Black Hills

Chapter 22 The Six Grandfathers

THE WORKDAY PROCEEDS IN A WHITE HALO OF HEAT. THIS LAST week of August finally has seen temperatures drop out of the high nineties in the Black Hills but the carved, white-granite inward curve of Mount Rushmore continues to focus sunlight and heat like a parabolic mirror and drives temperatures back up into the triple digits for the men hanging there by hot steel cords. By ten a.m. men working on the face are taking their salt tablets. Paha Sapa realizes that he is seeing halos of white light around not just the rock noses and cheeks and chins jutting from the granite, but also around the tanned and lip-blistered faces of the other workers.

He knows this illusion is just a by-product of fatigue and lack of sleep and does not worry about it. The effect is more pleasing than disturbing as men with their pneumatic steam drills and sledgehammers and steel spikes each move within their own white nimbus, the pulsing coronas sometimes merging as the men lean close or work together.

The fatigue-induced white halos are not a problem for Paha Sapa; the pain from his cancer is becoming one.

He grits his teeth tighter and sets the pain out of his thoughts.

All this Saturday morning he has been directing Palooka Payne on drilling the holes for the five charges to be detonated in tomorrow’s “demonstration blast” for the president and other VIPs. Everyone loves a good explosion. This one, as with all the demonstration blasts on public occasions, has to look and sound significant enough to give the civilians on Doane Mountain and in the valley below a sense that it is doing some work on the mountain while not being big enough to lob rocks or boulders at them.

One crew of men is rigging the extra crane arm over the Jefferson face, ready to drape the gigantic flag—sewn years ago by old ladies or FHA students or somesuch in Rapid City—to conceal Jefferson, and also rigging the ropes and cables that will lift the huge and heavy flag even while the crane swings to one side. But the flag itself will not be draped until tomorrow morning. Although there is not a breath of wind in the blazing heat of this late morning, a stiff breeze might tear the flag, tangle the cables, or otherwise ruin the draping. A special crew will drape the flag the next morning, not too long before the guests are scheduled to arrive.

The president’s train is supposed to be pulling into Rapid City late this evening of the 29th, but already word is coming up the hill that the president will definitely be arriving here tomorrow, Sunday, later than originally planned; FDR has added a longer-than-originally-scheduled service at the Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Rapid City and a luncheon with local Democratic leaders at the Alex Johnson Hotel (still the only air-conditioned hotel in South Dakota) before coming up to Mount Rushmore in his motorcade.

This has made Borglum apoplectic. He is swearing to his son, Lincoln, to his wife, to June Culp Geitner, to supervisor Julian Spotts, to worried Democratic politicans who make the mistake of taking his phone call, to William Williamson (head of the delegation in charge of greeting the president), and to unsmiling Secret Service liaisons that President Roosevelt will have to change his plans back to arrive earlier, as Borglum had directed and as Roosevelt had originally promised, or the shadows on the faces will be in the wrong position and the unveiling of the Jefferson head will be ruined. The president’s and governor’s people explain to Borglum that the president has expedited his arrival as much as possible and expects to arrive no later than 2:30.

Gutzon Borglum growls at the gathered men.

—That’ll be two and a half hours too damned late. The unveiling of the Jefferson figure and the dedication ceremony are going to happen exactly at noon. Tell that to the president! If he wants to be part of it, he’ll have to get here about fifteen minutes before the unveiling.

Then Borglum walks out of the studio where the group is gathered and takes his tramway up to the tops of the heads.

The few old-timers who’ve been working here since Borglum talked President Calvin Coolidge into taking a horse-drawn wagon (which broke down, forcing the president to make the rest of the trip by horse) up to this isolated spot to “dedicate the site” of the as-yet-totally-untouched Mount Rushmore on August 10, 1927, just shake their heads. They know the Boss will wait for this new president.

