Black Hills

Chapter 11 On the Six Grandfathers

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT IS DEFINITELY COMING TO THE BLACK Hills.

Word on the cliff face and on the faces themselves is that the president has given in to Borglum’s endless pleadings and will include in his busy South Dakota itinerary a formal dedication of the Thomas Jefferson head, probably on Sunday, August 30.

Less than a week’s time, thinks Paha Sapa. He can be ready by then.

Work on Mount Rushmore continues at the fastest pace in the project’s history despite the fact that this summer of 1936 is the hottest in the wasichus’ own recorded history.

Every day this summer, Paha Sapa listens to the other men talking about the temperature and about the forest fires to the north and about the Dust Bowl to the south. Average temperatures in July registered a full ten degrees above normal and August has been worse. Out on the plains where Rapid City swelters, midday temperatures hover around 110 and have touched 115 at least once. For Paha Sapa and the others working on the Rushmore cliff face, it is like being in a giant white bowl that focuses the sun’s rays. Not only does a worker’s back blister from the sun, but the heat and light reflected from the increasingly white layers of granite strike them like some sort of focused heat ray out of a science-fiction magazine.

All this August, the stone has been too hot to touch with ungloved hands for the long daylight hours. Paha Sapa’s and the other powdermen’s placement of the dynamite has been riskier than ever, with even the new sticks and blasting caps less stable in the searing, focused heat, and the rock itself threatening to ignite any one of the hundreds of shortened and fused sticks as they are tamped into place. On some days this August, despite his overpowering rush to finish the Jefferson head, Borglum has ordered the men off the cliff face for hours at a time, at least until lengthening shadows offer some relief from the heat.

Dehydration is the serious threat. Paha Sapa’s presumably cancer-ridden body feels it constantly, but now all the men are fearful of it. Borglum has set some men dangling full-time in their bosun’s chairs just to keep delivering water to the men working on the drilling and polishing, but it seems that no matter how many times a man drinks, his body always craves more. Paha Sapa has never seen the workers as tired as these slouching, shuffling, dust-coated figures coming down the 506 wooden steps each evening. Even the youngest, strongest men shuffle like the red-eyed, white-coated walking dead they are by the end of the workday up here.

With less than a week to go before President Roosevelt arrives, Paha Sapa spends his hours crimping and placing dynamite thinking about how to deliver the ton or more of explosives he will need next Sunday to bring down all three of the presidents’ heads in front of the horrified crowd (but not, he will take measures, down on them). But his epiphany on that matter the previous week makes Paha Sapa smile; all this time he’s been thinking about the problem as if he were planting the charges in their predrilled holes—hundreds upon hundreds of them for a blast this large—requiring weeks or months of drilling, if nothing else. But this will be no careful, business-as-usual carving of the Monument; this is the destruction of it. There will be no follow-up polishing charges or drilling or buffing, only ragged stone left—blasted away to the bedrock so that Borglum (or anyone) can never carve out sculptures here again. Paha Sapa smiles again at his own stupidity, bred by too many years working here as a faithful, skilled employee.

All he has to do by next Sunday is hide, in carefully placed and covered positions on and around all three heads, about twenty of the larger crates of dynamite he has hidden in his hovel in Keystone. Oneelectric blasting cap and wire will do for each of the crates. If he prepositions the crates, he will be able to get them up the mountain and hide them and arm them on Saturday night—the flurry of work and activity on Friday and Saturday will be mostly cosmetic, buffing up the stone, especially on Jefferson’s head, and arranging the flag with which Borglum plans to cover the head until the unveiling.

Paha Sapa shakes his head with the simplicity of the solution and his own opacity at not seeing it months—years—earlier. He can blame it now on the rare morphine injections he’s begun to give himself so that he can continue working.

Six more days? Can his five years on the hill, those thousands of days, come down to six more days?

Paha Sapa will not see the aftermath—he plans to go out with the heads in the mighty blast that will be the headline in every newspaper and on every radio broadcast and movie newsreel for weeks—but he knows he will be seen as a villain. For a while he will replace the infamous Bruno Hauptmann, or perhaps that rising new German villain Adolf Hitler, as “Americans’ most hated man.”

Roosevelt, Paha Sapa has heard, is coming to South Dakota and the West purely for political reasons. (Do presidents and other politicians, Paha Sapa wonders, ever do anything for any reason other than political?)

South Dakota had been a Republican state since time immemorial, since bison and those red savages were the only (nonvoting) citizens there, but Roosevelt carried it in 1932 and has no intention of allowing it to go back into the Republican column in the 1936 election, now just two months and a dusty handful of days away. More than merely wooing South Dakotans amid the Depression and the forest fires and the record heat, this will be billed as the jaunty president’s “Dust Bowl tour”—Roosevelt’s first effort to get out and see the havoc that the increasingly perverse climate is wreaking on a huge swath of the nation he rules from Washington and shady Hyde Park—although, Paha Sapa knows, the president’s destinations of Rapid City and Mount Rushmore are many hundreds of miles north of the northern boundaries of the actual, physical Dust Bowl.

