Black Hills

Chapter 24 Along the Greasy Grass

PAHA SAPA HAS THE SIDECAR LOADED AND IS READY TO LEAVE at dawn, but Lincoln Borglum and a work crew show up early to check out the extra stored dynamite and transport it elsewhere. The younger Borglum knows what’s going on and acts embarrassed, almost apologetic, but powdermen Clyde “Spot” Denton and Alfred Berg, as well as Red Anderson, Howdy Peterson, Palooka Payne, and the other men carrying the crates out to the waiting truck are just confused.

It’s Red who asks the question.

—Where you goin’, Billy?

Paha Sapa tells the truth.

—Home.

He’s dug up the coffee can from the backyard so he has all his remaining money in the sidecar. He’s also loaded everything else he’ll need for the rest of his life—some food for the trip, a change of clothes, the oversized leather jacket Robert left for him when he went in the Army, and the loaded Colt revolver.

Lincoln Borglum offers to shake hands and although it confuses Paha Sapa, he sees no reason not to do it. Then he kicks the motorcycle alive and drives down the hill to the highway that runs through Keystone.

First he stops at the blacksmith shop to fill the bike’s gas tank. Gene Turnball, bustling around with his one dead eye, says chattily—

—Didja hear that Mune Mercer killed hisself last night?

Paha Sapa pauses in the act of checking the oil.

—Mune? How?

—He was blind drunk over to Deadwood when he left Number Nine and drove a car off that bad curve above the Homestake. Flinny said it rolled over an’ over for three, four hundred feet before it come to a stop on the talus there. Mune wasn’t even throwed out—and it was a topless roadster—but it took his head clean off.

—Mune didn’t have a roadster. He didn’t have any car.

—That’s true. He stole it from his drinkin’ buddy at Number Nine, that big Polack who works in the mine, you know who I mean, the mean one with the sister who’s real popular at Madame Delarge’s, and Flinny said the Polack’s really pissed off about it.

Well, thinks Paha Sapa as he pays his thirty cents and drives out of town for the last time, my little conspiracy claimed a life after all.

INSTEAD OF HEADING DOWN TO RAPID CITY, Paha Sapa drives west and then north through the Black Hills a final time. This takes him past Mount Rushmore, and he pauses just once, west of the Monument at the point where the road curves and only George Washington’s head is visible almost straight above the highway. Paha Sapa has always thought that this was the best view of the Monument.

Except for some lumber trucks, the roads are almost empty all the way to Lead. The air is cooler today—it’s not just the speed of his passage, he’s sure, since the old motorcycle rarely gets above forty miles per hour—and somehow the sunlight has shifted from end-of-summer to early-autumn illumination in just a day. From Lead he takes the canyon down to Spearfish and the sound of the Harley-Davidson J’s little engine pangs echoes off the steep canyon walls on either side.

Beyond Spearfish (where Paha Sapa always imagines the fat trout in the hatchery having nightmares of Calvin Coolidge’s return), he heads north toward Belle Fourche but turns left on unpaved Highway 24 before he gets to that little town. The tiny white sign that tells him that he’s entered Wyoming is illegible because of the rifle bullet holes and shotgun pellet splatters.

He’s come this way rather than heading straight to Montana because he wants to see Mato Tepee—what the wasichu have named “Devil’s Tower”—again. He brought Robert there on one of their summer camping trips when the boy was eight.

The 867-foot promontory with its broad, flat top and deeply ribbed sides—it looks like a fossilized tree stump in the scale of the Wasichu Stone Giants—is most sacred to the Kiowa, who call it T’sou’a’e or “Aloft on a Rock,” but all the tribes have borrowed the Kiowa’s story of how the giant bear chased seven sisters to the top of the tree stump after the wagi of the stump said “Climb on me” to them. Once the girls were on the ordinary stump, the stump began to grow, the gigantic bear pawing and clawing wildly at them, leaving the vertical grooves that one could still see on the huge rock formation.

Of course, the girls could not come down while the bear was there (and the bear would not leave), so Wakan Tanka allowed the seven sisters to ascend into the sky, where they became the seven-star formation known by wasichus as the Pleiades. (Although some Kiowa insist to this day that the sisters became the seven stars of the Big Dipper. Kiowa, Paha Sapa has always thought, make up in imagination what they lack in consistency.)

