Black Hills

Chapter 23 The Six Grandfathers

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT DOES NOT ARRIVE BY NOON, BUT GUTZON Borglum does not start the ceremony without him.

Paha Sapa is the only man on the face of the cliff, perched near Lincoln’s cheek—the carving has not yet exposed the head’s bearded chin—far to the right but still able to see George Washington, the flag-covered Jefferson, and the white granite slope from whence the Teddy Roosevelt head will begin to emerge. The only other men on the mountain this day are the eight workers peering over the top of the Jefferson head where the winch, boom, pulleys, and rope stays attached to scaffolds are holding the giant flag in place until it is time to swing it away and then pull it up out of sight.

The plan is for the five-charge demonstration blast to be detonated first, then an orchestra will play, and only then will the flag be removed from Jefferson’s face. After that, Borglum and a few others will speak to the crowd and radio audience as the head is officially dedicated. There are no plans for President Roosevelt to speak. Just as in the original plans for the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg more than three score and ten years earlier, the presence of the president of the United States is mostly a technicality; others are scheduled to do the speech making.

Borglum has loaned Paha Sapa his second-best pair of Zeiss binoculars so that there will be no question that his powderman will be able to see the Boss raise and then lower the red flag as the signal to detonate the five charges, and the heavy optics bring individual faces into clear focus.

By eleven a.m., townspeople and the curious from all over western South Dakota are arriving and beginning to fill up the bleachers above and to either side of the main VIP viewing area on Doane Mountain, right where, if Borglum gets his way (and when hasn’t he? thinks Paha Sapa) there will be a huge Visitors Center and fancy View Terrace and probably a gigantic amphitheater with seating for thousands, just for patriotic presentations—including, Paha Sapa is certain, elaborate programs literally singing the praises of a certain sculptor named Gutzon Borglum.

For right now, though, Borglum has had his son, Lincoln, take the bulldozer and improve the ruts leading to the center of that viewing area, below and in front of the V shape of the VIP stands and general bleachers. President Roosevelt, Paha Sapa learned just that morning, will not be getting out of his open touring car during the dedication ceremony. Even without his binoculars, Paha Sapa can see the spot where the president’s car will stop, already ringed as it is by bulky microphones on stands, black cables, newsreel cameras, and areas taped off under the ponderosa pines to corral the press photographers. All the other VIPs will be behind FDR as he and Borglum look at Mount Rushmore during the ceremony.

Paha Sapa finds Gutzon Borglum through the binoculars and feels a sudden shock as he sees that Borglum is using his best pair of Zeiss binoculars to look straight at him.

Normally, Paha Sapa would be atop the ridge to set off a detonation, even one as small as the five-charge demonstration. He suggested this position along Lincoln’s cheek with the argument that with all the crowds and congestion, he might have problems seeing Borglum and his flag from atop the ridge.

Borglum scowled and squinted at that.

—Admit it, Billy. You just want a better view.

Paha Sapa shrugged and shuffled his silent agreement at that. It was true, of course. But it wasn’t the ceremony that he wanted the better view of; it was the twenty-crate explosion all along the cliff face.

He is sitting on the twenty-first crate of dynamite (they are rigged to blow in series so he should see the effects of the other twenty before this one goes) and for a terrible, clammy-sweat second, Paha Sapa is sure that Borglum can see the crate through his long-lens binoculars and now knows exactly what his powderman is up to.

But no… the gray-painted extra detonation wires are also covered with granite dust all along this Lincoln cheek ridge to Paha Sapa’s position. He’s sitting on a dynamite crate, but the crate is under the last of the gray tarps he’s brought up to further conceal all the hidden charges. It’s true that he has one detonator too many—the smaller one for the five-blast demo charge, a larger one for all the other boxes of dynamite—but he’s taken care to hide that second detonator box behind the crate he’s sitting on, out of sight even if Borglum were using an astronomical telescope to look up at him.

Paha Sapa pans across the rest of the arriving crowd, and when he comes back to Borglum, the Boss has turned away, the fresh and ever-present red kerchief around his neck easy enough to see amid the crowd of mostly white shirts and dark jackets. Borglum himself is all in white—or a rich cream-colored long-sleeved shirt and slacks, Paha Sapa sees—except for the large kerchief and black binoculars strung around his neck.

Paha Sapa lowers his own glasses and leans back, his sweat-soaked shirt against the strangely cool curved granite of Lincoln’s emerging cheek. He’s angry that his hand is shaking slightly as he removes his watch from his pocket. Another two hours, at the most, before FDR arrives and the ceremony commences.

THE MORNING AFTER their dance in the aspen grove across the lake from the new hotel, Rain announced that she wanted to climb Harney Peak, which was looming over them to the northeast.

Paha Sapa crossed his arms like one of the cigar store Indians that all Indians hate.

—Absolutely not. There’ll be no discussion of this.

Rain smiled that peculiar smile that Paha Sapa always thought of as her “Ferris Wheel smile.”

—Why on earth not? You yourself said that it was a short walk—two miles or less?—and that there was no climbing involved. A toddler could do it, you said.

—Maybe. But you’re not going to do it. We’re not. You’re… with child.

Rain’s laugh seemed as much in delight at the fact he’d just announced as it was making fun of his concern.

—We’re going to go on lots of walks on this camping trip, my darling. And I’ll be walking a lot at home during the six months left. This is just a little more uphill.

—Rain… it’s a mountain. And the tallest one in the Black Hills.

—Its summit is still only a little more than seven thousand feet, my dear. I’ve summered in Swiss towns that sit at higher altitudes.

In rebuttal, Paha Sapa shook his head.

She moved closer and her hazel eyes looked almost blue that perfect morning. After their dancing in the aspens, they’d returned to their little campsite and Rain had gone to the back of the buckboard and started removing both the mattresses that Paha Sapa had insisted on bringing in case she “needed to lie down.” Seeing her lifting them, Paha Sapa had run to grab the mattresses from her and to carry them back to the big army tent. Why do we need these? he’d asked innocently. At times, he had discovered, his wife could literally purr like one of the cats that stayed around the mission school and church. Because, my dearest love, our army cots, while wonderfully comfortable, are not adequate for long periods of lovemaking.

But still… in the clear May morning light, Paha Sapa was shaking his head, arms still crossed, the frown seemingly etched into his bronzed face.

Rain set her finger to her cheek as if struck by a thought.

—What if I rode Cyrus up?

Paha Sapa blinked and looked at the old mule, who, hearing his name, twitched one notched ear in recognition but did not look up from his grazing.

—Well, maybe, but… No, I don’t think…

Rain laughed again and this time it was totally a laughing at him.

—Paha Sapa, my dearest and honored anungkison and hi and itancan and wicayuhe… I am not going to ride poor Cyrus up that hill… or anyplace else. First of all, he wouldn’t leave Daisy. And second of all, I’d look like the Virgin Mary being led into Bethlehem, minus the big belly. No, I’ll walk, thank you.

—Rain… your condition… I don’t think… If something were to…

She held up her forefinger, silencing him. From less than a quarter of a mile away, just over the low ridge, came laughter and a woman’s shout. Paha Sapa imagined the Sunday-dressed wasichus playing croquet or badminton on the long green lawn that sloped down to the mirror-still lake.

He also understood what his silent wife was saying. They were almost certainly much closer here to medical help should there be a problem with her pregnancy than they would be in all the months to come at Pine Ridge.

Her voice now was low, soft, and serious.

—I want to see the Six Grandfathers mountain you’ve talked about, my darling. There’s no easy way in to it, is there?

—No.

The presence of the hotel and new man-made lake and white gravel path here in the heart of his Black Hills made Paha Sapa dizzy, as if he were living in someone else’s reality or on a new and only vaguely similar planet. The very idea of there someday being roads to the Six Grandfathers made him ill.

—I want to see it, Paha Sapa—it and a view of all the Black Hills. I’m putting the luncheon things in this old army map case you brought. Why don’t you make sure that the tent is secure and that Daisy and Cyrus will be all right for the few hours we’re gone?

The view from the summit of Harney Peak (or Evil Spirit Hill, as Paha Sapa still thought of it) was incredible.

The last half mile or so of the very visible trail was across the top of one rounded granite outcropping after the other. Having no interest in scrambling up the scree- and boulder-tumbled spire to any technical high-point “summit,” the two strolled out onto the north-facing rock terraces of the high shoulder of the mountain.