While Paha Sapa cuts dynamite sticks into workable lengths—no gloves today for the fine work, so he will have a headache tonight—and prepares the fuses and blasting caps, he remembers his encounter with this so-called Dust Bowl.

BY SPRING OF THE PREVIOUS YEAR, 1935, work on the Monument was shutting down periodically for lack of funding. These funding gaps, often as imagined as real, and the brief work stoppages that came from them were a regular feature of work on Mount Rushmore, and the men were used to them, but this pause in the spring of ’35 was more about Gutzon Borglum’s battles with John Boland (Borglum’s theoretical boss on the commission that oversaw the Rushmore carving) and Senator Peter Norbeck (the greatest supporter that the Monument ever had).

Borglum had never been able to tolerate “supervision” and he was poisoning his own nest that spring with his attacks on Boland, Norbeck, and his other most loyal supporters. So for a few days before Palm Sunday, 1935, Paha Sapa and the other men had neither work on the cliff nor pay coming in.

Then Borglum called Paha Sapa in to inform him that he and Borglum’s son, Lincoln, and two other men would be driving to southern Colorado to pick up two submarine engines.

Paha Sapa had heard about the engines.

The compressors, drills, twenty-some jackhammers, winches, tramway, and other machinery on the mountain needed a tremendous amount of steam and electrical energy, and Borglum had “upgraded” the old powerhouse several times, first moving it from its original location in nearby Keystone to the valley here and then increasing the size of the steam boilers and electrical generators. But, in Borglum’s view, there was never enough power, and recently the sculptor had accused commission member John Boland of shutting down the Insull Plant in Keystone not because it was worn out, as Boland had claimed, but for reasons of private profit.

Senator Norbeck informed Borglum that these sorts of wild attacks on Boland would get the entire project canceled, but Borglum persisted in both his attacks on Boland’s reasons for shutting down the original powerhouse and his lobbying for larger engines, turbines, and generators in the new plant.

The response in the winter of 1934 was that the navy would donate two used but still-functioning diesel engines from a submarine they were decommissioning.

—Probably two pieces of prehistorical junk left over from the Great War!

Borglum had thrown the letter across the room.

Whatever shape the diesels were in, the War Department promptly shipped them to the wrong place. Rather than getting them to Mount Rushmore or to Keystone or to Rapid City, the navy sent them by rail to the Ryan-Rushmore Electrical Works at the Colorado Steel plant in Pueblo, Colorado. And there, on a siding, the two giant banks of engines had sat under a tarp for two months. The Navy and the War Department acknowledged their small error but said that it was Borglum’s problem to get the monstrous things from southern Colorado to South Dakota.

Borglum seemed as distracted and angry as ever when he called Paha Sapa into his office at the studio on April 10.

—Billy, Lincoln’s going to take you and Red Anderson and Hoot Lynch down to Colorado in the pickup truck and the big flatbed Dodge we have on loan from Howdy Peterson’s cousin’s construction company. You’re going to bring back those damned submarine engines.

—OK, Boss. Do we get paid for the trip?

Borglum only stared at him with his most evil eye.

Paha Sapa started over.

—I don’t know how much a submarine engine weighs, Mr. Borglum, but I know we’ll need a crane to get them onto that Dodge’s flatbed. And odds are low to none that the Dodge’s suspension will handle a load that heavy all the way back from Colorado.

Borglum merely coughed his dismissal of that worry.

—The diesel monsters are at a steel plant, Old Man. They’ll have a crane, a ramp, whatever you need to load the things. Lincoln will take care of everything. He’ll have some walking-around money for you and Red and Hoot during the trip. Consider it your vacation for this year. If you leave in the next hour, the four of you can get down into Nebraska tonight before it gets too dark.

Paha Sapa had nodded and gone to find the other three.

They did get into Nebraska that evening, the two vehicles driving due south. Lincoln Borglum led in the Ford pickup truck, Hoot Lynch and Red Anderson both crowded into the passenger side. The two were close friends and disliked missing conversations and neither liked Paha Sapa all that much.

Paha Sapa didn’t mind driving alone, he preferred it actually, but the 1928 Dodge truck with its bug eyes and floating fenders and extended flatbed was a pure pig to drive. The whole vehicle was a dinosaur from earlier design days, including an opening slab of windshield that had to be battened down with brass clamps. The clamps were gone, the windshield never completely closed, and the result was that if they were lucky enough to find a patch of highway where they could drive thirty miles per hour, the cold air poured in over Paha Sapa. He was wearing his son’s leather motorcycle jacket and his heaviest gloves, but his fingers were numb after just the first twenty-five miles, and the big truck steered so poorly that his arms ached abysmally from the exertion by the end of that first afternoon and evening.

Paha Sapa didn’t mind the pain. It distracted him from the worse pain lower down.

They didn’t drive very long after dark, since dust was blowing up with the Nebraska wind and Borglum had told his son not to drive at night if the dust storms were obscuring vision. They got permission to camp in a farmer’s field that first night, hunkering the trucks down behind a lone line of pine trees put there a generation earlier to serve as a windbreak. They’d stopped by Halley’s Store in Keystone—the better of the two general stores there (Paha Sapa always expected Art Lyndoe’s store to go out of business, it extended so much credit to the miners and other locals)—and picked up some bread and bologna and canned goods for the trip.