Paha Sapa and Robert visited Mato Tepee in 1906, the year President Teddy Roosevelt anointed the tower as America’s first national monument. Not only the Kiowa but the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Crow tribes formally objected to this, but the Park Service—which controlled all access to the formerly sacred site—hired an anthropologist who proclaimed (Paha Sapa remembers reading the announcement in the Rapid City Journal just two years earlier, in 1934), “It is extremely unlikely that any one tribe has been in the area of Devil’s Tower National Monument for a sufficiently long time to have occupied an important place in their lives or their religion and mythology.”

Paha Sapa smiled at that and could imagine how Limps-a-Lot would have laughed aloud at the idea. Not only did that stone tower go back generations in most of the tribes’ storytelling—Limps-a-Lot had told Paha Sapa and the other boys no fewer than ten differing stories about the seven sisters and the place—but that anthropologist had not appreciated, as Limps-a-Lot and even Robert had, how quickly the Natural Free Human Beings and other bands could create new mythology about any new habitat they found themselves in and then insert that mythology—or new view of reality—as central to their thinking.

There is, shockingly, a gate on the dirt road leading to the tower now and a man in a park uniform and WWI campaign-style hat demanding fifty cents for entry. But Paha Sapa turns around and drives away. He saw enough of the tower as he approached and he’ll be damned if he’ll pay the same price to see a rock outcropping that looks like a giant tree stump as he once paid to get into the World’s Fair.

He has to backtrack a bit to take county roads that are no more than two ruts in the prairie north to intersect Highway 212 in Montana. Here on the ruts there are no signs at all to notify him when he has left Wyoming and entered Montana somewhere beyond a town (consisting of one store with a gas pump) called Rockypoint.

Paha Sapa stops at a dirt crossroads to buy a Coca-Cola where one building in the midst of endless prairie and distant hills shows how empty this part of Wyoming-Montana truly is. All the money from the coffee can bank, the bills now wedged in his back pocket, makes him feel rich.

The boy behind the counter is a dull-seeming wasichu and when he takes Paha Sapa’s nickel, he leans across the splintered wood counter and whispers conspiratorially—

—Hey, Chief, you wanna see something really intrestin’?

Paha Sapa drinks the Coca-Cola in one head-back glug. The day’s driving and all the dust that is Wyoming have made him thirsty. The boy had whispered, so he whispers back—

—Don’t tell me… a two-headed calf.

—Naw, better’n that. This is history-like intrestin’. Nobody but us who live here know about it.

History. Paha Sapa is a sucker for history. Also, he realizes, he is a victim of it. (But so is everyone else.)

—How much? And how long will it take to see it?

—’Nuther nickel. And it’s just a couple minutes walk, ten tops.

Feeling rich in his last days, Paha Sapa slides two nickels across the counter, one for history and the second for another cold Coca-Cola.

It’s actually about a fifteen-minute walk behind the store. The boy seems to have a coordination problem and walks like a poorly handled marionette, arms and legs all akimbo, booted feet lurching out at random, but he manages to lead Paha Sapa across a field where two bulls watch them with lethal intent in their eyes, then over a barbed-wire fence and up a small hill with a few pine trees at the top, then down a slope toward a broad low-grass valley.

—There she is. Somethin’, huh?

For a moment Paha Sapa thinks it’s the retarded boy’s idea of a joke, but then he sees the old tracks and gouges in the lowest part of the valley, the old wagon wheel ruts stretching from the low ridge on the eastern horizon to an even lower ridge far to the west.

The boy puts his thumbs behind his suspenders and becomes an avatar of civic pride.

—Them’s General George Armstrong Custer’s wagon ruts, Chief. From when he brought the Seventh Cavalry through here a long, long time ago with wagons, cattle, cannons, extra horses, even had his wife along, I hear tell…. Hell, it musta been a real circus. Wouldn’t ya’ve liked to have seen it?

—It was worth the nickel, son. That Custer sure did get around.

Paha Sapa drinks the last of his second Coca-Cola and hurls the bottle out across the Spanish bayonet and other spindly shrubs toward the distant wagon ruts.

The kid screams—Hey!—and goes running after the bottle, bringing it back up the hill like a faithful if slightly glowering, uncoordinated, and dumber-than-usual Labrador retriever.

—That’s a penny deposit, Chief.