Between drillings, chief pointer Jim Larue informs Paha Sapa that Coolidge wore totally dude-ish new cowboy boots, fringed buckskin gloves, and a Stetson big enough to shade half of west South Dakota when he rode up the hill. Earlier in that trip, he had allowed some not-quite-local Sioux Indians to dress him up in a war bonnet that hung to his heels, and they gave Silent Cal the official name “Chief Leading Eagle”—Wanbli Tokaha in Lakota, which most of the white locals decided actually meant “Looks Like a Horse’s Ass.”

Doane Robinson, who was a big part of this wooing of Coolidge, once told Paha Sapa that the most devious thing done by the local whites was to dam up the little stream near where the president was staying at the Game Lodge in the Hills, bring down hundreds of fat, disgustingly liver-fed, stupid breeding trout from the hatchery up in Spearfish, and release these torpid creatures, a clump at a time, into the hundred yards of stream where Coolidge—who had never tried fishing before in his life—was standing uncomfortably, still dressed in suit, vest, tie, stiff collar, and straw boater, awkwardly holding the expensive trout-fishing rod Robinson and the others had given the visiting president as a gift.

Incredibly, Coolidge caught a fish in the first five minutes. (It would have been almost impossible not to, said Doane Robinson. One could have all but walked across the creek on the back of the fish released there without getting one’s shoes wet.) And he kept catching these slow, fat breeding trout, released every hour on the hour from the newly built little dam just upstream. Coolidge was so delighted with his fishing prowess that he not only went fishing for hours each day he was at the Game Lodge, but insisted on serving the dozens upon dozens of trout he caught every breakfast and dinner at the lodge.

The locals, who could taste the rotted liver from the slaughterhouse in Spearfish that these trout had been fed on for years, gamely smiled and tried to swallow as Coolidge beamed at everyone at the table and urged second helpings of his trout.

PAHA SAPA and Palooka have the five blasting holes drilled by ten a.m. and Paha Sapa has run and secured the detonator wires in their protective orange guides across the face of the cliff under the Jefferson head and the white rock now ready for the Teddy Roosevelt fine drilling. For safety’s sake, he will not install the dynamite in the holes until tomorrow morning after everyone else is off the face.

But he has Palooka continue drilling for him well into the blazing noon and tells the driller to join him after the lunch break for more work.

—What’re these slots for, Billy? They’re not even blast holes. They’re more like… well, big slots.

It’s true. Paha Sapa has shown the driller where they’re going to expand niches under rock ledges and cliff lips and in crevices all along the face of the cliff, from Washington’s right shoulder to the farthest west, then east up and around the bend in the swooping saddle between Washington’s lapels and Thomas Jefferson’s right cheek, then down under Jefferson’s chin, then east again to the left of the undifferentiated mass that is Jefferson’s parted hair, beneath and to both sides of the tabula rasa of prepared granite ready for the carving of Teddy Roosevelt, then farther to the right into the shadowed niches between the Roosevelt granite field and the busy working face of Lincoln, then down under Lincoln’s still-emerging chin and beard where scaffolds are clustered, and finally even on the just-blasted cliff face to the southeast of Lincoln’s unseen left ear. With Paha Sapa supervising exact placement of these excavations, he and Palooka will be working all day on these holes.

The slots aren’t blast holes. Palooka guesses that they’re going to be support insets in the stone for still more scaffolds to join those still on the face under Washington (where his cravat and lapels continue to emerge) and under Jefferson (where more work has to be done on the neck), across the exposed granite prepared for TR, and on both sides of and beneath Lincoln’s head. Those portable scaffolds that can be cranked up on pulleys will be removed by tomorrow to clear the way for the crowd’s viewing, but many of the other working walkways and scaffolds rest on sturdy posts with drill holes not unlike these horizontal niches Palooka will be drilling all the rest of this Saturday.

Paha Sapa does not say that these aren’t support holes for future scaffold pilings.