There was no extra wood for a campfire, so they heated their pork and beans over cans of Sterno. It was a poor substitute for a real campfire, but they huddled in their sleeping bags—Paha Sapa had only two blankets—and tried to talk a few minutes before turning in to sleep at seven p.m.

With the wind and light dust storm, the talk invariably turned to the endless drought and the weather. Both of the Dakotas had seen their share of blowing dirt—just the year before, in ’34, Mount Rushmore and the Rapid City area had had two days of darkness as uncounted tons of topsoil blew high over them in the jet stream, darkening the sun, that “duster” finally reaching New York City and the Atlantic Ocean—but it was Nebraska and states south that were really drying up and blowing away. At least South Dakota still had grass on its prairie.

Red Anderson cleared his throat.

—I was talking to a CCC boss who says that President Roosevelt’s got men out traveling all over the world hunting for the right kind of pine or fir tree. Roosevelt’s got experts advising him that they could build a huge windbreak, just like this’n, only stretching from Mexico to Canada, and the farmers could huddle in its lee, like.

Lincoln Borglum and Hoot chuckled at the image. Red frowned at them.

—I’m serious. He really said it.

Lincoln nodded.

—And I bet they are considering such a windbreak, although where on earth they’ll find a pine tree that can put up with this heat and these droughts, all the way down through Texas, I have no idea. And I heard from another CCC boss that the president was also being advised by his so-called experts to just save the expense and evacuate the south of Nebraska, major parts of Kansas, most of Oklahoma, east Colorado, and all of the Texas Panhandle down to Lubbock… just let the plowed-up topsoil blow away and hope the grasses come back in a generation or two.

Hoot Lynch snorted as he scooped up the last of his beans.

—Well, that’s one shit-poor idea, if you ask me.

Red shot his pal a glance, and Hoot sort of bobbed his head in the direction of Borglum’s son.

—Sorry, didn’t mean to… I mean…

Lincoln Borglum grinned.

—I don’t mind a little cussin’, Hoot. If it doesn’t get in the way of things. I’m not a Mormon.

The other two men laughed at that, and Paha Sapa found himself holding back a smile. He knew that Lincoln’s father, Gutzon Borglum, had been a Mormon—his parents Mormon, his father with two wives—and that the woman Borglum listed as his mother was actually his father’s second wife, and his real mother had left the family after they’d moved due to persecution of the Mormons.

Paha Sapa knew this because he had had a confused glut of Gutzon Borglum’s memories, including the direst secrets, in his mind since that day in the Homestake Mine in 1931 when Borglum had come to hire him, Paha Sapa, and then offered to shake hands when the deal was done. With that handshake, Paha Sapa had almost staggered back as all of Borglum’s memories had flowed into him. Just as Crazy Horse’s had back in the late summer of 1876.

Just as Rain’s had that first night they’d kissed in 1893.

Luckily, these three people’s lifetimes of memories (and Rain’s was so sadly short!) were passive—there to confuse Paha Sapa at the time but not shouting out and interrupting and babbling away into the night the way the ghost of Custer still did.

Sometimes, Paha Sapa was sure that the bulk and weight and noise of these other memories, not to mention the ghost rattling its bars for almost sixty years now, were sure to drive him mad. But at other times he was glad the memories were there and he found himself walking through the corridors of Borglum’s past or Crazy Horse’s—more seldom Rain’s, since it was so painful to do so—the way Doane Robinson might wander the stacks of a particularly fine reference library.

Lincoln said to Paha Sapa—

—Did you attach the drag chain under the Dodge the way I said?

—Yes.

They were coming down into the land of dusters and black blizzards now—there were twenty other names for these sudden, fierce, sometimes weeklong dust storms—and discharges of static electricity were a real threat. A truck’s whole ignition system could be wiped out in an instant of white-static ball-lightning unless the drag chain grounded it, and then they’d be stuck for sure, a hundred miles from the nearest mechanic besides themselves. (It was the spare engine parts they lacked, although both vehicles hauled extra tires and wheels and fan belts and other parts in their carrying beds.)

The wind was rising, although it wasn’t carrying that much dirt. Lincoln used a little water from one of their spare bags of water to at least go through the motions of cleaning the plates.

—With a little luck, we’ll be in a real bed, or at least a barn, tomorrow night, boys. Get some sleep. It’s going to be a long few days of hard driving and there’s nothing waiting for us at the end of this trek except two useless submarine engines that nobody wants, not even my father.

LINCOLN HAD SPOKEN THE TRUTH in more ways than he knew. The submarine engines may have been the most abandoned- and unwanted-looking wasichu machines or devices that Paha Sapa had ever seen. The twin banks of diesel engines were the length of the Dodge truck’s extended flatbed, taller than the cab, and amounted to a terrifying mass of early-1920s pistons, steel, oil tubes, conduits, shaft columns, rust, stains, and open metal maws. It was hard for Paha Sapa to believe that so many awkward tons of steel and iron had ever gone to sea.