Yes, the view was incredible in all directions.

Back the way they had come were the Needles formations, forests, and receding grass-and-pine hills all the way to Wind Cave and beyond. To the northwest was the dark-pined and gray-rocked heart of the majority of the Black Hills. Far to the east the Badlands were like a scabbed white scar against the plains; farther north the distant marker of Bear Butte rose against the horizon. Everywhere beyond the Hills stretched the Great Plains which were—for these very few weeks in late May into early June and only then after a rainy spring such as this had been—as green as Rain had once described Ireland.

There were gray granite summits and needles and ridgelines poking up and out of the so-dark-green-they-were-black pine forests in all directions, but the Six Grandfathers was the only rising gray mass to challenge Harney Peak itself. The long summit ridge was almost literally at their feet. The last time Paha Sapa had seen the Black Hills—and especially the Six Grandfathers mountain—like this, he had been floating high in the air with the spirits of those six grandfathers.

—Oh, Paha Sapa, it’s so beautiful.

And then, after they sat for a while on the blanket Paha Sapa had spread on the stone summit ridge—

—All you’ve ever said, my darling, is that you attempted your hanblecˇeya there when you were a boy of eleven summers.

She took his hand in both of hers.

—Tell me about it, Paha Sapa. Tell me everything.

And, to his great surprise, he did.

When he was finished telling her the entire tale, the entire experience, everything he had seen and heard from the Six Grandfathers, he fell silent, astounded and somewhat appalled that he had said all he had.

Rain was looking at him strangely.

—Who else did you describe this Vision to? Your beloved tunkašila?

—No. By the time I found Limps-a-Lot in Grandmother’s Country, he was old and ill and alone. I did not want to burden him with so terrible a Vision.

Rain nodded and looked thoughtful. After a long moment in which the only sound was the light breeze moving through the rocks and low plants there at the summit, she said—

—Let’s eat lunch.

They ate in silence, with Paha Sapa feeling more foreboding with each minute the silence stretched on. Why had he told his beloved—but mostly wasichu—wife this tale, when he had told no one else? Not Limps-a-Lot when he had the chance. Not Sitting Bull. Nor any of the other Ikcˇe Wicˇaśa when he had had the chance over the past dozen years.

Both were watching something that Paha Sapa had never seen before, not even when he had flown with the Six Grandfathers. The high grass of the endless plains, at its absolute greenest this May morning, moved to the caress of strong breezes that were strangely absent there on the summit ridge of Harney Peak. Paha Sapa thought of invisible fingers stroking the fur of a cat. Whatever it reminded him of, he and Rain watched as the strong but distant breezes moved mile upon mile of grass, flowing ribbons of air made visible, the underside of the grass so light it looked almost silver as ripple moved on to ripple. Waves, he realized. Having never seen an ocean in real life, he realized he was looking at one now. Most of the plains and prairie there had, he knew, been parceled up into rich men’s ranches and poor men’s homesteaded parcels—the former destined to grow larger, all the latter doomed to fail—but from this summit on this day, those buildings and barbed-wire fences were as invisible as the absent buffalo and the root-chewing destructive cattle that had taken the buffalo’s place.

Now, from this height, there was only the wind playing on wavetops across that perfect illusion of a returned inland sea. Then came the stately cloud shadows moving across that sea of dark grass interspersed with brilliant ovals of sunlight. “When the sun shone through the clouds, making silvery pools in the dark sea… ” Pools in the sea. Where had he read that startling phrase? Oh, yes, last year in Dickens’s Bleak House, which Rain had so enjoyed and had recommended he read, although his hours for reading, between returning from the ranch long after dark and leaving for the ranch while it was still dark, were few enough. But he loved reading books on her recommendation so that they could talk about them on Sundays and sometimes she returned the favor by reading some of his old favorites. The Iliad had been one such. Rain admitted that she’d had a tutor who had attempted to get her to read the Iliad in Greek but that the spears and blood and boasting and violent death had caused her to turn away. (But this spring, reading the same Chapman translation that had so moved young Paha Sapa in Father Pierre Marie’s school amid the almost carnal scent of sunbaked tent canvas, she told her husband that she had learned, from him, how to love Homer’s tale of courage and destiny.)

The picnic food was good. Rain had actually baked a pie using a campfire oven. She had also brought lemons and although there was no ice, the lemonade in carefully wrapped glasses was sweet and light to the tongue. Paha Sapa tasted none of it.

Finally, when they were packing away the plates, he said—

—Look, Rain… I know the so-called Vision was all a hallucination… brought on by many days of fasting and the heat and fumes in the sweat lodge and by my own expectations that…

—Don’t! Paha Sapa… don’t!

Paha Sapa had never heard her use that tone of voice with him before. He was never to hear her use it again. It silenced him at once.

When she spoke again, her voice was so soft that he had to lean toward her there on the rocky summit ridge of Harney Peak.

—My dearest… my husband and darling boy… that Vision you were granted is terrible. It makes my heart ill. But there is no doubt that God—whatever power rules the universe—chose you to receive that Vision. Sooner or later in your life, you will have to do something about it. You have been chosen to do something about it.

Paha Sapa shook his head, not understanding.

—Rain, you’re a Christian. You lead the choir. You teach Sunday school. Your father… well… You can’t possibly believe in my gods, my Six Grandfathers, my Vision. How could…

Again she silenced him, this time with the palm of her hand on the back of his hand.

—Paha Sapa, is not another name for Wakan Tanka, besides “the All,” also “Mystery”?

—Yes.

—That is at the heart of all our faith, my darling. Of everyone’s faith, for those who can find and hold faith in their hearts. Unlike my father, I know so very little for certain. I understand little. My faith is fragile. But I do know—and, yes, I have faith—that at the heart of the heart of the universe there is Mystery with a capital M. It has to be the same Mystery that allowed us to find our love and to find each other. The same love that has allowed the miracle of this child growing in me. Whatever you decide to do because of this Vision, Paha Sapa, my darling, you must never deny the reality of the Vision itself. You have been chosen, my dearest. Someday, you will have to decide. What you will have to decide, I have no idea and I doubt if you do either. I only pray… pray to the mystery within that Mystery itself… that by the time you do have to decide, your life will have given you the answer as to which way to proceed. It will, I fear, be the hardest of choices.

Paha Sapa was stunned. He kissed her hand, touched her cheek, then rubbed his own cheek roughly.

—Wovoke, the crazy old Paiute prophet I told you about, must have thought that he was chosen as well. But in the end, he was just crazy. The Ghost Dance shirts did not stop bullets. I saw that Limps-a-Lot had been wearing one, under his ratty old wool jacket.

Rain winced, but her voice was just as strong as before.

—That old man thought he had been chosen, my darling. You have been chosen. You know that and now I do as well.

The wind suddenly arrived from the plains below and arose around them, whistling through crevices in the rocks.

Paha Sapa looked into his wife’s eyes.

—But chosen to do what? One man can’t stop the Wasicun Stone Giants or bring the buffalo back or return the Wakan—the sacred Mystery—to his people who have lost it. So… chosen to do what?

—You’ll know when the time comes, my dearest. I know you will.

They did not speak again on the slow walk down Harney Peak, but they held hands much of the way.

THE IMPORTANT GUESTS are arriving in the front-row stands far below.

Through the melded twin Zeiss circles, Paha Sapa can see the gleaming bald head of his old mentor Doane Robinson. He knows that Doane will be eighty years old this coming October, but the poet and historian would never miss a ceremony like this, a celebration of the next visible part of a shared reality that was once just Doane Robinson’s solitary dream (however much that dream has changed).

Near Robinson in the front row is an older man who looks as if he has a bulky towel wrapped around his chin and left cheek and neck. This is US senator Peter Norbeck and Paha Sapa knows that Norbeck—along with the dreamer Doane Robinson and pragmatic congressman William Williamson—is part of the troika who actually had argued for, pushed ahead, presented to the Senate and House, found funding for, begged for, and tirelessly defended the Mount Rushmore project (often from the excesses of Gutzon Borglum himself) all the way to its current three-heads-almost-finished reality. But Senator Peter Norbeck, who had taken more verbal abuse from Borglum over the years than most men would permit from their wives, is now dying of recurring cancer of the jaw and tongue. The cancer and repeated surgeries for it have finally robbed him of his speech and turned the lower half of his face into a nightmare guaranteed to frighten children and some constituents, but Norbeck has grown a beard to hide some of these ravages and has draped this towel-scarf around the lower part of his face as if it were a normal part of his wardrobe—a second tie, perhaps, or a flashy cravat.