PAHA SAPA CAMPS that night just off the road in a high, wooded plateau in the forty-mile empty stretch of Montana between Epsie and Ashland. He’s certain that this long north-south pine-covered plateau will be a national forest, if it’s not already, and that it will be named after Custer.

He’s brought no tent, but folded on the floor of the motorcycle’s sidecar is a ground tarp and another, waterproof tarp to rig as a lean-to if it rains. This night is warm and cloudless. The moon is just past full and, although it rises late, it ruins his star counting. He realizes that this is the same full moon by which he’s recently danced weightless across the face of Mount Rushmore, placing his dynamite charges. That event seems more lost in history to him than the Custer wagon ruts he paid good cash to see. Somewhere north in the forest of pines or the adjoining high prairie, coyotes begin howling. Then a single, deeper, more terrifying howl—it sounds like a wolf to Paha Sapa, although Montana has fewer and fewer wolves these days—and all the coyotes fall silent.

Paha Sapa remembers Doane Robinson discussing the ancient Greek maxim of the agon—of how life separates everything into categories of equal to, lesser than, or greater than. The coyotes honor the agon with their craven silence. Paha Sapa knows how they feel.

Seeking more pleasant if still painful thoughts, he remembers how the full moon looked over the huge black silhouette of Mato Tepee when he and Robert camped there in the summer of 1906, and how late he and his eight-year-old son talked into those nights. Perhaps that was the summer when Paha Sapa fully realized how gifted his son truly was.

When he sleeps this night, Paha Sapa has a single dream. In the dream, he is on the ledge at Mount Rushmore again, with Abraham Lincoln’s head exploding and disintegrating around him, the ledge under him crumbling, but this time he can read the note in the otherwise empty dynamite crate.

It is Robert’s handwriting, of course, and the message is short—

Father—

I would have caught the Spanish Flu even if I’d gone to Dartmouth or stayed home with you. As it was, I was with brave friends of mine at the end and I fulfilled my destiny of meeting the loveliest of all girls. The flu would have found me anywhere. The girl might not have. It’s important that you understand that. Mother agrees with me.

Paha Sapa is weeping when he awakens from the dream. Later, he is not sure whether it was seeing Robert’s signature again that made him weep in his sleep or the painfully, malignantly hopeful “Mother agrees with me.”

HIS MORNING DRIVE west through low, rolling hills dotted with scrub pine and intervals of low-grass prairie too dry to support cattle soon takes him into the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. All reservation Indians, in his experience, are sullen and suspicious of outsiders—he certainly was during his years at Pine Ridge—and the ancient Cheyenne clerk when he stops at the only store in Busby to buy bologna confirms that experience, even though the Cheyenne and Sioux have gotten along better than most. Just beyond Busby, he knows, he’ll be entering the large Crow Agency for the rest of his trip (the rest of his life, he thinks and bats the pathetic, sorry-for-himself thought aside), and the Crows and Lakota have not gotten along, historically speaking. He knows that reservation sullenness will turn to open animosity in Crow country and hopes that he won’t have to stop anywhere there.

A little clerkly sullenness doesn’t matter to Paha Sapa. He’s only about thirty miles from his destination. He can carry out his plan long before the sun goes down. For some reason, it’s important to him that it still be daylight.

But a few miles beyond Busby, the Harley’s engine seizes and stops. Paha Sapa parks it in the low grass off the road, sets out the ground tarp, and slowly strips the engine down to its component parts; he is in no hurry and working on the motorcycle always reminds him of the hours and nights and Sundays he spent rebuilding this machine with Robert.

Hours pass as Paha Sapa sits in the sunlight next to the gray-painted motorcycle, carefully setting out the pieces on the tarp in their proper order and relation to one another: intake valves, rocker arms, the delicate springs, the spark plug (fairly new), the heads of the intake ports, the cylinder heads themselves, then the camshaft… placing each in its proper spot, ready for rebuilding even if he were blindfolded as Robert must have learned to field-strip his Model 1917 American Enfield bolt-action rifle, learning each piece by feel as well as by sight, taking care not to allow dust to gather on the oiled and greased pieces or to get into the interior.

The problem is with the right cylinder of the little 61-cubic-inch V-twin engine. The rod bearing between the piston connecting rod and the crankshaft has burned out and split in two.

Paha Sapa sighs. There was a rudimentary garage, another former blacksmith shop, attached to the cluttered and smelly one-room general store back in tiny Busby, but even if the garage were still a blacksmith shop, he couldn’t engineer his own bearing. He’ll need a replacement.