They’d reached Pueblo, Colorado, on Saturday afternoon—April 13—and quickly found the steel plant and its associated companies, huddled around like so many piglets nursing at the sooty teats of the great black sow of the steel mill itself. The place looked bankrupt and abandoned—ten acres of parking lot empty, tall smoke stacks cold, gates chained—but Jocko the watchman explained that the plant merely shut down on alternate weeks during these hard times and that some or all of the men would be back on the job come the following Monday. Jocko knew right where the submarine engines had been parked and led the four men to a rail siding behind another siding at the back end of an abandoned building just behind the slag heaps. The toothless old man had the style to shout Voilà! when Lincoln, Red, Hoot, and “Billy Slovak” dragged off the dust-covered tarp draped over the house-sized mass of metal.

Lincoln asked the watchman if they could get help loading the engines onto their Dodge flatbed. Monday, was the old man’s reply, since the only one who could handle the crane-on-rails parked just over there by the sludge pond was Verner, and Verner, of course, was probably out hunting this fine spring Saturday and wouldn’t even be thinking about work until Monday morning.

In the end, two relatively crisp twenty-dollar bills exchanged hands (Paha Sapa had not seen many twenty-dollar bills in recent years)—one from Lincoln to the old fart Jocko, another for Verner, who was probably drinking in a bar somewhere right down the street, to come in and transfer the engines from the flatbed train car to the Dodge’s long and shaky platform.

Jocko promised that he’d have Verner there by five p.m., and Lincoln and his three tired and dusty workers drove deeper into the little south Colorado steel town to find a place to get a beer and another place in which to spend the night.

Paha Sapa had to admit that the thought of a real bed really appealed to him. (Some Lakota, were his thoughts—in English rather than Lakota, he realized, as if his wasichun brain was adding insult to injury.)

“You’re getting old and soft, Black Hills,” whispered Long Hair’s ghost. “You’ll be all white before you die and as round and soft as an albino sow with no legs.”

—Shut up, Paha Sapa snapped silently. In the few years since he and the ghost had actually communicated—rather than the ghost babbling in the dark and Paha Sapa merely having to listen—Paha Sapa hadn’t gained much from the exchanges. He couldn’t imagine ghosts of murdered men aging, but this ghost was getting old and surly and sarcastic.

A town where half the population was made up of miners and their families (the mines were a few miles to the west, in the foothills) and the other half steelworkers and their families—a glut of Germans, Czechs, Swedes, Bohemians, and other odd lots—was sure to have good bars, and Lincoln and his boys found one within five minutes.

The first beers were ice-cold—the mugs actually refrigerated until ice rimned them—and Red Anderson couldn’t stop grinning.

—I could disappear into a dark little bar like this and not reemerge ’til the damned hard times are over.

Lincoln sighed and wiped his upper lip.

—Too many otherwise good men have, Red. We’ll spend the night at that boardinghouse across the street, but there’s no way I’m waiting ’til Monday.

Red and Hoot looked at each other behind Lincoln’s back, and their thoughts were easy for Paha Sapa to read even without touching them for a vision; the two would be happy to stay here for a week until the mythical Verner came back from hunting.

But one of the magical twenty-dollar bills brought Verner back just before sunset in time for the short, stubbled man to bring his railroad crane over from the main yard and get the great bulk of the submarine engines, pallets, tarps, and all, transferred to the Dodge’s flatbed. That flatbed sank eight inches on its nonexistent suspension, but no tires blew or wheels flew off or axles broke apart. Not right then, anyway.

When the transfer was complete and the four men had lashed the engines down with more straps and ropes than the Lilliputians had used on Gulliver (one of the first books he’d borrowed from Doane Robinson’s library), Paha Sapa drove the Dodge a hundred yards or so to a parking place outside the steel plant’s chained gates—the Dodge moved, eventually, after a sluggish fashion, although he didn’t think that it would climb any hill with a grade of more than 1 percent, and the steering had changed from difficult to damned near impossible—and the four left the mass there and went back to a café for dinner and then to the boardinghouse.

The last thing Jocko shouted after them was—

—You four look like good Christians to me. Well, at least three of you do. If you’re gonna stay over for Palm Sunday services in the mornin’, I can show you the way to the Methodist and Baptist churches.

None of the four looked back.

Lincoln showed the three men to their room—the Borglum largesse for this vacation didn’t extend to private rooms for anyone but Lincoln, but rather to three cots crowded into a nonheated second-floor room where the blankets looked like they would get up and crawl away on their own if not nailed down.

Paha Sapa had brought in his own blankets and extra sleeping layers. Red and Hoot looked dubiously at the sprung cots and then out the window, where the few lights of Pueblo’s modest but very serious about debauchery red-light district beckoned. (The bars still had their speakeasy false fronts and peepholes, even two years after Prohibition had been lifted.)

Lincoln Borglum sounded tired and dejected, or perhaps he was just as depressed by the dusty steel town as was Paha Sapa.

—A beer or two, you two, but nothing serious tonight. We’re leaving at dawn, and I’m going to have the three of you take turns tomorrow wrestling that Dodge east to Kansas and then north. It’ll be a long day.