As Paha Sapa watches through the binoculars he’s steadying with his elbow on his left knee, he sees Norbeck leaning back to say something to three men in the row behind him. Pointing toward the gang of straining reporters held back by their rope, the dying senator makes quick pantomine motions that end with an upward spiral of his fingers. All three of the politicians—plus Doane Robinson sitting three chairs to Norbeck’s right—throw back their heads and laugh heartily.

William Williamson is not laughing. The congressman chosen to lead the welcoming delegation for FDR is pacing nervously back and forth in front of the stand of tall microphones.

Paha Sapa glances at his own watch—2:28. He can see that Gutzon Borglum is far too busy down there now, talking to important people, to have time to run up and stop Paha Sapa even if he were to see something out of the ordinary through his binoculars. But Borglum does have a telephone connection to his son, Lincoln, who’s in charge of the eight men at the crane and boom atop the Jefferson head, and the official program for the dedication says that it will be Lincoln who will, with a touch of a button, detonate the demonstration blast at the drop of his father’s red flag—but in reality it’s always the chief powderman who sets off the shot. Paha Sapa is sitting far enough forward along Lincoln’s cheek—also covered with a sort of towel, he realizes now, looking down at the granite he’s sitting on—that he’ll be able to see Lincoln Borglum’s waved flag, half red, half white, when his father’s second-in-command down there phones up the order to blast as a sort of backup command.

But the detonator boxes are with Paha Sapa.

For the hundredth time, he looks at the twenty sites where he’s planted the dynamite crates with their detonators. His worry is the same one he’s always had: that the power of the explosions will send large rocks or small boulders all the way to the crowd and reviewing stands. It shouldn’t, the way he’s half buried the dynamite in the spots he’s chosen. Big Bill Slovak, who had briefly worked with an urban demolition crew in Denver after leaving a Cripple Creek gold mine where unsafe practices by the owners had resulted in the deaths of twenty-three miners in one collapse, always liked to point out to the younger Paha Sapa that gravity was the real force involved when one was trying to collapse large structures, not the dynamite blast itself. Imploding rather than exploding had been the demolition crew’s motto. Give me one stick of dynamite, Big Bill used to say on their lunch breaks down there in the Holy Terror amid the glow of carbide helmet lamps and the taste of rock dust, and I’ll bring down Notre Dame. Just take out the right parts of the right buttresses, and gravity will do all the rest.

Paha Sapa hopes that will be true on this blast, but there is always the threat of flying debris. He’s calculated for the safety of the men atop the cliff and is almost sure that the president and all the guests and visitors at the viewing area on Doane Mountain are safe from small flying rocks, much less the inevitable rolling boulder debris from the blast, but he still worries.

Paha Sapa realizes that he should have said to his son years ago—I am no warrior and never will be. I lack the ability to willingly hurt people.

It was true, he sees now. Despite the necessary fistfights he’s had in his long life, including those in his early months on this job five years ago, he’s never willingly acted to hurt or kill another human being. Even when he’s fought in self-defense or to stop some racist bullying at his expense, he’s done so with the least force necessary—while at the same time knowing, from both Crazy Horse’s vivid memories and from the rants of Long Hair’s ghost, that there are times when the greatest force possible is the answer.

But he knows now, as he sits on this crate of dynamite with both detonator boxes within easy reach, that he chose not to throw himself and Gutzon Borglum out of the rising tramway bucket because he refused to kill Borglum if he had any choice left. And he does have a choice. At least for the next few minutes.

There’s a ripple of noise from below, then applause, and the motorcade is pulling into the parking area. Other vehicles pull to one side or the other but one long black touring car, men in dark suits now walking ahead of it protectively, bounces down the new road and comes to a stop in front of the viewing stands with the microphones just outside the front passenger-side door.

A man gets out of the backseat of the open car and receives a wave of cheers. Paha Sapa steadies the binoculars. It’s South Dakota’s popular cowboy governor, Tom Berry. The governor leans over and talks to the man sitting in the front passenger seat for a few seconds and then steps back and waves to the crowd again.

Now the high school band is playing “Hail to the Chief ”—Paha Sapa hears it twice, once regularly and the second, tinny time through all the microphones hooked to loudspeakers—and Franklin D. Roosevelt, still seated in the front passenger seat, of course, wearing no hat, his head thrown back, sunlight glinting on the gold frames of his sunglasses, raises an open palm and turns away from Paha Sapa and the waiting Borglum and waves at each part of the semicircle of the crowd, including both those seated and those standing. The standing crowd is relatively quiet but the VIPs on the closer reviewing platform respond so enthusiastically that the last notes of “Hail to the Chief ” are drowned out. Three radio reporters are babbling wildly into their bulky microphones, but those devices aren’t hooked up to the natural amphitheater’s loudspeakers. All Paha Sapa can hear, delayed and overlaid like a ghostly stutter, is the somewhat tepid applause and soft cheers of the crowd. It is, after all, a mostly Republican South Dakota audience.

Then the overlapping loudspeaker squawk, emphasized by the natural echo basin of the curved cliff face above his narrow granite ledge, becomes even more garbled and irritating as William Williamson launches into his welcoming speech.

Paha Sapa pulls the smaller of the two detonator boxes closer and carefully takes the ends of the two wires, from which he’s stripped back the insulation with his pocketknife, runs his thumb and forefinger up each to clean it of dust, and then threads each of them through a hole in each post and carefully wraps the excess around the two threaded terminal posts. When he’s sure the contact is clean, he screws the Bakelite terminal post coverings down tight onto the wire.

“I met one of these four presidents you’re about to blow up, you know. Shook hands with him. He talked to me about my graduation from West Point. Later, he met Libbie at a reception and said, ‘So this is the young woman whose husband goes into a charge with a whoop and a shout.’ ”

Long Hair’s voice in his head almost makes Paha Sapa fall off the dynamite crate. Almost three years of silence from the damned ghost and he chooses now to begin babbling again?

“It was Old Abe, of course. The fellow whose cheek you’re leaning against. In ’sixty-two, the other officers and me serving under General McClellan in the Army of the Potomac talked seriously about marching on Washington to replace that incompetent gorilla with our choice of war dictator, Little Mac himself.”

Paha Sapa paws at the air as if swatting away a gnat.

—Be quiet. You’re dead.

“I’m just waiting to see if you’re going to do this thing or if you’re going to lose your nerve… again.”

Paha Sapa has heard this Custer-laughter many times before. The Wasicun obviously did not have an especially charming laugh even in life—it sounded too much like a mischievous boy’s nervous cackle—and sixty years in the grave has not improved it.

—You can’t stop me, Long Hair.

Again the insufferable laughter.

“Stop you? I don’t want to stop you, Paha Sapa. I think you should do this thing. Have to do this thing. It’s long overdue.”

Paha Sapa closes his eyes for a few seconds to block out the white glare, the heat, the maddening literal double-talk of the noise from below repeated in its amplified echo. He wonders if the wasichu ghost is trying to confuse him… trick him… or perhaps just distract him at the coming crucial moment.

“None of the above, old friend,” Custer whispers to him. “I’m serious. No man—especially no man bred from a warrior people—can keep receiving these insults and injuries for so long without striking back—and striking back boldly. Do it, Paha Sapa. Blow these damned stone heads to hell today, right in front of the cameras and the president and God himself. It won’t change a damned thing—your people will still be defeated and irrelevant and forgotten—but it’s a warrior people’s answer to such humiliation. Do it, for God’s sake. I would.”

Paha Sapa shakes his head, more to free himself of the voice than in reply.

Up until now he has felt no fatigue or pain while he’s spent the long morning and interminable afternoon on this thin ledge, in this intolerable heat. Now the pain flows in as if Long Hair’s ghost has opened a door for it. Paha Sapa is suddenly so tired he wonders if he will have the strength to crank the handle against the resistance of the detonator box’s coils to charge it, or find the strength to raise the plunger against that friction and push it down.