His highway map shows no town at all ahead of him, westward into hostile Crow country as he still thinks of it, so he replaces the parts he can, sets the broken bearing, piston, and connecting rod in a bag in the sidecar, and pushes the motorcycle the four miles back to Busby in the grasshopper-leaping heat. Two old cars pass him, both driven by Indian men, but neither stops to offer help or a ride. They can see that he’s an outsider.

Back in Busby—Paha Sapa sees a few houses off to the north of the highway, no trees, and guesses the population of Busby to be somewhere around a hundred souls—the mechanic in the general store–garage is the same old man who grudgingly sold him the bologna earlier. The Cheyenne has to be in his eighties and admits, when asked, that his name is John Strange Owl but quickly informs Paha Sapa that he will answer only to “Mr. Strange Owl.” Mr. Strange Owl studies the parts that Paha Sapa has set out on the only clean expanse of the filthy garage bench and solemnly reports to Paha Sapa that the problem with the machine is a burned-out and broken rod bearing. Paha Sapa thanks him for the diagnosis and wonders when he might get a replacement. Mr. Strange Owl has Paha Sapa wait while the old Cheyenne confers with two other old men and a teenager who’ve been hollered in to help deal with the crisis.

All right, Mr. Strange Owl announces at last, for something as exotic as this Harley-Davidson J V-Twin machine, they’ll have to send not just to Garryowen or the warehouse at Crow Agency or even to Hardin, but all the way to Billings to get a bearing. And since Tommy don’t go to Billings except on Friday mornings, and this being Tuesday and all, they won’t get the bearing back ’til Friday evening, probably around suppertime, and Mr. Strange Owl closes up exactly at five, every day, no exception, and never opens the store or garage on Saturdays or Sundays, no matter how much folks around Busby fuss and want him to, so it’ll be Monday, September seventh (today is the first of September), before Mr. Strange Owl and young Russell and maybe John Red Hawk here, who owned a motorsickle once, can get around to working on it.

Paha Sapa nods his understanding.

—Is there a bus that comes through here? I’m just going thirty miles or so to the Little Big Horn battlefield.

—What the hell do you want to go to a battlefield for? Nothing there. Not even a restaurant.

Paha Sapa smiles as if sharing in the understanding of how totally foolish that goal would be.

—Is there a bus, Mr. Strange Owl?

There is. It comes through every Saturday on its way from Belle Fourche to Billings. It doesn’t stop at the old battlefield, though. Why would it? But it takes on mail at Crow Agency headquarters, just down the road from the battlefield.

—Do you think anyone here would like to earn a dollar by driving me to the Little Big Horn sooner than Saturday?

There is much earnest conversation about this, but in the end the three old men decide that Tommy Counts the Crows is really the only one who can or would want to drive anyone to the battlefield, and that would have to be during his regular run to Hardin and Billings on Friday, three days from now, and Tommy will probably have to charge three dollars for that, not one dollar, and does Mr. Slow Horse want to sell the broken motorcycle for… oh, say… ten dollars? Odds are good, the Northern Cheyenne old men and boy agree, that the Harley-Davidson can’t be fixed at all. A burned-out bearing’s a terrible thing and who knows what trouble it’s already caused in the rest of that old engine? Mr. Strange Owl might see his way clear to paying the ten dollars for the broken motorcycle and have Tommy Counts the Crows drive the Lakota stranger to Crow Agency for only one dollar, not three.

Paha Sapa suggests that he pay the three dollars to use some of Mr. Strange Owl’s tools and to rent space inside the closed garage on Friday evening after Tommy Counts the Crows gets back with his bearing. Mr. Strange Owl thinks that three dollars for the use of his tools is fair, but the rental of the garage space and use of its electric lights would require another two dollars.

Impressed by the old fart’s negotiating ability, Paha Sapa asks—

—Do you know, by any chance, Mr. Strange Owl, if the Lost Tribe of the Israelites happen to have wandered to this place and settled in Busby, Montana?

The three old men and teenager do not understand this query at all but it’s evident in the looks they exchange that they’ve already decided that their uninvited Sioux guest is crazy.

Paha Sapa confirms the diagnosis by laughing.

—Never mind. I agree to pay the five dollars for the use of the tools and garage space and lights on Friday night.