Everyone nodded, but Hoot and Red tiptoed out in their stocking feet, carrying their boots, no more than twenty minutes later. Paha Sapa heard the stairway creak softly and then he pulled his thick and relatively vermin-free blankets up over his head and fell asleep. The last time he glanced at his wristwatch, it read 8:22.

Hoot and Red came stumbling in smelling of much more than whiskey and beer a little after five a.m. One of them was busy retching into a bucket that he carried with him. At 5:20 a.m., Lincoln Borglum not only rapped hard on the door, but came in and overturned the two slugabeds’ cots. Paha Sapa was up, dressed, packed, and washing his face in the basin with what little water was left in a chipped pitcher that the management had begrudged them. The moans from the tangle of blankets on the floor were pitiful.

Lincoln and Paha Sapa ate alone and in silence at the small café across the street.

The pickup truck and absurdly weighted Dodge rolled east out of town a little before seven. The streets were empty. The air was very warm for mid-April. The sky was clear.

Something felt wrong to Paha Sapa all that long morning of driving northeast and into the afternoon. Of course, the slowly crawling Dodge with its mass of dead weight—if the load shifted forward, Paha Sapa would not even have time to jump free before the flimsy old cab was crushed—took up most of his attention as he literally wrestled it around the simplest turns and had to flog it up the shallowest of grades. Lincoln had sent Hoot back to share in the driving, and all that morning into the afternoon, Hoot snored and sprawled on the passenger side of the ripped old seat, waking occasionally only to open the door, jump off the running board, vomit into the weeds, and then run to catch up to the slowly moving Dodge.

What little traffic there was, even the oldest Model T’s, swung around the slowly moving Dodge and its Ford pickup escort.

But through all the snoring beside him and the roaring of the overtaxed engine and his need to concentrate on the driving, Paha Sapa sensed something wrong… something wrong with the world.

The birds were flying south in an unnatural way. The few animals he saw—some jackrabbits, scurrying voles, one deer, even livestock in the dust-filled fields—were also rushing south. They were trying to escape. Paha Sapa could feel it.

But escape what? The skies remained clear. The air remained warm, too warm. The cab of the Dodge truck smelled to high heaven of the whiskey in Hoot’s sweat, and for once Paha Sapa was glad that the windshield would not click shut.

This was country that gave the slightest hint of what would soon be called the Dust Bowl stretching a thousand miles to the south, but that hint was dramatic. Farms were abandoned. Even those farmhouses still occupied had had the last of their paint sandblasted off the walls. Sand drifted to the eaves of homes and outbuildings. Soil was so drifted against fences that Paha Sapa could see only a foot or less of the top of the fence posts poking up through the sand and soil. Farther south, he knew, farmers and ranchers said that they could walk miles on the dirt-buried carcasses of their livestock piled up against the buried fences, but even up here in the southeastern corner of Colorado, the dirt drifts were everywhere. Several times, Paha Sapa had to slow the Dodge to a stop while Lincoln, driving the Ford pickup, crashed repeatedly through heaps of reddish-brown soil that had covered the narrow highway like snowdrifts.

But for all the clear sky and warm day, Paha Sapa knew that something was wrong.

It was about two p.m., and they were nearing the Kansas state line when it hit them.

—Hi-yay! Hi-yay! Mitakuye oyasin!

Paha Sapa was not even aware that he had shouted in Lakota. He shook the snoring and snorting Hoot awake.

—Hoot, wake up! Look to the north. Wake up, goddamn it!

A wall of blackness rising three thousand feet or more was rushing at them like a tsunami of dirt.

Hoot sat straight up. He pointed through the open windshield and shouted.

—Holy shit! It’s a duster. A black blizzard!

Paha Sapa stopped the Dodge immediately. Ahead of them, the pickup paused, then stopped.

There had been an intersection with a wide dirt road not a hundred yards behind them, and Paha Sapa almost stripped gears as he threw the overladen truck into reverse and backed wildly toward that crossing. Just before the intersection, he remembered seeing a dust-drifted little farmhouse set back amid the skeletons of a few trees.

—What the hell you doin’, Billy?

—We have to get these trucks turned around. Get the hoods and engines turned away from that wall of dirt. We’d never get them started again.

Normally, backing that heavy load onto the dirt road and turning the Dodge around would have taken Paha Sapa five minutes of careful backing and turning. Now he made the turn in thirty wild seconds, looking over his shoulder at the advancing wall of blackness all the time.

Lincoln pulled alongside the Dodge and shouted across the wide-eyed Red Anderson.

—That’s one hell of a duster!

Paha Sapa shouted back.

—We have to get to that farmhouse.

The ramshackle, tumbledown structure was less than a quarter of a mile ahead on the left as they drove back to the southwest. The only clues that it wasn’t abandoned were the Model A in the driveway and two rusted tractors tucked under a shed overhang and half buried in dirt and dust. But both were so ancient that they might have been abandoned there with the house.

Paha Sapa didn’t think they’d make it in time, and they did not. Beside him, Hoot was shouting the same mantra over and over, as if it were a religious invocation.