“See what I mean, Paha Sapa? You’ve gone two nights without sleep and have been working on this hill three solid days and nights without a break. You’re going to pass out and your body is going to tumble down the cliff here and be a footnote in the history of this dedication ceremony—the White House will send Borglum a note expressing its sadness at the terrible tragedy of the death of one of his workers—and these damned Heads will still be here. Blow them now. What the hell are you waiting for?”

Paha Sapa raises the binoculars. A fat man he doesn’t recognize is speaking into the main microphone. President Roosevelt is smiling. Borglum is leaning casually against the president’s touring car and he doesn’t have his hand on the red flag yet.

When Paha Sapa speaks, it’s in a stilted whisper. If someone from below is looking at him through binoculars, he does not want it to be seen that his lips are moving.

—You’re cursing, Long Hair. Didn’t you promise your wife that you wouldn’t curse?

The ghost’s laughter echoes in Paha Sapa’s skull again, but it is not quite so grating this time.

“I did, yes. I made that vow in eighteen sixty-two, in Monroe, Michigan, shortly after Libbie and I had been introduced at a Thanksgiving party and only one day after she had, regrettably, seen me inebriated on a public street there in Monroe. I prayed and I admitted sin and I vowed that I would never touch liquor again as long as I lived, nor would I take the name of the Lord in vain or use ungentlemanly language ever again, no matter how frequently my occupation and mean comrades urged me to. But I did not make the pledge to Libbie that day, oh, no—I made it to my older sister Lydia, who, in good time, conveyed it to young Miss Elizabeth Bacon, who had indeed seen me in my unforgivable condition while spying out through the drapes of her upstairs window there from Judge Daniel Bacon’s home. But Libbie is dead, my Indian friend, as is your own dear wife, and all our vows have expired with them.”

—Shut up. You just want me to die. You just want to be released.

Long Hair laughs again. “Of course I do, damn you. I’m no soul waiting for Heaven, no ghost waiting to pass upward and onward, just a memory tumor of Paha Billy Slow Horse Slovak fucking Sapa. We’re both tired of this life, this world. Are you just waiting for more pain and loss? What are you waiting for, Paha Sapa? Trigger the goddamned fucking detonator now.”

Paha Sapa blinks at the shouted obscenities echoing in his aching skull. Has the ghost finally gone mad?

Then again, why is he waiting? He fully intends to set off the demonstration blast, then listen to the dedication, and only then—after detonating a single stick of dynamite to get the crowd’s and cameras’ attention—only then set off the twenty-one crates’ worth of explosive.

But the ghost has a point… why wait?

He realizes, blushing, that it’s because he wants to hear if President Roosevelt will speak after all, even though he’s not scheduled to, and if he does, what he will say. He realizes that he’s worked five years blasting and helping to carve this monument and wants to hear what the president of the United States thinks of it. He realizes, through fatigue as real as the granite under and behind him, that he wants the president and guests today to be proud of the work done on Mount Rushmore.

“Oh, that is so goddamned pathetic… ” begins Long Hair’s ghost.

Paha Sapa ignores him. Borglum has begun speaking to the president and guests and has the red flag in his hand.

The detonator boxes, chosen by Borglum himself, are made in Germany and are a little more complex than the old wire-it-up- and-push-down boxes that Paha Sapa used in the mines.

First he takes the handle of the demo-charge detonator box and cranks it four times to the right, charging it. Then he clicks the handle to the left, releasing the plunger safety, and raises that plunger against considerable friction. It is ready to send the current to the detonators in each dynamite crate.

Borglum is finishing his short talk about the combined use of explosives, drills, and chisels on the giant sculpture that is Mount Rushmore, emphasizing, as he always does, the sculptor’s tools that have, in truth, done less than 3 percent of the actual work of removing rock.

Borglum turns his back on the president and the crowd and theatrically raises the red flag. Up on the ridge above the flag-covered Jefferson head, Borglum’s son, Lincoln, on the phone with someone down there, raises his own red-and-white flag.

At the last second, Paha Sapa glances down to make sure it’s the five-stick demo-charge detonator box that he’s charged, and not the box linked by gray cables to twenty crates of dynamite. But his vision is foggy with fatigue and he has to look back through the binoculars quickly or miss the signal.

Borglum drops the red flag with a dramatic flourish, as if he’s a flagman at the Indianapolis 500.

Paha Sapa pushes the plunger all the way down.

HE HAD NEVER FELT AS ANGRY as he did the day in May of 1917 when his son, Robert, told him that he had joined the United States Army and was prepared to go fight in Europe.

Robert had graduated from his private Denver school in December of 1916 and spent the spring months living with his father in the shack in Keystone and then in Deadwood, finishing applications to various colleges and universities, and generally being lazy. Paha Sapa had disapproved when Robert had spent too much of his savings on the almost-new Harley-Davidson J. (A rich classmate of Robert’s in Denver had received the motorcycle as a graduation present and immediately smashed it up. Robert had purchased the broken 1916 machine for a few cents on the dollar, had shipped the pieces to his father’s address, and spent the majority of January through April happily rebuilding it.) Despite his original disapproval, Paha Sapa had pitched in to help Robert on Sundays and other odd hours when he wasn’t working in the Homestake Mine, and he had to admit to himself that he loved the quiet hours working next to his son in the shed they were using as a garage. It was the kind of mostly silent, mostly working separately, but strangely close activity that perhaps only fathers and sons could share. Paha Sapa thought of it often in the years to come.

Robert’s grades—which Paha Sapa had always known were good but had little idea of how good—along with enthusiastic recommendations from relatively famous faculty there in Denver had, by April of 1917, earned the boy eight scholarship offers. In Robert’s usual inexplicable (to his father) way of doing things, he had made separate applications to the same colleges and universities under two names, both of them legally belonging to him due to the quirks of various state and federal registrations—Robert Slow Horse and Robert de Plachette. The latter applications had stressed his connection to his late mother and white grandfather, as if Robert were an orphan, and listed the Denver boarding school as his address for the past nine years. The former applications specified his living Lakota Sioux father and listed the Pine Ridge Reservation and Paha Sapa’s shack in Keystone as Robert’s former homes.

By late April, Robert could inform his father that Robert de Plachette had not only been accepted by Princeton, Yale, and three other top Ivy League universities, he had received generous scholarship offers from those top schools. Robert Slow Horse, on the other hand, received scholarship offers from Dartmouth College, Oberlin College, and Black Hills State University in nearby Spearfish, South Dakota… the little town Silent Cal Coolidge’s liver-fed trout had come from.

Paha Sapa was irritated at the games his son had been playing with something so vitally important as a college education, but he was also proud. Then he became irritated again when he heard that Robert, who had long stated his intention of going to school not only out of state but away from the West, was considering the lesser known of the schools that had accepted him.

—Where are Dartmouth and Oberlin colleges, Robert? Why even consider them when Princeton and Yale have offered you scholarships?

It was late at night and they were working on the final reconstruction touches to the Harley-Davidson J’s sidecar when this conversation came up. Robert had flashed that wide, slow grin that made him so popular with the girls.

—Dartmouth’s in New Hampshire and Oberlin’s in Ohio, Father. Could you hand me that three-eighths socket wrench?

—But what makes them contenders compared to the Ivy League schools?

—Well, Dartmouth is Ivy League… sort of. Founded in seventeen sixty-nine, I think, with a royal charter from whichever governor was representing George the Third at the time, chartered with a mission to educate and Christianize Indians in the region.

Paha Sapa had grunted and wiped sweat from his face, leaving a streak of grease on his cheek.

—And how many… Indians… have they graduated since then?

Robert’s smile was wide and bright under the hanging bare sixty-watt bulb.

—Almost none. But I like their motto—“ Vox Clamantis in Deserto.”

—“The Voice of the Climbing Flowering Plant in the Desert”?

—Almost, Father. “The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness.” I can sort of relate to that.

Paha Sapa had arched an eyebrow.

—Oh? Do you consider your home here, the sacred Black Hills, a wilderness?

Robert’s voice had turned quietly serious.

—No. I love the Hills and want to come back here someday. But I think that the voice of our people crying out here has gone without answer for too long.

