Black Hills

by Simmons, Dan

  That is funny, in a way, since most wasichu whom Paha Sapa has spoken with about the night sky in his seventy-one years, including Rain and her father, seem to think that one can see millions of individual stars in the night sky on a perfect, dark viewing night. But the Ikče Wičaśa knew that there are only about three thousand stars visible even on the clearest, darkest night. They knew because they had counted them.

  Once, when Robert was very young, perhaps during that first camping trip to Bear Butte when they had let the fire die down to embers shedding almost no light and were lying back watching the stars, Paha Sapa asked his son to guess how many stars the full moon was hiding behind itself, on average, as it moved across the sky through the night. Robert guessed six. Paha Sapa explained that, on average, the full moon blocked no stars, and not just because its light made the stars fade from view. He remembers Robert’s little gasp from where he lay on his blanket that night and the five-year-old voice.

  —Gosh, Father, it’s really empty up there, isn’t it?

  Yes, thinks Paha Sapa now, it is.

  HE AND RAIN never had a real honeymoon.

  They were married at her father’s new mission church on the Pine Ridge Agency—already being called the Pine Ridge Reservation—that vast expanse of arid land and windblown dust east of the Black Hills in the southwest corner of what became the state of South Dakota. In the wet spring of 1894, Paha Sapa and a few Sioux friends—but mostly Paha Sapa—built the tiny wood-frame, four-room house that he and Mrs. Rain de Plachette Slow Horse moved into immediately following the ceremony in mid-June of that year. That time was warm in Paha Sapa’s memory, but it had been busy and cold and wet—the roof leaked terribly—in that strange June when summer just refused to come to the Plains. Billy was not working on the reservation where Rain was a teacher in the mission school and their little house was just over the rise from where her father’s larger home and the mission church sat at the crossroads of four wagon ruts; Billy, like many of the Natural Free Human Beings who’d come to Pine Ridge after the death of Sitting Bull and the slaughter at Chankpe Opi Wakpala, lived on the reservation but did day work as a hired hand and wrangler (although he was never good at cowboying) at various wasichus’ ranches in the richer grazing country north of Agency land.

  Most mornings, even during their “honeymoon,” Paha Sapa had to be up and out and dressed and saddled up and off for the long ride to some neighboring white man’s ranch by no later than 4:30.

  Rain never complained. (Thinking about it later, he could not remember a time when Rain ever complained.) She always insisted on getting up in the dark with him to make his coffee and a good breakfast, then make a solid lunch that he could take with him in the battered old gray lunch pail that he still used. It was usually something better than sandwiches, but when it was a sandwich, she always took a tiny bite out of one corner of the bread. It was her way of sending her love to him in the middle of the day. For more than three decades after she died, Paha Sapa would check the corner of any sandwich he was eating that day, just out of the echo-habit of that short time when he was loved.

  Rain and Paha Sapa were both virgins when they consummated their marriage in that leaky small house on the Pine Ridge Reservation. This did not surprise Paha Sapa, but much later, when they shyly spoke of it, Rain confessed that it had surprised her that Paha Sapa, who was twenty-nine when they were wed, had not “had more experience.”

  This was not a complaint. The two lovers learned together and taught each other.

  Paha Sapa’s only regret was that he had Crazy Horse’s memories and Long Hair’s pornographic monologues in his head when he finally carried his own bride to their marriage bed. Of the two men whose memories Paha Sapa reluctantly carried with him, Crazy Horse had been the gentler lover—when his couplings had not been merely to satisfy a hunger—and the dead warrior’s illicit relationship with Red Cloud’s niece Black Buffalo Woman (who was married to No Water at the time, even while Crazy Horse was technically, although not in reality, bonded with the sickly woman Black Shawl in an arranged marriage) showed moments of true tenderness. Even Long Hair’s explicit recollections, once Paha Sapa had the bad luck to learn English and knew what the ghost was babbling on about, were merely examples of that most secret place of all in a human being’s life—the privacy of intimacy. Through the unwanted words and images, Paha Sapa could sense Custer’s real and abiding love for his lovely young wife and the couple’s sincere surprise at the sexual energy that Libbie had brought to the marriage.