—Holy shit Jesus Christ! Holy shit Jesus Christ! Holy shit Jesus Christ.

Paha Sapa learned later that he would have seen this giant roller even if he’d stayed at Mount Rushmore. The cold front had slid across the Dakotas that morning, dropping temperatures thirty degrees in its wake and burying Rapid City and a thousand tinier towns in dust and howling winds. But the front was soon out of the Dakotas and rolling into Nebraska, picking up strength, velocity, and thousands upon thousands of tons of dust and dirt as it advanced.

Paha Sapa would also learn later that the temperature dropped twenty-five degrees in less than an hour when the west edge of the black-blizzard duster-roller passed by Denver. The width of the storm by the time Paha Sapa and his three fellow workers saw it approaching in southeast Colorado was more than two hundred miles and growing—advancing like a solid defensive line of brown-jerseyed football players—and it would be almost five hundred miles wide by the time it reached the real Dust Bowl states to the south and east.

None of this mattered as Paha Sapa floored the accelerator, getting the overloaded Dodge truck up to its maximum sprint speed of twelve miles per hour, watching in the rearview mirror and over his shoulder as the monster bore down on them.

Paha Sapa had spent his life on the Plains and it was easy for him to estimate the height of this black moving wall of dirt: the duster was coming over a low range of very eroded hills to the north and northwest, there were lower hills to the northeast—although the Dodge would have labored at the grade with the submarine engines on the flatbed—and just based on the size comparison with the hills, boulders, and the few pine trees disappearing into the black blizzard’s maw, Paha Sapa knew that the wall was three thousand feet high and growing. Paha Sapa had also spent much of his life watching horses rushing toward or away from him on the Plains and could calculate speeds well; this moving wall was hurtling toward them at sixty-five miles per hour or more. The low range of hills it had appeared above was no more than twelve miles away. The duster wall of black had covered half of that distance in the past minute or so.

Watching Lincoln’s pickup truck swerve into the dust-drifted driveway of the half-collapsed farmhouse, Paha Sapa glanced over his shoulder again and realized that the wall was black at the bottom, lighter more than half a mile higher at the top, but that strange, swirling, tornado-like columns of white were rushing in front of the solid wall, like pale cowboys herding stampeding cattle. Whatever those columns were (and Paha Sapa was never to learn), they seemed to be pulling the black wall along behind them and toward Paha Sapa and his truck with ever-increasing velocity.

He realized that Hoot was screaming something other than his former mantra now.

—Jesus fucking Christ! We ain’t gonna make it.

To the farmhouse, no. But Paha Sapa had known that. There were a hundred yards yet to go to the shack’s driveway, and time was up—the black wall was roaring behind them, audible now, and tactile as well, as the blackness blotted out the sun and the temperature dropped twenty or thirty degrees around them. Paha Sapa switched on the Dodge’s headlights and then the wall was on them and over them and around them.

It was like being swallowed by some huge predator.

Paha Sapa found himself stifling the urge to scream Hokay hey! and to shout to Hoot across the storm roar and static—

—It is a good day to die!

But there was no use trying to shout now. The roar was too loud.

A white horse ran by from the direction of the fenced farmhouse field. Disoriented and made crazy by the outer wall of flying dirt, the horse was running blindly toward the storm. But what Paha Sapa noticed—and would never forget—was the aura of chain lightning, ball lightning, Saint Elmo’s fire, and other static discharges that limned the horse in electrical flame. Lightning danced among the galloping horse’s mane and tail and leaped along its back.

Then the static enveloped the Dodge and the truck’s engine seized and stopped immediately.

Paha Sapa’s long hair stood on end, the black tendrils writhing like electrified snakes. There was a brilliant strobe flash from beneath the truck and for a second Paha Sapa was certain that the truck’s huge gas tank had ignited, but then he realized that it was lightning discharge from the drag chain attached to the rear axle. The flash lit up a fifty-foot radius in the sudden advancing darkness.

The truck rolled to a stop as blasts of dirt exploded inward through the open windshield and side windows. The dust was everywhere instantly—blinding them, choking them, flowing into their nostrils and closed mouths and ears. Paha Sapa grabbed Hoot’s flapping flannel shirt.

—Out! Now!

They staggered out into absolute darkness punctuated by nonilluminating lightning crashes. The Dodge’s engine seemed to be on fire, the hood thrown back, but it was only more electrical discharges frying everything there. Paha Sapa dragged Hoot forward—finding “forward” in the pitch-darkness only by feeling his way along the cab and fender to the bumper—and paused to grab the large canvas bag of water strung over the radiator. Paha Sapa tied his kerchief around his face after soaking it with water. He poured water in his eyes and felt the mud rolling down his face. With his powerful left hand, he kept Hoot from running while he handed the man the water bag.

Hoot had no kerchief. He tried to hike his shirt up over his mouth and nose while pouring water over both.

The darkness intensified even as the roar did. Hoot leaned closer and shouted into Paha Sapa’s ear, but the words were lost before they were out of the man’s mouth. Paha Sapa kept his grip on Hoot’s shirt and dragged him into the roaring darkness beyond the truck, closing his eyes so that he could see the distance and direction to the driveway and farmhouse at least in his mind’s eye.