Paha Sapa had stopped what he was working on and turned his head toward his son at the sound of that “our people”—he’d never heard that from Robert before—but his son was frowning at the bolt he was trying to tighten.

Paha Sapa cleared his suddenly tight throat.

—And what’s the appeal of the Ohio college… what’s the name… Oberlin? Do they have a catchy motto?

—Probably, but I forget what it is. No, I just like Oberlin’s style, Father. They admitted Negroes in eighteen thirty-four or some year around there… and women before that. After the Civil War, Oberlin graduates led the way to go down and teach in the Freedmen’s Bureau schools all over the South. Some of them were killed by night riders for doing it.

—So you’re telling me that you want to go teach Negroes in the South? Do you have any idea how strong the reconstituted Ku Klux Klan is getting? Not just in the South but everywhere?

—Yes, I’ve paid some attention to that. And no, I don’t want to teach—in the South or anywhere else.

—What do you want to do, Robert?

It was a question that had haunted Paha Sapa much more than had Custer’s ghost in recent years. His son was so bright, so good-looking, so personable, and such a fine student that—if he dropped the Indian last name that wasn’t really his father’s anyway—he could be anything: lawyer, doctor, scientist, mathematician, judge, businessman, politician. But Robert, who had always been curious about everything but who refused to focus on one single area of interest, seemed maddeningly indifferent to careers.

—I don’t know, Father. I guess I’ll have to go to Dartmouth for a few years…. It’s liberal arts, so they don’t demand you decide on a major of study or career path right away. In truth, I want to be just like you when I grow up, but I don’t know how to do that.

Paha Sapa had frowned and stared at the top of Robert’s lowered head until his son looked up.

—Let’s be serious about this, Robert.

Robert’s eyes—his mother’s eyes—were as darkly serious as Rain’s had been when she was saying something very important to Paha Sapa.

—I am serious, Ate… Atewaye Ki. I want to become as good a man as you have always been. Mitakuye oyasin! All my relatives!

So Robert had accepted the offer from Dartmouth in New Hampshire and had finished his motorcycle and gone on long rides down prairie dirt and gravel roads every day—and often in the moonlight—and then on April 6, one month and a day after his second inaugural, President Wilson, who had been reelected for promising to keep the United States out of the European war, went to Congress and asked for a declaration of war against the central powers of Germany, Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria.

Five weeks after that, Paha Sapa came home from a twelve-hour shift at the Homestake to find his son standing in the kitchen and wearing the dark khaki uniform, the high puttees, and the flat-brimmed Montana peak hat of the American Expeditionary Force. Robert calmly explained that he’d driven the few miles to Wyoming to enlist as a private in the Army, in the 91st Division and would be leaving the next day for basic training at Camp Lewis in Washington state.

Paha Sapa had never touched his son in anger. While all the white fathers he knew spanked their kids, especially their boys, whenever they got out of line, Paha Sapa had never raised a hand to Robert and almost never raised his voice. A look or slight lowering of his tone had always sufficed in terms of discipline and he had never been tempted to spank or strike his son.

That moment, in the kitchen in the shack in Keystone on May 8, 1917, was the closest he ever came to striking Robert—and it would have been no token slap: Paha Sapa would have pummeled Robert with his fists, beating him into submission as he later beat the bullies on Mount Rushmore who insisted on picking fights with him, if he hadn’t forced himself to sit down at the kitchen table instead. He was so furious he was shaking.

—Why, Robert? College? Dartmouth? Your future? Your mother’s hopes for you, Robert. My hopes. Why in God’s name?

Robert had also been shaking with emotion, although which emotion—embarrassment, fear at his father’s potential wrath, excitement, chagrin, nervousness—Paha Sapa would never know. He only saw the trembling of his son’s always calm hands and heard the slightest hint of tremolo in the always calm voice.

—I have to, Father. My country’s at war.

—Your country!?

Paha Sapa felt like jumping to his feet then and seizing his much taller son by the front of his oversized service coat, ripping the buttons off, and throwing the eighteen-year-old through the closed screen door.

But all he could do was to say again in a strangled rasp—

—Your country!?

He felt then that he had failed completely in showing his son Bear Butte and the Badlands and the Paha Sapa themselves, the Six Grandfathers in the sunlight, the forests of aspen and ponderosa pine, the valley meadows and grassy hills farther south and the plains where the wind became a visible thing moving its invisible hand across the hide of the world. He realized, too late, that he should have taken Robert to the valley of the stream called Chankpe Opi Wakpala, where the scattered bones of Paha Sapa’s beloved tunkašila lay bleaching beneath an ancient cottonwood tree and where Crazy Horse’s heart had been secretly buried so that no wasichu could ever disturb it.

All he could say, for the third and final time, was—

—Your… country?

Robert de Plachette Slow Horse had not cried, to his father’s knowledge, since he was one and a half years old, but he looked as if he was going to cry now.

—My country, Father. And yours. We’re at war.

Paha Sapa came very close to being physically ill. He gripped the edge of the kitchen table with all his strength.

—It’s a war between a wasichu kaiser and a wasichu king, Robert, with lots of other wasichu parliaments and prime ministers and foul-breathed old men speaking a score of languages all swept up in it. For no reason. For no reason. Do you know how many young English boys died at the Battle of the Somme, Robert… on just the first day?

—More than nineteen thousand dead, Father… before breakfast that first day. More than fifty-seven thousand casualties that entire first day. More than four hundred thousand soldiers from the British Empire dead or injured before the battle was over, more than two hundred thousand French casualties—and it wasn’t their battle—more than four hundred and sixty thousand German casualties.

—More than a million men dead or wounded in one battle, Robert… for what? What was gained by either side when that battle was over?

—Nothing, Father.

—And you’re volunteering for that? To join that absolute… madness.

—Yes. I have to. My country’s at war.

He sat down across from his father and leaned across the table.

—Father, do you remember when I was about five and you took me to Bear Butte for the first time?

Paha Sapa could only stare sickly at his son.

—Do you remember that I disappeared for several hours and all that I’d tell you when I came back to our campsite was that I’d been with a nice man who had the same name as I did? Robert Sweet Medicine—you also met him. I know you did.

Paha Sapa could not even nod or shake his head. He looked at his son as if he were already in the grave.

—Well, I told Mr. Sweet Medicine that I’d never repeat the things he told me that day, Father, but I’ll break that promise and tell you this…. He told me that I was not destined to die a warrior’s death. That I would never die on a battlefield or from another warrior’s hand. Does that make you feel better, Father?

Paha Sapa grasped his son’s wrist so hard the bones groaned.

—Why, Robert? Dartmouth? Your real life ahead of you? Why… this?

Robert looked down a moment and then met his father’s gaze.

—A couple of months ago when we were working on the Harley, you asked me what I wanted to do… with my life. I didn’t answer. I’ve been afraid for years to tell you the truth. But I’ve known for years what I want to do, must do…. I want to be a writer.

The words made no real sense to Paha Sapa. All he could see was the campaign hat, now laid on the table, the black eagle with the spread-wings buttons on the coat, and the bronze disks on the high khaki collar of the uniform jacket—the disk on the left with the embossed letters U.S. and the disk on the right showing the crossed rifles of the infantry.

—A writer? Do you mean like a journalist? A newspaperman?

—No, Father. A novelist. You love to read…. You read novels all the time. I learned my love of books and of Dickens and of Cervantes and of Mark Twain and of all the others from you, Father. You know that. I’m sure that Mother would have led me to books in the same way; she was a teacher, I know, but she wasn’t there and you were. I want to be a writer… a novelist… but to write about something, I have to have lived. This war, this so-called War to End All Wars, as obscene as it is—and I know it’s obscene, Father, just as you do: I know it has no more glory in it than a terrible train wreck or auto accident… but it will be the major event of this century, Father. You know that. How will I ever know who I am or what I’m made of or how I’ll react under fire—perhaps I’m a coward, I have no idea now—but how will I know any of these things or learn about myself unless I go? I have to go. I love you, Father—I love you beyond all words in any language I know or could ever learn—but I have to do this thing. And I swear to you on everything sacred to both of us—on Mother’s grave and the memory of her love for both of us—that I will not fall in battle.

And he had not. He had been as good as his—or Robert Sweet Medicine’s—word.