On another scaffold nearby, Howdy Peterson is beginning the honeycombing process on the lower TR carving field. This has been the procedure on the previous three faces—as blasting gets down to the last inches of clean rock before the “skin” of the faces emerges, drillers like Palooka and Howdy lean their weight into the drills (thus the scaffolds rather than bosun’s chairs) to drill hundreds upon hundreds of parallel holes, honeycombing the rock. Then carvers like Red Anderson come in with their large hammers and cold chisels and break away the stone in sheets, exposing the smooth face that will later be buffed and shaped and worked as actual sculptures.

Meanwhile, back down at the hoist house—the closest to the cliff that the tourists can wander—Edwald Hayes and the other hoist operators have an example of the flaked-off “honeycomb” nailed to the wall of the hoist house and acknowledge to the curious visitor that, Yep, we get a few of these real, actual honeycombed mementos of the mountain carving intact. Not many. They’re real rare. That’s why the fellows keep this one here as a sorta souvenir. The tourists invariably ask if Edwald (or the other operators) could see fit to part with that interesting honeycomb. Don’t hardly see how I could, sir (or “lady”). Y’see, it belongs to another guy. He might be real mad if I sold it, since it’s so rare and all…. ’Course, if you really want it, I might see my way clear to sell it to you and just take my chances with the owner.

The going price for the largest honeycombs is six bucks. The tourists take off with the chunk of honeycombed granite tucked in the husband’s jacket, almost running to their cars as they chuckle about the fast one they’ve pulled, and then Edwald or the other operator will phone up the mountain and say—Okay, boys, send down another one.

The honeycombed souvenirs are priced according to size—two dollars, four dollars, and six dollars—and the price is always in multiples of two, Paha Sapa knows, because moonshine in the area sells for two dollars a pint. Thousands of “rare and unique and one-of-a-kind” honeycombs have changed hands here over the years.

Borglum has driven off after his confrontation with the president’s people (perhaps, the workers buzz, to go confront FDR with his be-here-on-time-or-else ultimatum), and his son is in charge, but Lincoln focuses his supervision on the crane and flag-pulley preparation over the Jefferson head and the new drilling all over the emerging Lincoln head and pays little attention to Palooka and Paha Sapa and their seemingly innocuous small-time drilling on various parts of the cliff. Lincoln knows that “Billy Slovak” has to prepare for tomorrow’s demonstration blast and for much more serious working detonations in the week to come as Teddy Roosevelt’s skin and head shape are finally exposed.

When the noon whistle blows (without the deeper, louder blast-warning whistle that often follows, since Paha Sapa and the other powdermen do their blasting during the lunch break and after four p.m., when the workers are off the face), Paha Sapa heads up to the winch shack to fetch his metal lunch pail—he only had time in the morning to toss in some bread and old beef—and walks into the shade of the main boom and winch building atop Jefferson’s head.

It’s hot in the shed but a group of men, including Paha Sapa’s fellow powdermen Alfred Berg and Spot Denton, are huddled there with their lunch pails. Part of the space in the shack is taken up by a hollow five-foot-tall bust-mask of a clean-shaven Abe Lincoln, part of some earlier sculpture that Borglum did years ago and which he normally has set out along the scaffolding trail around the base of the emerging Lincoln head so that men can touch it with their hands while working there and “feel” the Lincoln that is still in the stone. Borglum ordered it brought in during the blasting.

Whiskey Art Johnson pats a place on the stone floor near the Lincoln face.

—There’s room here, Billy. Come in and set a spell, get out of the sun.

—Thanks, Art. I’ll be back.

He picks up his lunch pail and the little Coke bottle he keeps his water in—heated almost to boiling by now—and walks back out along the ridge and then out onto George Washington’s head until the slope becomes steep enough that he feels he’s about to slide right over Washington’s brow to the boulders three hundred feet below. It’s a comfortable place to sit, half reclining, and there’s a small niche in the president’s forehead, carved to give a sense of a wig, where Paha Sapa can rest his pail and bottle without worrying about them rolling over the edge.

As he munches his bread and meat, he looks to the southwest and toward the summit of Harney Peak.