  Still, Paha Sapa wanted no one else’s sexual histories mixed with his own gentle memories and thoughts and he succeeded fairly well in mentally walling off those recollections of Crazy Horse and in ignoring the middle-of-the-night babblings of Long Hair’s ghost.

  So their spring 1898 trip to the Black Hills was Rain’s and Paha Sapa’s first time away from the reservation together, except for the nightmare weeks the previous autumn when he took Rain to Chicago for the terrible surgery.

  That train trip to Chicago—the Reverend Henry de Plachette accompanying them, since the surgeon was his trusted friend—and the surgery had taken place not long after Rain discovered the lump in her right breast. (In truth known only to the two of them, it had been Paha Sapa who discovered it, when he was kissing his darling.)

  Dr. Compton had strongly recommended removing both breasts, as was the custom at the time, even though no tumor was detectable by touch in Rain’s left breast, but—defying both her father’s and her husband’s advice (for the first time)—Rain had refused. The couple had been married almost four years at this point and still no pregnancy, but Rain was determined that there would be a child someday. I can nurse the baby with the remaining breast, she had whispered to Paha Sapa minutes before they took her away to chloroform her. The remaining one will be closest to my heart.

  The surgery seemed successful, all of the tumor was removed and no other cancer was found, but the operation took a terrible toll on Rain. She was too weak to travel. When it was certain that his daughter would recover, Reverend de Plachette returned to his church and flock at Pine Ridge, but Paha Sapa stayed another four weeks with his darling in that little boardinghouse near the hospital in Chicago.

  The Lakota name for Chicago had long been Sotoju Otun Wake, which meant, more or less, “Smoky City,” but Paha Sapa had wondered if it had ever been as dark, smoky, sooty, black, and windy as during those endless November and December weeks he spent there with his beloved. The view out the window next to their bed in the boardinghouse was of warehouses and a huge switching yard where trains screamed and rumbled and backed day and night. The stockyards were close, and the stench aggravated the constant nausea caused by Rain’s medicine. Paha Sapa, refusing Rain’s father’s offer to pay for everything (the minister was suffering hard times after a lifetime of relative wealth), had borrowed money, an advance on his wages, from the white rancher Scott James Donovan, just to pay the room and board. He would be paying the medical bills for the next twenty-three years of his life.

  And so it was that when they arrived home at the Agency on Christmas Day 1897, the train being delayed a day while a plow train cut a way through twenty-foot-high drifts southwest of Pierre, even the Pine Ridge barrens and their tiny home looked beautiful in the white snow under blue western sky. Rain vowed that this was a new start for her and for them and that she would not allow the cancer to return. (A year earlier she might have said, Paha Sapa later thought, that God would not allow it, but he’d watched his bride become more thoughtful about such things. She continued being the only teacher at the missionary school, she led the choir every Sunday, she taught Sunday school to the Indian children, and she had not objected or interfered when her father had asked Paha Sapa to be baptized before he could sanction their marriage. Rain still read the Bible every day. But Paha Sapa had silently watched some aspect of faith—at least the specific Episcopal faith of her father—slowly seep out of his wife, rather like the energy she never fully rec
overed after the surgery.)

  But her happiness and high spirits did return. By spring of 1898, her light, quick laughter filled the house and Paha Sapa’s soul again. They made plans for building another room on the house the following summer after Paha Sapa finished paying back rancher Donovan. In April, smiling more broadly than Paha Sapa had ever seen her smile except on their wedding day, Rain announced that she was pregnant.

  The late-May trip to the Black Hills came about by accident.

  For his own reasons, the rancher, Donovan, had to lay off some of his hands for two months. Paha Sapa had found no other work for that time and was just helping Reverend de Plachette with repairs around the church and school and the old house everyone called the rectory. School was out—it always dismissed by the third week in May, since the families needed the children to work, plant, and herd on their tiny plots of land. Rain’s father had to return to Boston to deal with things after the death of his older brother there. Reverend de Plachette would be gone for at least a month and perhaps longer.