After ten months of training, the 91st Division was shipped first to England and then to France in the late summer of 1918. The little blue unfolding army-issued envelope-letters with Robert’s tight script filling each page arrived weekly, without fail, just as they had for all his years away at school.

August 1918 was filled with even more training near Montigny-le-Roi.

Paha Sapa bought a large map which he affixed to the kitchen wall.

In September, Robert’s division marched to the front and the letters began listing addresses such as Void, Pagny-sur-Meuse, and Sorcy-sur-Meuse, and Sorcy.

Paha Sapa bought a pack of children’s crayons and made red and blue circles on the wall map.

That September and October, Robert and his division fought in the reduction of the German St.-Mihiel salient, then in the ferocious Meuse-Argonne offensive, then regrouped in places with such horribly familiar names as Flanders and Ypres. Robert wrote of amusing little incidents in the trenches, about the sense of humor of the western-states young men he spent time with, of the habits and manners of the French and Belgians—on October 26, in a place called Chateau-Rumbeke, King Albert of the Belgians phoned the division’s headquarters to express his welcome to the Americans. Robert reported that although it was a rainy, hot, steaming, flea-bitten, rat-biting night in the Allied trenches, the men of the 91st were thrilled to death by the king’s welcoming phone call.

Later, Paha Sapa would learn how terrible the fighting in the so-called Ypres-Lys Offensive from October 30 to November 11, 1918, really was. Robert had been in the midst of the worst of it. His commanding officer wrote a letter of praise and commendation to go along with three medals that the private-promoted-to-sergeant would receive in that time. He was not touched by shell or wire or bullet or poison gas or bayonet.

At eleven a.m. on the eleventh of November 1918, an armistice was signed in a railroad car at Compiègne and a cease-fire went into effect. All of the opposing armies began to pull back from their front lines. The last Allied soldier to die on the Western Front was reported to be a Canadian named George Lawrence Price, killed by a German sniper at 10:58 a.m. that day.

The 91st Division moved back into Belgium to wait for demobilization and shipment home. Robert wrote of how beautiful the early-winter countryside was there, despite the ravages of four years of war, and how he was seeing a young lady in the village during his free time, communicating with her and her parents and sisters through his high school French.

What was later called the Spanish flu first broke out at Fort Riley, Kansas—General Custer’s and Libbie’s old stomping ground—and soon spread around the world. A strange mutation of a more common influenza virus, it was most deadly among the young and physically fit. The actual number of people killed by the influenza virus could never be certain, but some estimated up to 100 million people—a third of the entire population of Europe and more than twice the number of all the soldiers killed in the Great War.

Robert died of pneumonia—the most common cause of death among the young with this influenza—in an army hospital near his billet south of Dunkerque and was buried in the Flanders Field American Cemetery along with 367 of his comrades near the village of Waregem in Belgium.

Paha Sapa received the news on Christmas Eve 1918. Two more letters, following their slower and more circuitous route, arrived from Robert after the death notice, each letter celebrating the beauty of Belgium, his delight at seeing the young (unnamed and possibly not the same) lady, the pleasure he was receiving from the books he was reading in French, his profound gratitude just for surviving the war while suffering nothing worse than a slight cough he was fighting, and his eagerness to see his father when the 91st Division demobilized in earnest in February or March.

PAHA SAPA KNOWS that something is horribly wrong just by the sound of the first explosion.

The five charges he set for the demonstration explosion, one quarter of a stick of dynamite each, buried in deep holes in the raw rock beneath the slight rim ridge running from Washington past Jefferson, have been primed to detonate in such rapid series that they will sound almost simultaneous to the onlookers below—BAM,BAM,BAMBAMBAM. The demonstration blast was designed to make some enjoyable noise and kick up a maximum of granite dust with the minimum of loose stone actually moved through the air.

But this explosion is far too loud. It feels too serious, the vibration flowing into Paha Sapa through the rock beneath him and through the curved vertical stone of Abraham Lincoln’s cheek and vibrating his teeth and bones and aching internal organs.

And it’s too solitary.

Paha Sapa looks up to see his worst fear realized.

This is the “look up” blast he’s buried just to the right of George Washington’s cheek and it’s taken a large gouge out of the cheek itself.

Paha Sapa looks down and sees the wrong detonator, the gray wires rather than black leading from it. He hears rather than sees the commotion in the sound-shocked side of Doane Mountain below as the newsreel cameras swing on their tripods and as everyone from the youngest child to the president of the United States raises a shocked gaze to the area of the mountain where several score tons of granite have just been lifted into the air in a mighty cloud of dust.

There’s nothing Paha Sapa can do. The charges have been rigged in deliberate series, but the electrical charge has already been sent to the fuses of all twenty-one detonators.

He has not meant for this to happen yet. Long Hair’s ghost distracted him just when…

The second, third, fourth, and fifth blasts go off simultaneously. George Washington’s right eye socket explodes outward and the first president’s brow cracks, slumps, and falls, taking the aggressive beak of granite nose with it.

The third blast has taken the mouth and chin and launched Model T–sized chunks of granite far, far out into the thick August air. The fourth explosion blows Washington’s right cheek, what was left of his mouth, and part of the left brow into the air. The fifth blast brings the teetering debris of the previous four sliding and crashing down.

Chunks of rock larger than Paha Sapa strike and scar Abraham Lincoln’s face above and below and beside the Lakota powderman’s partially shielded roost. Below, people are screaming, the screeching microphones and loudspeakers still echoing the reality.

Jefferson flies apart more efficiently than Washington, which is appropriate for the third in line in any profession rather than the first.

But most of the five explosions here happen behind the huge flag that is still draped there, making the Jefferson Head seem like a firing-squad victim who’s chosen a large blindfold.

Paha Sapa didn’t want this to happen when the flag was still in place. It’s a major reason why he was willing to wait.

My country, Father. And yours. We’re at war.

Paha didn’t believe that then and doesn’t believe it now, when the country is not at war, but he had no intention of destroying the giant flag so patiently sewn by little old ladies and high school girls in Rapid City.

Incredibly, the thin fabric actually muffles the explosions a tiny bit. Then, faster than the eye can follow, the giant flag is torn to shreds as ton after ton of pulverized rock flies outward and upward in an expanding cumulus cloud of gray dust and flame.

The flag tatters are burning.

Jefferson’s prodigious jaw goes first, sliding in fragments toward the heap of old boulders far below. Let gravity do the work, Billy, my lad.

By the time the flag shroud is burned and blasted away, Jefferson’s nose and eyes and brow and entire left cheek are gone, pulverized. And now the unthinkable is happening.

After Lincoln Borglum’s eight workers were to have swung the boom arm of the crane away, even while cranking up the flag on its various ropes and guy wires, the plan was for them to head for the 506 steps. The workers were finished for the day and Borglum wanted to introduce his son to President Roosevelt before the party broke up for good.

But now Lincoln Borglum and his men seem to be trying to do something—crank up the flag? Reach the other charges before they detonate?

No time for any of those things, but with a surge of nausea and terror, Paha Sapa sees the small black figures still wrestling with the crane boom arm when an explosion blasts that thick boom high into the air and sends flames from the burning flag fragments over the whole top of the now-shattered Jefferson head. Through the granite dust and real smoke he can see the tiny figures running, falling… is that a man falling with the flag fragments and blackened boulders?

Paha Sapa prays to every God he knows that it is not.

Then all five crates of dynamite in the Theodore Roosevelt field of granite go off.

This throws the most rock of all at Paha Sapa and toward the crowds below. He has buried the dynamite crates deep in their niches—the idea, with each head, was not just to destroy what is there, but to deny Borglum or any future sculptor from ever finding enough rock for any future carving, and this goal has now been achieved, for the Washington and Jefferson heads as well as the shattered gray sheet that was the prepared field of granite for the TR carving. The good rock is gone. The shards of brow, ear, fragment of nose left of Washington and Jefferson will be ruins forever, but there is not enough rock for any more carving. And now none at all for the entire Teddy Roosevelt site.

Amid the noise and rock-shrapnel and burgeoning dust cloud, Paha Sapa has seized the borrowed binoculars to get a last glance of Gutzon Borglum and the guests on Doane Mountain.

Paha Sapa has calculated wrong. Rocks larger than his fist, larger than his head, are ripping through pine trees and aspen foliage to crash among the crowd like so many meteorites from space.