Doane Robinson once loaned him a new book that said that the granite on Harney Peak was 1.7 billion years old. Billion. The Natural Free Human Beings have no word for billion or for million. The biggest number that Paha Sapa remembers encountering when he was with his people was in the phrase Wicahpi, opawinge wikcemna kin yamni, which had to do with the three thousand stars visible in the sky on a perfect viewing right.

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 recovered 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…

—Stop it!

Rain’s hands were on his forearms. She physically jerked him around to face her. The orchestra paused and there was the distant sound of applause drifting across the new wasichu-made lake. Rain’s expression was fierce and her eyes burned into him.

She had read his mind. She often read his mind. He was certain of it.

—Just stop it, Paha Sapa, my love. My life. My husband. That out there…

She released his left forearm to swat away the image of the hotel, the orchestra, the dancers, the boats, the colored lanterns with a dismissive sweep of her right hand….

—That has nothing to do with me and what I want and what I need. Do you understand me, Paha Sapa? Do you?

He wanted to speak then but could not.

Rain put her hand back on his forearm and shook him with her strong, workingwoman’s hands. Her grip could bend steel, Paha Sapa realized. Her fierce hazel-eyed gaze could see into stone.

—I never wanted that, my darling husband, my dearest. What I want is here…

She touched his chest over his heart.

—… and here…

She brought his hand to the upper curve of her abdomen, just below her remaining breast.

—Do you understand? Do you? Because if you don’t… then the hell with you, Black Hills of the Natural Free Human Beings.

—I understand.

He put his arm around her. The orchestra started up again, playing something popular, no doubt, in New York dance halls.

Then Rain surprised him completely.

—Wayáčhi yačhiN he?

He laughed aloud, and not at the problems with her gender language, but simply in delight that she knew the words. How did she know the words? He did not remember ever having asked her to dance.

—Han. Yes.

He took her in his arms there in the aspen trees above the new lake and they danced late into the night.

BY THE TIME Paha Sapa quits work at five p.m., the white halos are gone from around his coworkers and have been replaced by a pounding headache that gives him vertigo as he plods down the 506 steps to the bottom.

Everything is in place on the cliff for tomorrow’s festivities except for the five actual demonstration charges. No one will be allowed on the cliff face in the morning except Paha Sapa as he rigs those charges. A skeleton crew will work from above to rig the flag on the boom arm and pulleyed cables over the Jefferson head. The rest of the final preparation in the morning will be down on Doane Mountain where the press and crowds and important personages will be gathering.

Borglum is back and waving aside those workers who are scheduled to work on the flag covering the next day, obviously about to give them their final directions. But Paha Sapa needs no final directions and he slips away to the parking lot, kicks Robert’s motorcycle into life, and follows the dust cloud of homeward-bound workers down the mountain road.

A third of the way down the hill he has to swerve the motorcycle into the trees, get off, fall to all fours, and vomit up his lunch. The headache seems better after that. (Paha Sapa, who has dealt with so many kinds of pain for so long, has not had a serious headache like this since Curly the Crow scout almost split his skull open with a rifle butt sixty years earlier.)

Once home, Paha Sapa heats water for another hot bath to help rid himself of some of the pain and stiffness, but ends up falling asleep in the tub. He wakens in cold water and darkness with a jolt of terror—Has he slept too late? Did Mune wander off to a speakeasy when Paha Sapa failed to pick him up at the appointed time?

But it’s only nine fifteen. The days are getting darker earlier now. It feels like midnight to Paha Sapa as he dries himself off and watches the water swirl out of the tub.

He can’t face dinner but he packs some sandwiches and sets them in an old burlap bag—he doesn’t want to bring the lunch pail. He realizes how stupid and sentimental this is, willing to blow himself apart but not wanting the lunch pail that Rain used to put food in for him blown apart. Stupid, stupid, he thinks, and shakes his aching head. But he leaves the sandwiches in the burlap bag.

He goes to the old blacksmith shop in Keystone, now the only gas station, and has the retarded boy there, Tommy, fill the motorcycle’s little tank. It would be too absurd if his plot failed now due to running out of gas.