  It was Rain who suggested that she and Paha Sapa take the church buckboard and mules and some camping equipment and go see the Black Hills. Living so near them now for four years, she had never really seen them. Her father had said that they could use the buckboard and mules. She was getting food ready for the trip even as she suggested the idea.

  Absolutely not, Paha Sapa had said. He would not consider it. She was three months pregnant. They could not possibly take the chance.

  What chance? insisted Rain. No more than if she stayed on the Agency. Her workload here, fetching the water and chopping wood all day and handling the work at the school and church, represented much more serious hard labor than a restful ride to the Hills. Besides, if there was a problem, they’d be closer to towns and doctors in the Black Hills than they were there at Pine Ridge. Also, her morning sickness had all but ended and she felt strong as an ox. If the mules didn’t want to pull the buckboard up into the Hills, she would… and still consider it a vacation.

  No, said Paha Sapa. Absolutely not. The roads were terrible, the buckboard old, all the riding and jolting and…

  Rain reminded him that while he was off working at the Donovan ranch, she was driving that same buckboard twenty miles and more some days, making her deliveries to the sick and shut-ins on the rez. Wouldn’t it be better if he were with her and if the next trip in the buckboard was a pleasure trip rather than just more work?

  Absolutely not, said Paha Sapa. I won’t hear of it. I have spoken.

  They left on a Monday morning and by evening were in the south end of the Black Hills. Paha Sapa had bartered an old single-shot rifle that he rarely used (he kept the Colt revolver) with a Seventh Cavalry sergeant for an army tent, two cots, and other camping materials that took up two-thirds of the space in the back of the buckboard. Spring had come earlier than usual this year, and the fields were bright with wildflowers. The first night was so warm that they didn’t even set up the tent; they slept in the back of the wagon with so many comforters and mattresses under them that they lay higher than the sidewalls of the buckboard. Paha Sapa pointed out the important stars and explained to his bride that there were about three thousand stars visible up there on this perfect viewing night.

  She whispered—

  —I would have guessed millions. I’ll have to tell the students next fall.

  On the second day they followed a wide and usually empty new road up into the south edge of the Black Hills proper—the hills there were gentle, rolling, and rich with high grasses, the trees clustered near the tops of these knolls—and in the midst of the seemingly endless waves of low hills, he showed her where Washu Niya, “the Breathing Cave,” lay in a hidden and wooded little canyon. Unfortunately, a homesteading wasichu family, who’d gotten the land for free, had boarded up the entrance to the cave and locked the door and were charging fees for those tourists who wanted to see it. Paha Sapa could not imagine paying money to go into Washu Niya so they continued traveling north.

  The new town of Custer, set in a broad valley, was mostly saloons, blacksmith shops, liveries, and whorehouses (with crib doxies in their tents for the miners who had little money), but they camped on a high grassy hill outside of town and went in for food and a sarsaparilla at a soda fountain with a striped red-and-white awning.

  The third day, they entered the heart of the Black Hills, their two patient Christian mules pulling the loaded buckboard up steep, rutted paths used by the mining companies and mule skinners. The route of the Denver–Deadwood stagecoach was to their west. Their own mules, slow and thoughtful as they were, learned to scamper the buckboard out of the way when a heavy freight wagon came barreling down the muddy track toward them.

  In some of the broad, grassy valleys before they got into the higher country, Paha Sapa showed Rain the ruts and gouges from Custer’s “scientific expedition” into the previously unmapped Black Hills in 1874, two years before Long Hair’s death.

  Rain was shocked.

  —Those marks look like an army came through this valley last week! How many scientists did Custer take with him on this expedition?

  Paha Sapa told her.

  Ten companies of the Seventh Cavalry, two companies of infantry, two Gatling guns pulled by mules, a three-inch artillery piece, more than two dozen Indian scouts (none of whom were really familiar with the Black Hills), gangs of civilian teamsters—some of the bearded, wild-eyed men driving their freight wagons past them that day might have first come with Custer—as well as white guides (but not Buffalo Bill Cody this time), interpreters in half a dozen Indian languages, photographers, and a sixteen-piece all-German band that played Custer’s favorite tune, “Garry Owen,” from one end of the Hills to the other. In all, Custer’s 1874 “scientific expedition” had been composed of more than a thousand men—including President Grant’s son Fred, who was drunk most of the time and whom Custer ordered to be put under arrest once for disorderly conduct—all traveling in 110 six-mule-team Studebaker wagons of the sort still being used in Custer City and Deadwood.