Those who were standing have already fled like victims at Pompeii or Herculaneum, running across the parking lot, forgetting their cars in their panic. Those trapped in the closer reviewing stands are huddled on the wooden planks, husbands trying to shield their wives from falling debris, the white cloud almost to them now, and heavier rocks from the TR granite field blast beginning to fall. Paha Sapa sees Senator Norbeck standing, his towel blown away by successive shock waves and his cancer-ravaged jaw and chin and neck looking like a bloody preview of things to come for the others.

And the president…

Paha Sapa’s bowels clench at the thought.

He had almost forgotten, until the presidential touring car with its special hand controls pulled up, that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a cripple, unable even to stand without steel braces locking his wasted, withered legs in place and unable even to pretend to walk without someone next to him bearing his full weight. The president of the United States can’t run.

But in the three seconds he looks down there, before the expanding dust cloud and the final explosions eliminate his view forever, Paha Sapa sees a Secret Service man who was looking toward the reviewing stand and crowd, his back to the seated president and to Mount Rushmore, turn and leap into the driver’s seat of the powerful touring car, jam its gears into reverse, and roar backward away from the falling debris and approaching cloud, almost running over Governor Tom Berry as he does so. The roar of the car’s engine is audible even amid the explosions and screams and avalanches of rock. The president’s head is still thrown back almost jauntily, his smile replaced by a look of great interest if not wonder (but not horror, Paha Sapa notices), his eyes still fixed on the death of his four stone predecessors on the cliff above.

Gutzon Borglum, on the other hand, stands where he was, legs apart, his fists on his hips, staring at the approaching cloud of grit and dust and flying rock like a pugilist whose turn it is to await his opponent’s blow.

The Abraham Lincoln Head explodes above and around Paha Sapa.

Reacting from some atavistic survival instinct, he throws himself flat on the narrow ridge even as the cliff comes apart above and beneath him.

Lincoln’s heavy brow comes loose in one piece and falls past Paha Sapa, just feet away, with a horrible mass greater than a house, heavier than a battleship. The pupils of Lincoln’s eyes—carved granite rods three feet long that give the appearance of a real eye pupil glinting from a distance below—go firing across the valley like granite rockets, one cutting through the mushrooming dust cloud to pierce Borglum’s studio like a spear.

Lincoln’s nose also severs in one piece and takes off a seven-foot stretch of the ledge just inches away from Paha Sapa’s outstretched and wildly gripping fingers.

The next two blasts deafen Paha Sapa and throw him six feet into the air. He lands half off the ledge, legs dangling over hundreds of feet of empty, dust-filled air, but the bleeding fingers of his left hand find a rim and he grips and grunts and scrambles back up amid the pelting of rock bits and blasts of unspeakable noise. His shirt and work pants have been ripped to shreds. He is bleeding in a hundred spots from rock splinter strikes, and his right eye is swollen shut.

But he is alive and—illogically, treacherously, hypocritically—he fights to stay on the collapsing ledge amid the chaos and to stay alive.

How can this be?

The final crate of dynamite is inches from his face. It should have gone off with the others. Has the delay fuse in the detonator been damaged?

Paha Sapa’s survival instincts tell him to shove the crate off the ledge before it does explode. Let it join the exploding, sliding, roiling, dust-clouded chaos below. In that fraction of a second, Paha Sapa confronts the full extent of his cowardice: he’d rather die from being hanged in a few weeks than be blown to atoms right now.

But he does not push the crate over the edge of the avalanching cliff.

Instead, Paha Sapa tears his nails as he claws the boards off the top of the crate. He has to know why it hasn’t detonated.

The reason, he sees through the enclosing, choking dust, is that there is no dynamite in the crate—not a single stick—although there was the night before when he hid this final crate here and carefully attached the interior detonator and detonator box wires.

There is just a single slip of paper.

Paha Sapa sees his name written on it and the few sentences scrawled beneath, the words not quite legible in the swirling dust, but the handwriting quite recognizable. There is no doubt as the dust occludes everything and shuts off Paha Sapa’s breathing as well as vision. The note is written in his son Robert’s bold but careful script.

The ledge beneath him gives way.

PAHA SAPA SNAPS AWAKE.

Sleeping, dozing… impossible! A second Vision? No. No. Absolutely not. Just a dream. No. How could… one can’t fall asleep in the middle of… three nights with no sleep, the long days of work, the heat. Long Hair’s ghost babbling, lulling him. No, not possible. Wait, what has he missed?

The Will Rogers twang of Governor Tom Berry is just wrapping up. The loudspeaker echoes off itself and the three intact Heads, the intact rock field where TR is meant to rise. Borglum begins to speak. The red flag is in his hand again… no, for the first time.

Paha Sapa wonders if he has died. Perhaps Hamlet was right—to sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub. Death would be welcome if it were dreamless, but to live this over and over in dreams…

Borglum is explaining that we—the royal we, the unnamed sixty workers and he—use dynamite to clear the surface rock but do all the actual carving by hand.

My ass, thinks Paha Sapa. He looks down. The cables are not connected to the detonators. The dream hangs on him like a wet, dead chimpanzee. His head pounds with pain and he feels as though he might have to vomit over the rim of the ledge… the ledge that crumbled under him only seconds ago. The vertigo still inhabits his inner ear and belly.

Borglum is raising the red flag.

Paha Sapa threads the wires, wraps them, presses down the Bakelite covers. His scarred, blunted hands have done this a thousand times, and he allows them to do it now without his intervention. The only intrusion he allows his mind is to check the color of the cables. Black. The demonstration charge. Wired, the voltage cranked up in four turns to the right, safety clicked left and off, plunger raised against the drag of coil. Paha Sapa keeps his right hand on the plunger and raises the binoculars with his left hand.

Unlike in the dream, Gutzon Borglum does not turn his back on the president or wave the red flag dramatically, as if he were a flagman at the Indianapolis 500. Borglum’s left arm is along the back of the president’s car seat, his body half turned toward the president, eyes lifted to the cliff, as he casually lets the flag drop.

BAM, BAM, BAMBAMBAM.

Paha Sapa has no physical memory of pushing the detonator box plunger, but it is pushed, the charges fired as fused.

To Paha Sapa’s blast-deafened ears, these quarter-charge reports are more like rifle shots than dynamite blasts. The amount of rock blown out is purely symbolic, the dust cloud negligible. But the audience below applauds. Oddly, President Roosevelt offers his hand to Borglum and the two men shake as if the outcome of the blast had been in question.

There is movement above Paha Sapa. Lincoln Borglum and his workers have swung the boom, lifted the flag. Thomas Jefferson ponders the blue sky. The sounds of the real applause and the delayed and overlapping amplified applause pitter-patter on the stone faces above and around Paha Sapa.

Borglum has leaned close to the microphone again. His tone is imperative; he is giving the president of the United States a direct order:

—I want you, Mr. President, to dedicate this memorial as a shrine to democracy; to call upon the people of the earth for one hundred thousand years to come to read the thought and to see what manner of men struggled here to establish self-determined government in the western world.

Applause again. Everything sounds very, very far away to Paha Sapa, whose hands are threading and wrapping the bare leads of the gray-painted cable to the terminals of the second detonator box. Borglum’s phrasing—“to call upon the people of the earth”—sounds familiar, derivative, to Paha Sapa as he cranks the detonator four times to the right, building the charge. Yes, he knows… it echoes the translated opening to the Berlin Olympic Games earlier this month: I call upon the youth of the world…

And it is just like Borglum to mention not the faces he’s not even finished carving, but the “shrine of democracy” and all its reading material tucked away in the Hall of Records that’s now just a test bore in the unknown canyon behind the heads.

One hundred thousand years of wasichu domination of the Black Hills. He pulls the detonator plunger up against its friction until it clicks into place. Ready.

FDR was not scheduled or invited to speak—Paha Sapa cannot remember if Abraham Lincoln had been invited to speak at Gettysburg (Robert could tell him), but he knows that the sixteenth president hadn’t been the main speaker, and now this thirty-second president was not invited to speak at all—but, overcome with emotion or politics (just as Paha Sapa expected), Franklin Delano Roosevelt reaches out and pulls the heavy circle of the microphone closer.

