  No lady closer, for I well believe

  Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know,

  And so far will I trust thee, gentle Kate.

  LADY PERCY

  How? So far?

  HOTSPUR

  Not an inch further. But hark you, Kate:

  Whither I go, thither shall you go too;

  Today will I set forth, tomorrow you.

  Will this content you, Kate?

  LADY PERCY

  It must of force.

  I remember it in such detail because I later read it in our newly acquired Compleat Shakespeare volumes at least half a hundred times. It did indeed sound like a cavalry officer speaking to his beloved but too-inquisitive wife. How many times had you and I had similar conversations, Libbie? Always with me promising that wherever I was to be sent, I would summon you and we would be together.

  You also laughed that day, I remember, at this Hotspur’s seeming similarity to me in the way he asked his officers for advice but then interrupted them, never listening. And Hotspur’s temper and reckless boldness, you said, reminded you so much of me that you were considering calling me “My darling Hotspur” rather than “Autie” in your love letters.

  But then Henry Percy, Hotspur, was cut down on the battlefield. (In single combat with that wastrel fop Prince Hal, which I did not believe for a moment.)

  And then that fat, drunken bag of cowardly guts Falstaff gave his idiotic soliloquy about honor being “only a word, that is, nothing” and went so far as to slice Hotspur’s corpse with his own sword and claim the victory over this fine warrior, lugging the body off stage. This dishonorable act, evidently much approved of both by Shakespeare and the crowd at the dress rehearsal that evening, so upset you and so angered me that we left early.

  But the next evening, during the rehearsal for Henry IV Part II, it was Lady Percy’s eulogy for her dead husband—the other kings and royals and knights seem almost to have forgotten him—that caused you to start weeping. We stayed for the end of that interminable play, but I’m sorry we did. I don’t think you ever forgot Lady Percy’s widow’s lament, and once, in the middle of the night, weeping hard even as I held you, you admitted that if anything ever happened to me, you would have to give the same speech, telling other members of the Seventh Cavalry and the ignorant public that your dead husband had been the miracle of men…

  … and by his light

  Did all the chivalry of England move

  To do brave acts. He was indeed the glass

  Wherein the noble youth did dress themselves….

  In diet, in affections of delight,

  In military rules, humors of blood,

  He was the mark and the glass, copy and book,

  That fashion’d others.

  I told you then, Libbie (I almost said “Kate” there), each time you sobbed in the night that I would do everything in my not-inconsiderable powers to keep you from becoming the widow who would have to read Lady Percy’s lines like that.

  But tonight (or today, there is only darkness here in this semiconscious state), I worry and wonder if I can keep that promise. I know that you would be a fierce and loyal widow, Libbie, always keeping my memory alive and defending my honor from those honorless rogues (Major Benteen?) who have always wanted and tried to sully my reputation.

  But I do not want you to be a widow, Libbie. I do not want to die.

  Oh, my darling, my dearest—I hold fast to the memories of you and of us, and I lie here and wait for the light. I know that you will be there when I awake. I know it as surely as I know our love.

  16

  The Six Grandfathers

  August 28, 1936

  PAHA SAPA STEPS OFF THE BOTTOM STEP OF THE 506 STEPS down from the summit of Mount Rushmore and feels a wave of absolute exhaustion roll over him. He has to step aside and grab the railing just to remain standing. The other workers, most of them thirty to forty years younger than he, bound and joke and leap their way off the staircase, roughhousing, slapping, and shouting their way to the parking lot.

  It is six p.m., and the direct sunlight has passed beyond the carved southern face of the mountain, but the waves of heat off the white granite hit Paha Sapa like a hot-knuckled fist. He has been up there all this long Friday, dangling from his cable and moving from site to site at the base of the three existing heads and the fourth field of white granite ready for carving the Roosevelt head, but only now does this absolute tsunami of fatigue and exhaustion strike him.

  It is the cancer, he knows. The increasing and encroaching pain has been a factor, but one he’s been ready for and can deal with. This sudden weakness… Well, he is seventy-one years old, but he has never been weak before. Never.

  Paha Sapa shakes his head to clear it, and sweat flies from his long, still-black braids.

  —Old Man!

  The August cicadas are loud and there is a buzzing in his ears, so at first Paha Sapa is not sure the cry is for him.

  —Old Man! Billy! Hey, Slovak!

  It is Mr. Borglum, standing between the hoist house and the path to the parking lot. Paha Sapa lets go of the railing and raises a weary hand. They meet in the clearing near where the shouting, laughing men are lining up to pick up their paychecks at the office.

  —You all right, Billy?

  —Sure.

  —You looked… well, I guess pale isn’t the right word… fagged out. I need to show you something up on the mountain. You ready to head back up?

  Paha Sapa turns his head toward the 506 steps of the stairway and wonders if he can climb them, even without his usual morning load of fifty or sixty pounds. His plan was to work all this Friday night to prepare and deliver the dynamite to a hiding place here—the site still to be determined—and then spend all of Saturday night placing the charges in time for President Roosevelt’s visit on Sunday. Now he wonders if he can even stagger up the stairs in this heat.