Mr. Strange Owl’s loud, wheezing voice reminds Paha Sapa of the kind of bellows that once worked in this very space when the garage was a blacksmith shop.

—And don’t forget the price of the bearing itself, plus, of course, the dollar to Tommy for fetching it all the way from Billings.

—Of course. Is there any place here I might be able to stay the three nights before Tommy goes to get the bearing in Billings?

This conference among the three old and one young Cheyenne is much shorter than the earlier ones. No one in Busby, it turns out, wants to board a Sioux, Paha Sapa is told without a hint of apology, not even for cash money, but Mr. Strange Owl informs him that there is a creek just down the road with some cottonwoods if Mr. Slow Horse would like to camp there. There’ll be no charge for the campsite. But Mr. Slow Horse has to promise not to shit or piss in or near the creek, because, you know, people in Busby use that water.

Paha Sapa makes a solemn promise to avoid shitting or pissing within fifty yards of their stream and gathers his tarps, jacket, canteen, and leather gladstone valise from the sidecar. He buys an extra loaf of bread and a flashlight from Mr. Strange Owl in the general-store side of the garage. He noted the creek bed—almost dry this time of year—and the picket line of dying cottonwoods as he went over the tiny bridge both while driving west and then when pushing the motorcycle back east earlier today. It’s not even a half-mile walk, and he has hours before sunset.

Walking west toward the lowering sun, Paha Sapa knows in his heart that the sensible thing to do is just keep walking—hitchhike if anyone will stop for him on the Crow reservation to the west, but just keep walking if no one does. It’s only twenty-five or thirty miles to the battlefield. He can walk through the cool of the night, taking a little care to watch for snakes that come out to soak up the warmth of the dirt and gravel on the road, and be at Greasy Grass by tomorrow afternoon. He’s walked farther than that in one spell of steady day-and-night walking many, many times in his seventy-one years and in conditions far worse than this straight road in the pleasant weather so early in the Moon of the Brown Leaves.

But for some reason, Paha Sapa can’t stand the thought of leaving Robert’s beautiful gray-with-brown-and-orange-trim-and-lettering motorcycle behind to the mercy of Mr. Strange Owl and Mr. Red Hawk and the invisible but threatening Tommy Counts the Crows. And he wonders if the Crows Tommy counts are the flying kind or the sullen reservation kind.

You’ll be leaving the motorcycle behind somewhere in a few days anyway, says a more sensible and less sentimental part of his mind.

Yes, somewhere. But at the battlefield. And at a place of his choosing, not at the burned-out bearing’s choosing. He’s come this far with Robert’s beloved machine, across many miles and almost twenty years of time, and he wants to travel with it the rest of the way.

BY RIGHTS, Paha Sapa should have been restless during his three nights and three days of waiting, so close to his purpose and destination yet so stranded here near a no-place named Busby, but a perverse part of him welcomes the time spent relaxing and thinking and reading along this dried-up excuse for a creek. (What little water there is in the mostly dry streambed lies in puddles and hoofprints—someone around Busby runs cattle—and those few circles of brown stagnant water, it is obvious, have already received their share of excrement and urine. But bovine, not human, so Paha Sapa can understand Mr. Strange Owl’s and the residents of Busby’s concern. For drinking water and for his morning coffee, Paha Sapa has to hike back to the Busby store and pay Mr. Strange Owl two bits to fill his two small canteens at their pump.)

Paha Sapa has found a sheltered place, out of sight of the highway, and rigs his ground tarp and overhead tarp so that he can quickly close up the latter when the rain comes (and his bones tell him it is coming). He makes sure that the site is up and out of the streambed itself so that there will be no surprises if the rain turns into a gully-washer. Anyone who has lived in the West for more than a week, he thinks, would take such precautions.

This thought reminds him of the flooding everywhere that rainiest-in-his-life month of August in 1876, and with that memory comes the wave of guilt and emptiness at the loss of the Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa, the most sacred Buffalo Calf Bone Pipe of his people. The despair and shame are as fresh as if he had lost the pipe yesterday.

And how does he feel after this most recent failure?