Driving up the mountain to fetch Mune (whose own Model T succumbed earlier this year to too many drunken collisions with trees and boulders and who is now dependent upon his equally drunkard and unemployed friends for transportation), Paha Sapa thinks of how his plot—he’s only recently begun thinking of it as a plot, but that’s what it is (the Gunpowder plot! his tired mind decides)—depends now on the idiot Mune Mercer. If Mune has wandered off with his idiot friends, believing more in Saturday-night whiskey than in the promised Sunday-morning fifty dollars… well, the plot is over. Paha Sapa simply cannot get the crates of dynamite from the Hall of Records canyon to the ridgeline summit or then deploy those crates on the face without the help of at least one man to run the winches.

Except that Paha Sapa has spent years of sleepless nights trying to find alternatives so that he can do it alone. If Mune is gone, Paha Sapa knows that he’ll spend the night hauling those crates of dynamite down the canyon and around the valley and then up the 506 steps himself, one crate at a time, and then go dangling out in space without a winch handler if he has to. But he also knows the night is not long enough for that approach, even if his energy were to hold out.

So, again, it all depends on Mune Mercer. Paha Sapa finds himself chanting a prayer to the Six Grandfathers to help him with this one element that is out of his control. The prayer reminds Paha Sapa that, before noon tomorrow, he finally has to compose his Death Song.

Incredibly, miraculously, Mune is there at the appointed time and waiting outside and is even relatively sober.

The problem now is first cramming the giant into the little sidecar—in the end Mune looks like a huge cork in a tiny bottle—and then getting the little motorcycle with all that extra weight up the last mile of road to Mount Rushmore. With that final miracle granted, Paha Sapa glides the motorcyle across the empty parking lot and into the cover of trees. The moon has risen a little earlier tonight and it is even fuller.

—How come you parkin’ here in the trees?

Mune’s massive brow is furrowed.

—In case it rains, of course. I don’t have a cover for the motorcycle or sidecar.

Mune frowns up at a sky free of all but a few light clouds. It has not rained in five weeks. But he ponderously nods his understanding.

It’s only eleven p.m. and music comes from the direction of the sculptor’s studio. Paha Sapa walks Mune to the base of the stairway and again the giant balks.

—Hey! I hate these fucking stairs. Can’t we take the tram?

Paha Sapa presses the big man’s sweaty back.

—Sshhh. This is all to be Mr. Borglum’s surprise, remember? We’re not using any of the power equipment. You walk up to the Hall of Records canyon winch—all the cranking’s by hand tonight, remember—and I’ll go around and up the canyon. Just send the wire down…. I’ve got all the hooks and palette cables down there. When I send the crates of fireworks up, just stack each one outside the cable shack. But be careful with them. We want the show to be for the president tomorrow, not just for the two of us tonight.

Mune grunts his understanding and starts clunking his slow way up the stairway. Paha Sapa flinches, thinking that the thud of the giant’s hobnailed boots will be enough to bring Borglum or someone checking to find out what all the racket is.

The next hours are a dreamscape.

Paha Sapa has nothing to do between lifts of the dynamite crates and stands there in the shifting puzzle of moonshine and moon shadow, looking up at the black silhouette of the winch boom and shack, always waiting for Mune to change his mind, or discover that the crates so crudely stenciled as fireworks—caution! handle with care! are actually filled with dynamite and then just run away, but that does not happen.

Finally the last crate and covering tarps are gone, the narrow steel wire comes down a final time, Paha Sapa shines his flashlight into the Hall of Records tunnel to make triply sure that he’s sent everything up, and then he clips on the bosun’s chair he’d stored there, whistles once, and relaxes as the cable lifts him three hundred vertical feet to the top of the ridge.

His next five hours on the cliff face with the giant Heads are even more dreamlike.