  Borglum touches his back but only briefly. Paha Sapa rarely sweats so that others can notice—it’s been a long, bad joke on the site—but today his work shirt is soaked through.

  —We’ll take the tram up.

  Paha Sapa nods and follows Borglum to the aerial tramway platform below the hoist house. Edwald Hayes is acting as hoist operator this Friday afternoon and touches his dusty cap as Mr. Borglum approaches.

  Paha Sapa hates the tramway but says nothing as he and Borglum squeeze themselves into the upright, small-outhouse-sized space and Borglum signs to Edwald to start the ride up.

  Paha Sapa knows that his fear of the tramway cage falling is foolish; he spends every day of his working life dangling from a one-eighth-inch steel cable, and the tram is suspended from huge pulleys running on a seven-eighths-inch cable stretched from the hoist house on Doane Mountain to the A-frame above the Roosevelt head thirteen hundred feet away and four hundred feet above the valley floor. The cage itself is propelled by a three-eighths-inch cable driven by a large drive wheel at the hoist house.

  But Paha Sapa—along with all the other men after the accident with the tram—knows that while that drive wheel is supposed to be fixed on its axle by a steel key, and both wheel hub and axle contain key seats for such a steel key, in truth the wheel has always been fastened by only a single setscrew driven through the hub and into the key seat of the axle itself. That setscrew worked itself loose at least once, breaking the hoist shaft and sending the cage whizzing unstoppedly down the long wire while plucking the entire A-frame and its platfor
m off the top of the mountain.

  Gutzon Borglum was scheduled to be in the tramway for that ride but arrived a few minutes late, so Edwald sent a load of water cans up instead. Those cans were thrown over two acres of Doane Mountain and smashed to bits. If Borglum had been on time, the Mount Rushmore project would, most likely, have been shut down after the death of its sculptor.

  Borglum shows no nervousness now as they rise higher and higher above the mountain, toward the basin between the three existing heads, rising directly toward the patch of smooth white granite that has been prepared for the Teddy Roosevelt head.

  There is no breeze. If anything, the heat up here is worse than down below, with the white rock on three sides of them focusing and radiating the stored heat from the day’s worth of blazing sunlight. The temperatures in Rapid City have broken all records; Paha Sapa guesses that it must be a hundred and twenty degrees or more here at the locus of all that white heat. He has been hanging and dangling and moving and drilling and working in it since seven a.m.

  Borglum waves to Edwald far below, and the tram cage stops suddenly, swinging sickeningly back and forth. Both men hang on to the chest-high edge of the wooden cage itself, and Borglum has his hand on the guide wire. Now the sculptor reaches up and cranks down the emergency brake that Julian Spotts, the most recent bureaucrat to be put “in charge” of the project (Mr. Borglum is, always, the man really in charge), ordered added to the tramway system after another brake failure had sent some men hurtling to the bottom.

  They are very high: past Washington, even with Jefferson’s eye, looking across the rough mass of rock that delineates Abraham Lincoln’s shock of hair from his forehead. The Theodore Roosevelt head has not been begun yet and is present only as a near-vertical swath of blindingly white granite awaiting the last careful blasts and then the carvers.

  The tramcar quits swaying. Both men lean on the northwest side of the cage, looking down at the white granite.

  To say that no work has been done on the Roosevelt head would be a lie. Over the past year, especially the productive four months of summer, Borglum has penetrated and had Paha Sapa blast away more than eighty feet of the original gray, wrinkled, rotten granite here on the south face of the Six Grandfathers. During all that blasting and carving away, only Borglum was confident that they would find carvable stone beneath the rotten rock. But they did, finally, and enough… barely… to carve the Roosevelt head.

  If there are no mistakes.

  The problem is that there is only so much rock left, and they have used most of it up. To any observer on Doane Mountain or in the valley below the heads, Mount Rushmore looks like a deep, solid mountain—one could imagine walking out onto the summit from the forest and mountaintop behind it—but that continuity is an illusion, as Paha Sapa knows from his hanblečeya there exactly sixty years ago to this day.

  Behind the north face of the Six Grandfathers, behind the three presidents’ heads now emerging from the granite and the fourth head ready to be carved, there is a long and deep canyon. This split in the rock begins just north of the Lincoln head and runs southwest behind the heads for about 350 feet.

  The first three heads, already emerged from stone, had adequate rock behind them. The Teddy Roosevelt head, set so far back and near the hidden vertical cliff of this hidden canyon, has only thirty feet of rock left from which to carve this last president. Another ten feet of looking for carvable rock after the eighty feet he blasted away, Paha Sapa knows, and they would have had to give up on Roosevelt; there simply would not have been enough good rock there to work with.

  Borglum takes off his white Stetson, mops his brow with the red handkerchief from his back pocket, and clears his throat.

  —We’re within five feet of the nose, Billy.

  —Yes.

  The heat from the white granite is palpable. Sickening. Paha Sapa tries to blink away the black spots swarming in his vision.

  —I’ve scheduled you to work both tomorrow and Sunday in preparation for the president’s visit.

  —Yes.