In 1925, on the recommendation of Doane Robinson, he read a poem called “The Hollow Men” by a certain T. S. Eliot. He still remembers the final two lines of that poem and they seem to fit his state of mind—

Doane Robinson told him that the bang and whimper in the poem related to the failure of Guy Fawkes’s Gunpowder Plot, whenever that was in English history. (Suddenly he imagines Robert’s voice, the tone always enthusiastic, never pedantic, whispering excitedly—Sixteen oh five, Father. Fawkes and some friends attempted to blow up Parliament, but the barrels of gunpowder were found in the vaults under the House of Lords before Fawkes could set them off, and the final whimper was his, you see, whimpering as he was tortured. His sentence was to be tortured and hanged and drawn and quartered, the hanging first and only to the point where he was almost but not quite dead, but he cheated them from the drawing-out-his-bowels-while-he-was-still-alive part by jumping from the gallows and breaking his own neck.)

—Thank you, Robert…

Paha Sapa whispers to his absent son—

—I needed that to cheer me up.

But joke as he may, he knows that he is one of the Hollow Men now.

Having silently promised his beloved tunkašila that he would protect the sacred Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa with his life, he lost it instead… while fleeing some fat, flea-bitten Crows.

Having promised Limps-a-Lot, Angry Badger, Loud Voice Hawk, and the other wičasa wakan that he would return with word of his Vision, he failed to return in time… failed even to tell them about the Vision. To this day he has never revealed the details of the Wasichu Stone Giant Vision to a single human being other than his wife.

Having promised his beloved wife on her deathbed that he would watch over and care for their son always, swearing to her that he would make sure that Robert became educated and would be happy as a man, he allowed the boy to go into the army and then to war and to die young in a strange land among strangers, his gifts and potential untapped.

Having promised himself that he would deny the Wasichu Stone Giants their destiny of rising from the sacred soil of the Black Hills and wiping out the buffalo while stealing the gods, past, and future of the Ikče Wičas´a and other tribes, Paha Sapa has totally failed at that as well. He couldn’t even manage to dynamite some fucking rock.

There is nothing left to fail at.

Or almost nothing. A week earlier, knowing that he could fail yet a final time, Paha Sapa went to Deadwood and purchased new cartridges for the Colt revolver, then test-fired twelve of them in a remote canyon. Even gunpowder, he knows, becomes weak and useless with age.

But he is tired of whimpering. And it is past time for the bang.

ON THURSDAY EVENING it begins to rain and by midnight it has become the downpour Paha Sapa has been warned about by his aching bones and sinews. He’s rigged the tarps well, high on a spot above the highest watermark of the old stream, the lean-to’s opening facing away from the wind, and the sweet geometry of the two tarps rigged on ropes well out from under the tall cottonwoods where lightning might strike or where heavy rotted-out limbs will fall at the slightest push of wind, and Paha Sapa stays comfortably dry between his blankets as the storm rages through the night.

He’s using this last luxury of the flashlight he bought from Mr. Strange Owl—at twice the price of any flashlight—to read Henry James’s The Ambassadors. Paha Sapa has been checking this book out of the Rapid City library—doggedly, between reading other books—for almost ten years now. He simply can not get through it. It’s not just the meaning of James’s book that eludes Paha Sapa, it’s the meaning of individual sentences themselves. The story itself seems so insignificant, so overblown, so petty and obscure, that Paha Sapa has actually wondered if Henry James tried to hide his complete lack of a tale to tell behind these wandering, convoluted, grammatically and syntactically indecipherable sentences and flurries of words and paragraphs seemingly unattached to thought or human communication. Trying to decode this thing reminds Paha Sapa of his first weeks of confusion and overload while trying to learn to read under the tutelage of the Jesuits at the Deadwood tent school, especially under the patient, never-frustrated guidance of Father Pierre Marie, who—Paha Sapa now realizes with a shock—must have been only around twenty years old when he taught Paha Sapa and the other boys.

But why, Paha Sapa asks himself as the storm attacks his tarp, has he persisted with this one unreadable novel when he’s read hundreds of others so easily? Just give it up.

But Robert admired Henry James and loved this book, so Paha Sapa has continued checking it out of the big library in Rapid City, returning it each time with no more than a few pages conquered. His struggle to finish this book reminds Paha Sapa of what he heard about the battles in the Great War, at least before the Americans (including his son) entered the war near the end: so much life’s energy and so many artillery shells expended for such terribly small patches of murky ground gained.

But the real problem, he thinks as he switches off the flashlight (although he could continue reading by the constant lightning flashes if he wished to), is that he still has to return the book to the library. It’s why he put it in his valise in the first place. He’s not a thief.