Hoot seemed to be struggling, trying to break away—to go back to the truck?—but Paha Sapa dragged him onward.

Paha Sapa realized that the Dodge’s headlights had somehow remained on, but they’d become invisible after only three or four steps into the roaring darkness. The lightning all around them still illuminated nothing. Paha Sapa wondered if they would be trampled by the fleeing white horse turned back toward its barn or field and had a sudden urge to giggle at the thought. He knew that he would never earn a newspaper obituary, but that would have been a great one after seventy years of life.

He staggered forward—it was impossible to stand upright, and even as they hunkered into a crouch, the wind threatened to throw them both down and scuttle them away across the ditch and fields like so much wind-tossed detritus—and then Paha Sapa decided that they should be even with the driveway, so he tugged the still-struggling and writhing Hoot left and let the wind shove them south.

Once they bumped into something unmoving and solid in the darkness, but it was only Lincoln’s pickup truck, abandoned in the driveway. The driver’s-side door was wide open, and Paha Sapa could feel the dust already filling the cab. They did not tarry there.

He found the front porch by tripping over the step. For a second as he fell forward in the howling darkness, he lost Hoot, but then he swung his arms out and around and caught a grip on the stumbling wasichu’s hair and then his collar. Paha Sapa fell forward a few more steps. Already he could feel his lungs filling with the swirling, pressing, flying dirt—grains of sand and silica like so much molecule-sized sharp glass already cutting the insides of his nose and throat. Stay out here for thirty minutes of this, and their bodies, if they were found at all after the storm, would show lungs so packed solid with dirt that the autopsy doctor could compare them to vacuum cleaner bags that had never been emptied.

The front door! Paha Sapa felt it with the flat of his hand in the darkness and pounded around the edges to make sure. It was a door.

And it was boarded up.

Resisting the urge to laugh or cry or to call out to Wakan Tanka or to Coyote the Trickster in a dead man’s glee, Paha Sapa pulled Hoot through the darkness as he felt his way along the house to the left.

They fell off the low and sagging porch together. Paha Sapa was on his feet in a second, lunging toward the side of the house. If he lost the house, they were dead.

For a short, sagging shack, the farmhouse seemed to go on forever. Paha Sapa felt boarded windows under his splintered palms. If there was no way into this house…

He left that thought alone and tugged Hoot along with him. The sturdy mine worker had fallen down and not regained his feet. Paha Sapa dragged him. Drifts were building around his legs as he moved. Paha Sapa suddenly felt disoriented, as if he were climbing a steep cliff—as if the flat, baked earth of this east-Colorado farmhouse were the vertical wall of Mount Rushmore, of the defiled Six Grandfathers.

Paha Sapa felt a sudden exhilaration welling up in him. He did weep then, the tears turning to clumps of mud on his eyelids, caking and sealing his eyes shut.

He would not have to be the cause of the Four Heads’ destruction on the sacred mountain in the sacred Hills.

Wakan Tanka and the Thunder Beings had acted in his stead. Surely this terrible storm, this terrible blotting out, could not be resisted.

Lincoln and Hoot and Red had talked of President Roosevelt pondering abandoning all of the Plains states and the middle of America if no windbreak of pine trees could protect the farms and ranches and sandblasted ghost shells of the dying towns here and south of here. Suddenly Paha Sapa realized that the gods of the Lakota and the All, and possibly the ancestral ghost spirits of his people, had already acted. For more than five years, the winds had blown and the topsoil had lifted into the sky and the farms had gone fallow and been buried in their own excreta and the ranches had counted their dead cattle in the thousands as the soil dried up and blew away, carrying the last remnants of overcropped grasses with it.

The gods were acting. Nothing on earth could resist a series of storms like this. Paha Sapa knew that this—this black blizzard, this booger of a duster, this big roller—could not be resisted by mere soft, fat, God-praying wasichu. Paha Sapa knew nature intimately, and this storm, all these increasingly violent storms he’d read about and caught glimpses of in newsreels and experienced in South Dakota’s milder forms were not part of nature. No cycle of nature in the history of North America or the world had seen months of winds like this, years of drought like this, and screaming, wailing, roiling walls of suffocating death like this.

This was the gods of his people telling the Wasicun to leave forever.

Paha Sapa sobbed silently behind his kerchief, sobbed mostly from relief that he would not have to be the agent of the wasichus’ destruction. He was old. He was tired. He knew the enemy too well. He wanted this cup to pass from him—and now it had.

Inside his heart and brain and chest, the ghost of Long Hair gibbered at him. Paha Sapa could understand the words now, of course—had been able to for most of the decades he had been alive, ever since Curly and the Seventh Cavalry and the battle at Slim Buttes—but he chose not to listen now.

Suddenly Paha Sapa’s flailing left hand found nothingness… the back end of the house.

He tugged Hoot’s body through high dirt drifts into the blessed lee of the house, away from the wind.