Usually when a driller or powderman has to move laterally across the cliff face as Paha Sapa must tonight, there’s a “call boy” tied into a safety harness and sitting far out on the brow of the Head above the worker. It’s easy work for the money, since all the call-boy has to do is to relay the workingman’s shout to the cable winch operator up in his shack. Then the call boy leans far out to check on the driller’s or powderman’s or other worker’s movement while being held in place by his harness—one wire running back to the shack, one up to the boom arm—and sometimes looking quite comical since he can be standing almost horizontal, feet on the granite, eyes facing straight down, all the while shouting further directions to the winch operator controlling the unseen worker’s movement below.

Well, there are no call-boys this night.

Paha Sapa has explained the new system to Mune half a dozen times, but he went over it again before he dropped over the edge of George Washington’s hair.

—No call-boy, so we’re doing it with this rope this time, Mune. I’ve got enough rope that it’ll go with me wherever the cable does. You keep one hand on the rope here where I’ve rigged it to run by your chair. One hard tug means stop lowering. Two tugs means higher. One tug, pause, then another tug means swing to the right at that level. One tug, pause, then two tugs means swing to the left.

Mune’s ferocious frown of pained concentration makes Paha Sapa think that Mune appears to be trying to figure out the article on quantum effect published by Albert Einstein that Robert mentioned twenty-four years ago. Since then, everyone has heard of Einstein… except, perhaps, for Mune Mercer.

—Here, Mune, I’ve got it all written out on this chart. If we get tangled up, just clip your harness onto the boom wire and walk out on George’s brow a bit and look down to see what the mess is. OK?

Mune frowns but nods doubtfully.

In the end, it all works as well as if there were a call-boy. Paha Sapa has planned the deployment of the dynamite crates and detonators (which he takes down first and stores on a safe ledge, kicking back and forth to the box like a bird returning to its nest) so that he has little lifting or descending to do, and all of that at the beginning and end of each placement. Mostly it is just him kicking and gliding, lifting and placing and wedging and then kicking off and flying sideways through the night air and moonlight again.

Then Mune cranks Paha Sapa up, they move to the next winch shack farther east along the cliff’s edge, and Paha Sapa drops over on his bosun’s chair with his rope in his hand and the easy dream of weightlessness begins again. Improbably, miraculously, there are no hitches, either in the cable or the plot.

Palooka has drilled the holes perfectly. The dynamite crates slip in easily and are concealed by the gray tarps. It is the placement of detonators (since the whole crate of dynamite has to go off at once, rather than single sticks or fragments of a stick) and then the placement and concealment of the long gray wires that take most of the night.

But by 4:43 a.m. they are finished. Even the second detonator box is in place and concealed—the first having already been placed there publicly by Paha Sapa in preparation for the day’s demo blast—along the rim of rock running flat to the east of Lincoln’s cheek.

Paha Sapa drives Mune home, pays him his forty-five dollars, and doesn’t look back as he coasts the ’cycle down the long winding hill to Keystone and home as the sun is rising. For a while he worried that Mune might come to the site and talk to Borglum about the mysterious work in the middle of the night and about dynamite crates labeled fireworks, but now Paha Sapa knows beyond all doubt that Mune Mercer is too stupid and too selfish to notice, care about, or talk about such things. Mune, he knows, will sleep for a few hours and then hitchhike to a speakeasy in Deadwood that’s open on Sundays and then get forty-five dollars’ worth of drunk.

It’s another hot, sunny, windless August day.

Paha Sapa considers sleeping for an hour—except while in a hot bath, he trusts his lifelong ability to wake when he wills himself to—but decides not to risk it. After changing his shirt and splashing cold water on his face, he makes some coffee and sits for a while at his kitchen table, thinking of absolutely nothing, and then, when cars belonging to other Mount Rushmore workers in Keystone begin starting up, he washes the mug and sets it in its place in the tidy cupboard, cleans and sets away the coffee pot, looks around his home a final time—he’s already burned the note he left on the mantel two nights ago regarding taking care of the donkeys if something happened to him—goes outside, kicks his son’s motorcycle into life, and joins the smaller-than-usual procession of workingmen in their battered old vehicles all heading up to Mount Rushmore.

The crowds, he knows, will come later.