  —There will be a lot of VIPs down there besides Roosevelt. Senator Norbeck’ll be here—I don’t know how he’s lasted this long with that jaw cancer of his. Governor Berry, of course. Tom wouldn’t miss rubbing up against a president, even if the president is a New Deal Democrat. A bunch of others, including Doane Robinson and Mary Ellis.

  Mary Ellis is Gutzon Borglum’s daughter. Paha Sapa nods.

  —So I want the demonstration blast to go off really smooth, Billy. Really smooth. Five charges. I figure beneath the fresh granite here, cheating a little toward Lincoln so it’ll be more visible. Who would you like to do the drilling for you tomorrow? Merle Peterson? Palooka?

  Paha Sapa rubs his jaw. Sensation there and everywhere is muted because of the pain throughout his body.

  —Yes, Payne would be good. He knows what I want for the charges even before I say it.

  Paha Sapa and Jack “Palooka” Payne have been working together almost every day of the blazing summer on both the Lincoln head and the granite field being readied for Teddy Roosevelt.

  Borglum nods.

  —I’ll tell Lincoln to assign Palooka to you tomorrow. Anything else you need? I do want this demonstration blast to go smoothly.

  Paha Sapa looks Borglum in the eye. The intelligence and determination he sees looking back is—has always been—almost frightening. Is frightening to most people.

  —Well, Mr. Borglum, this is the president of the United States.

  Borglum scowls. His displeasure at the reminder rolls off him in a wave that is as palpable as the late-August heat.

  —Damn it, Billy, I know that. What’s your point?

  —My point is that the president is usually met with a twenty-one-gun salute. Isn’t that the protocol?

  Borglum grunts.

  —Anyway, it wouldn’t take that much more effort for me tomorrow, especially if I have Palooka and Merle as drillers, to rig twenty-one charges from just to the left of Washington’s lapel all the way around to where we’ll be blasting Lincoln’s chin out someday. And I could rig them in a series, so everyone could tell there were twenty-one separate blasts.

  Borglum seems lost in thought for a minute.

  —They’d have to be fairly small charges, Billy. I don’t want to blow Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s eardrums out. I like the New Deal.

  Paha Sapa knows that he should smile at this, but he’s too tired. And too much is riding on Borglum’s answer.

  —Small charges, sir. Except for beneath TR and below Lincoln, where we do have to move some real rock. But they’ll sound the same. And I’ll pack enough loose rock around the charges that there’ll be plenty of dust and rock fall…. The civilians always love that during a demonstration.

  Borglum considers for only a second longer.

  —All right, a twenty-one-blast salute it is, then. Good idea. But don’t kill yourself—or Palooka and Merle—tomorrow getting the blast holes ready. This damned heat… Well, do your best.

  Borglum squints up to where the sun is disappearing beyond Washington’s head.

  —I’ve told Roosevelt’s people that he has to be here by noon. If he’s not here by noon, I’ll do the unveiling of Jefferson without him.

  —Why’s that, Mr. Borglum?

  Borglum turns his fiercest countenance toward Paha Sapa.

  —The shadows, of course. Any later than noon, and the features of the three heads will become somewhat obscured. Roosevelt has to see Jefferson and the others at their best. I told his people—damned bureaucrats—that if the president isn’t here for the ceremony’s beginning at eleven thirty, the president can go fuck himself.

  Paha Sapa only nods. After five years with Borglum, he is not surprised or appalled that the sculptor thinks he can boss around the president of the United States. He also knows that Borglum will wait until dusk if he has to. In the end, Gutzon Borglum needs the patronage of the rich and powerful, and he does what he has to in order to get it
.

  As if to refute this thought, Borglum almost growls his next statement.

  —Billy, let’s skip that twenty-one-blast-salute idea. FDR’s president, and I’m all for the New Deal, but five charges should serve. If they go off at once, no one can tell the difference.

  —Yes, sir. Can I still have Palooka as my driller?

  Borglum grunts assent and leans on the latched door of the cage, looking across and down at the white slope that will be Teddy Roosevelt. The air still ripples with heat.

  —Old Man, you can see Teddy Roosevelt’s head there, can’t you?

  —Yes.

  —You know, Billy, you’re the only one on this project, other than me, who can see the full head while it’s still in the rock. Even my son… Lincoln… has to go refer to the new version of the models to understand just what we’ll be doing, just what Theodore Roosevelt will look like when he comes out. But you, Billy, you have always seen the figures in the stone. I know you have. It’s a little uncanny.

  Of course he can see it. Of course he always has been able. Didn’t he watch that fourth head and the three others—and their giant bodies—rising out of this soil and mountain like newborn giants clawing and chewing through their cauls sixty years ago? And, he realizes now, not for the first time, he has been one of the midwives for this unholy birth. By his own count, Paha Sapa has been personally responsible for blasting away more than 15,000 tons of rock from the side of the Six Grandfathers this shortened year alone. His own rough calculations have told him that in his five years here as powderman, Paha Sapa has moved and removed more than five hundred million pounds of stone—a good portion of the more than eight hundred million pounds of moved rock that the project will probably require before it is finished, including that which was moved before he came on the job—and every pound he has helped remove, every ounce, has felt to Paha Sapa exactly like carving into and removing the flesh of a living relative.