But the dirt swirled and intruded and compelled here as well, and it was no lighter. Paha Sapa took his free hand and held it a few inches in front of his mud-caked face even as he pried open his eyelids against the mud and stinging particles.

Nothing. He literally could not see his hand in front of his face. Lightning leaped and coiled all around him—from an unseen gutter to an invisible metal clothesline post, from an unseen pump to invisible nails in the porch, from the invisible nails in the porch to a never-seen metal fence or gate twenty feet away. The lightning and static discharged and displayed all around him but never illuminated.

Paha Sapa kept the rear of the house against his right shoulder as he pulled Hoot’s body forward. Now that the wind neither shoved him from behind nor pushed against him as it had out on the road, he felt further disoriented. If it hadn’t been for the farmhouse wall to lean on, he would have fallen on his face and not risen again.

He realized that there was a wild banging ahead of him, sounding exactly as if someone were standing in the roiling darkness and firing off a heavy repeating rifle or machine gun. Paha Sapa thought of his son.

It took the wildly flapping screen door hitting him on the head and almost knocking him out before Paha Sapa identified the source of the repeated explosions. He braced the banging screen with Hoot’s body and tried the solid back door. Locked or stuck.

Paha Sapa threw his shoulder, his full weight, and the last of his energy into it.

The heavy, paintless door screeched inward, shoving against drifts and piles of sand within.

Paha Sapa bent over and tugged Hoot inside, slamming the door behind him.

The howl receded a few decibels. At first, Paha Sapa was sure that it was as dark and dust filled here inside the house as it had been outside—and freezing cold—but then he saw what appeared to be the tiniest of glows. It was like a campfire glimpsed miles away.

Tugging the groaning Hoot, he crawled toward it.

It was a kerosene lantern on the floor of the kitchen not six feet away. The glow waxed and waned, but not before Paha Sapa saw the faces clustered around it—only faces, the bodies in dark, soiled garments lost in the darkness—the faces of a whisker-stubbled rail-thin farmer and his thinner wife, their three children, and the wide white eyes of Lincoln Borglum and Red Anderson. They were all huddled around the low-flickering lantern on the floor like medieval worshippers kneeling around some holy artifact.

The wide eyes had just enough time to register surprise at Paha Sapa’s and Hoot’s appearance in the howling space when the lantern glow dimmed and flickered out altogether. There was no longer enough oxygen in the air to sustain a flame.

Paha Sapa whispered—Washtay, hecetu! Good, so be it!—and collapsed onto the chipped and drifted yellowed linoleum. He couldn’t breathe.

An hour later the deafening, unrelenting howl died down to a mere animal’s roar. The lantern was relighted and held the flame. A second lantern was taken down from the counter and lighted by the farmer’s wife. The glow now pushed six or eight feet or more into the swirling gloom. But the monster outside still banged and roared and shoved at the door and boarded windows to be allowed in.

The farmer was shouting something.

—Would y’all folks like something to drink?

Lincoln Borglum, his white eyes now red, nodded for all of them. Paha Sapa realized that he had been lying on his side, eyes open but unseeing, his kerchief choking him, for a long time. He sat up and leaned back against a cupboard under the kitchen counter. Hoot was on all fours, his head down like a sick dog’s, and he seemed to be moaning along with the rise and fall of the wind’s roar and moans.

The farmer stood, staggered in the whirlwind, and went to the sink. Paha Sapa could see things six, eight, ten feet away now, and his eyes marveled at the murky clarity.

The farmer pumped and pumped and pumped at a pump handle at the sink. Surely, thought Paha Sapa, a pump could not work now that the world had been destroyed.

The farmer came back with a single cup filled with water and handed it around, small sips for everyone, starting with the children, then the four guests, then his wife. It was empty when it came back to him. He seemed too tired to go refill it.

Thirty or forty-five minutes later—Paha Sapa was guessing; his watch had stopped in the first minutes of the sand’s intrusion—the roar died a little more, and the farmer and his wife invited the four of them to stay for dinner.

—Mostly just greens, I’m afraid. And the Injun’s welcome too.

It was the farmer’s hatchet of a wife speaking.

Again, Lincoln Borglum spoke for them, but only after he pulled mud and more solid dirt out of his mouth.

—We’d be much obliged, ma’am.

And, after a minute’s silence and still no movement from any of them save for the children crawling off into the darkness to do whatever they were going to do, Lincoln again.

—Say, you folks wouldn’t have any use for two really big submarine engines, would you?

PAHA SAPA SMILES as he hangs in the blazing cliff-bowl of August light and heat. He is under Abraham Lincoln’s roughed-out nose. It gives a little shade as the hot blue-haze afternoon thickens toward evening. He slides in the last of the charges. It is almost time for the four p.m. blasting after the men scurry off the faces.

Then Paha Sapa’s smile dies as he remembers the lost exhilaration when he realized a year ago that those storms from the Thunder Beings, perhaps from the All himself, were not going to drive the wasichus out of the world of the Natural Free Human Beings.

It would have to be him after all.

President Roosevelt will be there in just a few days, this coming Sunday, for the unveiling of the Jefferson head.

Paha Sapa has much to do before he can allow himself to sleep.