  As Rain stared, Paha Sapa added—

  —Oh, yes… and some three hundred beef cattle, brought down from Fort Abraham Lincoln in North Dakota, so that the men could have their steaks every night.

  —Were there any… scientists?

  —A few. But it was the two miners they brought along—Ross and McKay I think their names were—who served the purpose of the so-called expedition. They were looking for gold. And they found it. The Fat Takers began pouring into the Black Hills as soon as word got out, and word was out before Custer’s expedition had left.

  —But hadn’t the government given the Black Hills to your people—our people—just a few years before this? At Fort Laramie in eighteen sixty-eight? And signed a treaty to that effect? And promised to keep whites out of the Black Hills forever?

  Paha Sapa smiled and slapped the reins against the mules’ backsides.

  The narrow, new dirt road ran up through the beautiful Needles rock formations (which, more than twenty-five years later, would inspire historian-poet Doane Robinson to go looking for a sculptor) and then into narrower valleys filled with flowers and aspen and birch stretching between high, gray granite peaks. In the evening, Paha Sapa remembered a good camping spot near a stream and pulled the buckboard into the high grass and drove it half a mile from the road into an aspen grove where new green leaves were already quaking in the mild May breeze.

  The dinners Rain cooked during their camping trip were excellent, better than any fare Paha Sapa had eaten around a campfire since he was a boy. And the camps were comfortable thanks to the Seventh Cavalry cots and camp chairs and folding tables.

  The sun had set, the long May twilight was lingering, and the quarter moon had just risen above the high peak to their east when Rain set down her metal coffee cup.

  —Is that music I hear?

  It was. Paha Sapa slipped his camp knife into his belt, took Rain’s hand, and they walked through
the aspen forest and moon shadows up a small saddle, then down through the pine trees on the other side. When they came out through the lodgepole pines and into a scattering of aspen again, both stopped. Rain put her hands to her cheeks.

  —Good heavens!

  Below them was a lovely lake—large for the Black Hills—that had not been there before. Paha Sapa had heard about this from other men on the ranch but hadn’t known exactly where it was located. In 1891, they’d dammed up the stream at the west end of this valley where needle-type vertical boulders rose shoulder to shoulder and named the new body of water Custer Lake. (Years later, it would be renamed Sylvan Lake.) Three years ago, in 1895, they’d built a hotel right next to the water and adjacent to the invisible dam, near the high boulders on the far west end of the lake.

  Paha Sapa put his hand on Rain’s shoulder.

  An orchestra was playing on the broad stone-and-wood patio next to the water. Parts of the path circling the lake had been covered in fine white gravel that now gleamed in the starlight and moonlight. Festooned along the porch of the hotel, the patio, and in the trees across the lake were countless glowing Chinese lanterns. Couples in formal dress danced to the orchestra’s lively beat. Others strolled on a wide lawn or up the gleaming white path or out onto the lantern-lit pier, from which canoes, paddleboats, and other little boats, many with white lanterns hanging from their sterns, held couples where the men were paddling and rowing and the women were lifting their wineglasses.

  Paha Sapa felt as one does in certain dreams in which you visit your old home and find it totally different, changed, not the way it could possibly be in your world.

  And even as he felt that, there came a stronger emotion, as strong as scalding water in his lungs.

  Paha Sapa looked at the laughing, dancing, strolling wasichu couples, some of the men in tuxedos, the women in long, flowing dresses, the lamplight gleaming on their decolletages, looked at the hotel with its expensive rooms looking out over the moonlit lake and with its dining room where waiters glided like ghosts bringing fine meals to the well-dressed laughing men and women, the white husbands and wives, and he realized with a sick turning in his soul that this is what his beautiful wife, his beautiful young mostly white wife, daughter of a famed minister who had written four books on theology, experienced traveler to Europe and the great cities of America before she was twenty… this is what Rain de Plachette should have had, deserved to have had, would have had if only she had not…