The familiar tones from radio, the reassuring cadence—still sounding as if it is on radio due to the speakers and echoes—blasts up and out from Doane Mountain to Mount Rushmore and then to the world.

—… I had seen the photographs, I had seen the drawings, and I had talked with those who are responsible for this great work, and yet I had no conception, until about ten minutes ago, not only of its magnitude, but also its permanent beauty and importance.

… I think that we can perhaps meditate on those Americans of ten thousand years from now… meditate and wonder what our descendants—and I think they will still be here—will think about us. Let us hope… that they will believe we have honestly striven every day and generation to preserve a decent land to live in and a decent form of government to operate under.

The applause is louder now and Paha Sapa can hear it before the speakers echo it around him. There are some cheers from the mostly Republican crowd. Paha Sapa lifts the binoculars again and catches FDR turning away from the beaming Borglum and waving that oft-parodied wave to the crowd, the magnificent head back, the grin locked and lacking only the cigarette holder and cigarette to make it whole. Paha Sapa sees that poor Senator Norbeck’s towel has slipped—the dream tries to slide in with its sickening reality—but the cancer-mauled creator and protector of Mount Rushmore is smiling a corpse’s smile.

Time seems to twist out from under Paha Sapa. Has he dozed again? Is he going mad? He lifts the sun-heated binoculars.

Borglum is leaning almost casually against the touring car. The sun has heated that metal as well and Paha Sapa can see how Borglum is using his white sleeves to protect his arms against the burning steel (is it bulletproof?) of the car’s black door. More VIPs are milling around the automobile now and frowning Secret Service men hold some back.

The microphone has been removed—or, rather, radio announcers are babbling into theirs, but the speakers here are not carrying their broadcasts—so there is no way that Paha Sapa can hear what the president and the Boss are saying. But he does.

Roosevelt’s voice is relaxed, satisfied, genuinely curious.

—Where are you going to put Teddy?

Borglum half turns and points to the left of Paha Sapa as he explains that the TR head will go in that lighter-granite area between Jefferson and the emerging Lincoln head.

—I have it all planned out in my studio.

Borglum is inviting the president up to the studio—right then. It would be like Borglum to expect the president of the United States to accept the impromptu invitation and to hang around while Borglum grills some steaks for everyone later.

Roosevelt is smiling and speaking.

—I will come back someday to look this over more fully.

Borglum is smiling and nodding, obviously believing FDR. Paha Sapa knows his boss, literally inside and out. How could someone not want to return to Mount Rushmore? Besides, there are so many more dedications ahead—the Abraham Lincoln head, probably next year in 1937, then Teddy Roosevelt, of course, by 1940 if Borglum’s schedule is kept to (and Paha Sapa knows that Borglum also expects Franklin Roosevelt to remain president for three or four more terms, at least), and then the Hall of Records before 1950 or so…

Paha Sapa looks up, squinting into the sunlight. Lincoln Borglum and his men have folded the huge flag away, secured the boom arm and pulleys, and have left for the staircase. Lincoln had better hurry if he wants to be introduced… the fringes of the crowd are breaking up, the VIPs have left their seats, the president’s Secret Service men and aides are clearing a path for the automobile.

This is the time, Paha Sapa realizes. Now. This second.

The detonator box is between his knees, the plunger still raised.

He is still sitting that way an hour later when he raises his head, lifts the binoculars, and looks down.

Almost everyone is gone. The president’s car is long gone. The parking lot is almost empty. The reviewing stand is being dismantled.

There’s motion above Paha Sapa and he looks up to see Gutzon Borglum dropping toward him. Of all the hundred or so workers who’ve learned to move across the face and faces of Mount Rushmore, no one floats with a lighter or surer touch than Gutzon Borglum.

The Boss drops to the ledge and steps out of the bosun’s chair and safety harness. He looks down at the detonator box still secured and armed between Paha Sapa’s knees.

—I knew you wouldn’t do it. Where did you hide the dynamite crates?

Keeping his right hand on the plunger, Paha Sapa points out the various hiding places on and under and around the various faces.

Borglum shakes his head—he is wearing his broad-brimmed hat, the red kerchief is still around his neck—and sits on the ledge, propping one powerful forearm on his knee.

Paha Sapa has to fight the hollowness in him in order to speak at all.

—How long have you known what I was going to do?

Borglum shows his nicotine-stained teeth.

—Don’t you know? I’ve always known what you were planning to do, Paha Sapa. But I’ve also always known you wouldn’t do it.

The statement makes no sense but Paha Sapa has the urge to ask the Boss how he learned his, Paha Sapa’s, true name. The detonator is still fully charged. The plunger is still raised.

—Paha Sapa, you remember our meeting in the Homestake Mine. The handshake?

—Of course.

Paha Sapa’s voice sounds as weak and hollow and defeated as he feels.

—You’re so damned arrogant, Old Man Black Hills. You think you’re the only person in the world with the gift you have. Well… you’re not. You got those bits of my past when we shook hands that day—I felt them flow into you—but I got bits of your past and future. This day has been as clear to me as our shared memories of you counting coup on Custer or the face of your tunkašila.

Paha Sapa looks at Borglum and blinks and tries to understand this but cannot. Borglum laughs, but not cruelly, not out of some victory. It’s a tired but strangely satisfied sound.

—You know, Paha Sapa, that doctor you snuck off to see in Casper is a damned quack. Everyone knows that. You need to see my doctor in Chicago.

Paha Sapa has no reply to that. Borglum looks up at the Washington head, then at Jefferson, then at the white field of granite that will be Teddy Roosevelt.

—I think the president was really impressed. Now I’ve got to go beg the Park Service for another hundred thousand dollars so that I can finish everything. They’ll think that I’m lying when I say I can get everything done with only a hundred thousand bucks, and they’ll be right… but it’ll keep us going.

Borglum cranes his red-kerchiefed neck to look up at Abraham Lincoln looming over them.

—One of the things I saw that day in the mine, Paha Sapa, is that in nineteen forty-one I’ll… well, we’ll see if that comes true. I believed in all the rest, but I don’t have to believe in that if I don’t want to. Shall we take those damned contact wires off now?

Paha Sapa says nothing as Borglum undoes the wires from the detonator box terminals. The Boss tosses the gray-painted cables aside and then sets the detonator box gently next to the other one. In his place, Paha Sapa might have tossed the detonator over the side of the cliff, but the boxes are expensive and Borglum is a man who watches every penny when he can. Not in his own life, of course, but for the Mount Rushmore job.

With the detonator harmless, Paha Sapa finally can speak again.

—Are the police on the way, Mr. Borglum? Waiting below?

Borglum looks at him.

—You know there are no police waiting, Paha Sapa. But I need you to tell my son where all the crates of dynamite are. Are they usable on the job?

—Most are. I have some more crates in the shed next to my house that aren’t so good. Someone should check those and get rid of them.

Borglum nods. He pulls a second and smaller red handkerchief from his pocket and mops the sweat from his forehead.

—Yeah, Lincoln will take care of those too. We’ll check the sticks in these boxes and store them up in the powder shed for now. You going to take a little vacation… go away for a little while?

Paha Sapa understands nothing.

—You’ll let me go?

Borglum shrugs. Paha Sapa realizes, not for the first time, how powerful the sculptor’s hands, forearms, shoulders, and personality are.

—It’s a free country. You’re overdue for a real vacation. I’m gonna have the boys work on the Lincoln head here through September and start the serious honeycombing for Teddy Roosevelt in October. But when you come back, I’ll have a job for you.

—You have to be kidding.

The quality of Borglum’s grin and gaze shows that he is not.

—I don’t think you should be powderman anymore, Old Man, although I know it’d be all right if you were. I thought maybe you should work with Lincoln on supervising the drilling and bumping on the TR head, then work with the second team to start the serious work on the Hall of Records and the Entablature. We’ll talk about it when you get back from vacation.

They stand then, both men easy on the narrow ledge with nothing between them and two hundred feet of clear air other than their experience and sense of balance. The long August day is shading into a golden evening that—suddenly, sharply, inexplicably—feels more like the benediction of autumn than the constant test of endlessly blazing summer.

Borglum is slipping into his bosun’s chair and safety strap and Paha Sapa looks up to see a second bosun’s chair dropping down for him on its almost invisible steel wire.