Black Hills

Chapter 2 On the Six Grandfathers

IT’S TIME FOR THOMAS JEFFERSON’S HEAD TO EXPLODE.

Visible in the rough sketch of stone is the parted hair, so much lower on the forehead than the hair above Washington’s forehead immediately to the left and higher than the emerging Jefferson. And rising out of the white-and-tan granite below the hair and forehead is the long rectangle of a blocked-out nose, terminating just about even with the sharp line of Washington’s chin. Also emerging are the overhang of brows and the indentations of the eyes, the right eye more finished (if one can call a circular hole within an oval hole finished). But the two heads—one almost completed, the other just emerging—appear too close to each other for even the non-artist’s eye.

Paha Sapa was resting in the shade of the powerhouse in the valley the summer before, carefully and slowly going through his dynamite box even though work on the project was officially in hiatus, when he’d heard two older tourist ladies arguing under their parasols.

—That’s George in front, so the other has to be Martha.

—Oh, no. I have it on good authority that they’re putting only presidents up there.

—Nonsense! Mr. Borglum would never carve two men snuggled up to each other like that! It would be indecent! That’s definitely Martha.

So today, at four p.m., the first Jefferson has to go.

At four o’clock sharp the sirens sound. Everyone off the heads, everyone off the faces, everyone off the stairway, everyone off the rubble slope beneath. Then there settles in the briefest winter silence, unbroken even by crow call from the snowy ponderosa pines on either side and below or by the otherwise constant creak of the supply tram being hauled up or down, until suddenly three booms echo across the valley, and Jefferson’s forehead explodes outward. There is the briefest pause as rocks fall and dust dissipates—then another blast as Jefferson’s indistinct masses of hair and the overhang of brow explode into thousands of flying, falling granite shards, some as big as a Model T. This is followed by an even briefer pause during which more rocks clatter down the slope and crows whirl black above, and then Jefferson’s nose and right eye and the remaining hint of his cheek erupt outward in half a dozen simultaneous final blasts that roll down the valley and echo back, diminished and tinny sounding.

The debris seems to fall and roll for long minutes, although the real work has been done in seconds. When the last smoke and dust drift away on the cold breeze, the rock face shows only a few subtle folds and minor spurs that will require burring away by hand. Thomas Jefferson is gone. It is as if he never existed there.

Paha Sapa, against all rules but with special dispensation, has been hanging in his bosun’s chair out of view of the blast around the east side of Washington’s massive head during the explosions, his feet set against a subtle ridge on the long expanse of virgin white rock that has already been blasted down to good stone in preparation for carving at Jefferson’s new site. Now he kicks out, waves up to Gus, his winchman, and begins bouncing across the bulge of hair, cheek, and nose of George Washington, the winch crane above swiveling smoothly with him as he seems to fly. He thinks what he always thinks when he begins to move this way—Peter Pan! He saw the play performed on the Pine Ridge Reservation by a traveling troupe from Rapid City years ago and has always remembered how the young woman playing a boy flew around and above the stage on her all-too-visible wire harness. The steel wire that holds Paha Sapa hundreds of feet above the stone valley floor here is one-eighteenth of an inch thick, less visible than the girl–Peter Pan’s was, but he knows that it could hold eight men of his weight. He kicks harder and flies higher; he wants to be the first to see the results of the fourteen large charges and eighty-six small charges he personally measured and drilled and tapped into place on Jefferson’s head that morning and afternoon.

Balancing on Washington’s right cheek, waving to Gus to lower him to a point level with the first president’s still-being-worked lips and line of mouth, Paha Sapa looks to his left at his handiwork and finds it good.

All one hundred of the charges have fired. The masses of parted hair, eyebrows, eye sockets, eye, nose, and first hint of lips are gone, but no errant gouges or lumps have been left in the inferior rock where the first Jefferson carving was mistakenly started.

Paha Sapa is bouncing weightlessly from the right corner of Washington’s chin, still some hundred and fifty feet above the highest point of the rubbled slope below, when he senses rather than sees or hears Gutzon Borglum descending on a second line from the winch house above.

The boss drops between Paha Sapa’s bosun’s chair and the remains of the first Jefferson rock face and Borglum glowers at the newly exposed rock for a minute before swiveling easily toward Paha Sapa.

—You missed some little spurs there on the far cheek, Old Man.

Paha Sapa nods. The spurs are visible only as the slightest hint of shadows within the patch of weak February light reflected from Washington’s cheek and nose onto the now empty rock face. Paha Sapa feels the cold as the last of that reflected February light fades away on this south-facing slope. He knows that Borglum had to criticize something—he always does. As for being called Old Man, Paha Sapa knows that Borglum will be celebrating his sixty-sixth birthday in a few weeks but never mentions his age to the men and has no idea of Paha Sapa’s real age; he will turn sixty-nine in August. Paha Sapa knows that Borglum calls him Old Man and Old Horse in front of the other men but actually believes that the only Indian he has working for him is fifty-eight, which is what the Homestake Mine records show.

—Well, Billy, you were right about the charge sizes. I wasn’t sure we should use so many little ones, but you were right.

Borglum’s voice is its usual dissatisfied growl. Few of the workers love him, but almost all of them respect him, and that’s all that Borglum wants from them. Paha Sapa neither loves nor respects Borglum, but he knows that statement would be true about his feelings toward almost any Wasicun, with the possible exception of a few dead men and a living one named Doane Robinson. Paha Sapa squints at the clean rock face where the three-dimensional Jefferson sketch was half an hour earlier.

—Yes, sir, Mr. Borglum. Any more large ones would have cracked that fault open and you’d be patching for six months. Any fewer little ones and we’d be blasting for another week and buffing a month more after that.

It’s the longest sustained speech Paha Sapa has given in months, but Borglum only grunts. Paha Sapa wishes the other man would just go away. He has a dynamite headache—literally a dynamite headache. Paha Sapa’s been working with his bare hands in the cold all day, cutting, shaping, and placing the charges since early morning, and, as all powdermen know, there is something in dynamite, possibly from the nitroglycerine beading up out of it like dangerous sweat, that seeps through a powderman’s skin, migrates to the base of his skull, and brings on these thudding, blinding headaches that make normal migraines seem insignificant. Paha Sapa tries to blink away the onset of the red film over his vision that the dynamite headache invariably brings with it.

—Well, it could’ve been cleaner, and I’m sure you could’ve used less dynamite and saved us some money. Be ready to set the new charges on the upper third of the new site early in the morning for the noon blow.

Borglum waves for his own winchman spotter, his son, Lincoln, to crank him up.

Paha Sapa nods, feeling the stab of pain and vertigo that the nod brings on, and waits for Borglum to reach the winch house before he will kick around for one last, closer inspection. But before the boss disappears up into the dark rectangle at the bottom of the overhanging winch house, he shouts down—

—Billy… you’d like to use enough powder to bring Washington down too, wouldn’t you?

Paha Sapa leans far back with only the tips of his toes touching the rock, his body almost horizontal in the bosun’s chair with only the one-eighth-inch metal cable holding him there in space two hundred feet above the valley floor, and looks up at the dark shape of Gutzon Borglum hanging fifty feet above him, a small silhouette against the rapidly paling February South Dakota sky that is almost the blue of a dead wasichu horse soldier’s eye.

—Not yet, Boss. I’ll wait ’til you finish all the heads before I bring them all down.

Borglum coughs a laugh, signals his son, and is cranked up into the winch house.

It is an old joke between them and the question and answer, always the same, have long since been wrung dry of any remaining humor. But does Borglum ever suspect, Paha Sapa wonders, that his premier powderman is telling him the truth?