Somewhere between here and the Custer battlefield, he has to find a place to buy an envelope and then find a post office. All logic dictates that Mr. Strange Owl’s store should serve both purposes out here, alone as it is in the prairie, but it does not. When Paha Sapa asked to buy a large envelope and a stamp, Mr. Strange Owl stared at him—again—as if the Sioux were crazy.

The lightning flashes, the thunder rolls, and the creek rises, but Paha Sapa sleeps dry and dreamlessly in his well-lashed lean-to, with only the echoing whimpers of tortured Jamesian sentences to disturb his sleep.

ON FRIDAY MORNING the storm is gone and the skies are clear, although the air feels cooler than early September. Paha Sapa packs up his camp and hangs out the tarps in the sunlight to dry while he takes a walk north along the meandering stream.

It strikes him that his world has gotten smaller the older he’s become. When he was a boy, before Greasy Grass and the hard part of his life, Angry Badger’s tiyospaye had wandered together from the Missouri River in the east to Grandmother’s Country in the north to the Grand Tetons and west, then south along the Platte River to the Rocky Mountains, south almost to the Spanish town of Taos, east back a long loop through Kansas and Nebraska, back to the heart of the heart of the world near the Black Hills.

Paha Sapa remembers the sight of the tiyospaye on the move, usually with several other bands for safety’s sake, the warriors ranging ahead on their ponies, the old men and the women walking, the younger children playing and ranging wide to either side of the march, the travois being pulled by the older nags and dogs. Often they would come to a grassy hilltop and see thousands of buffalo stretching off for miles. Other times they would cross a rise to see a mountain range in the mists of distance, knowing that those white peaks in summer would be their destination soon. There were no boundaries to the world of the Ikče Wičas´a then….

“It’s because you murderous Sioux had killed or chased out all the other tribes.”

Paha Sapa stops in surprise. The voice in his head is louder than usual.

—I thought you’d gone away.

“Where would I go? Why would I go? And why are you going where you’re going? Not for me, I hope. It makes no difference to me where you end things.”

—I’m doing nothing for you, Long Hair.

Custer’s irritating laughter echoing in his head, Paha Sapa glances over his shoulder to make sure that none of the local Northern Cheyenne are watching him talking to himself. There is only a single black cow on a nearby hill, watching with that placid, stupid, trusting expression that can only be called bovine.

“Well, good. We were talking about how you Sioux, you peace-loving Sioux who, I’m sure historians will soon be saying if they aren’t already, fought only to defend their lands and families, used to go to war against everything that moved on two legs. And killed everything with four legs as well. Your warfare was as indiscriminate as your old habit of driving hundreds of buffalo off a cliff to enjoy a liver or two.”

It is true, Paha Sapa thinks. He has to smile. The Indian’s enemy, this enemy, knows them—knew them—better than do their wasichu so-called intellectual friends. Every spring and summer and fall, the warriors in Angry Badger’s tiyospaye would paint themselves and ride out to go to war for no more reason than it was time to go to war. A Natural Free Human Being male without someone to fight was simply not a natural free human being. Warring against other tribes and against strangers sometimes seemed necessary, but if it wasn’t necessary, which it so often wasn’t, the fighting would have been pursued anyway. It was necessary for its own sake. It was a break from the women and their talk and the smells and sounds and banality of life in the village, in the lodge, that almost all men looked forward to. It was a test of courage and fighting ability that could be found nowhere else. Most of all, of course, it was fun.

But even as Paha Sapa acknowledges these things to himself, he realizes that Custer is not finished with his rant.

“When the Army called your leaders to that first peace powwow at Fort Laramie in eighteen fifty-one, you Sioux kept talking about territory you’d owned forever but which in reality you’d just taken away from the Arikara and Hidatsa and Mandan on your way west from Canada and Minnesota. You bragged about territory that had belonged to you forever but which really had belonged to the Crows and Pawnee just a few years earlier. You Sioux were a ruthless, relentless invasion machine.”

—We didn’t take all the land away from the Cheyenne.

“Not for want of trying, my red friend. Besides, you liked teaming up with the Cheyenne and Arapaho to kill the Pawnee and the Ponca and Oto and Missouri, all the weaker tribes.”

—They were weak. They deserved to die or lose their lands. That was the thinking then.

“It still is, Paha Sapa. At least among us whites. Look at that Hitler fellow you were reading about when we went to New York three years ago. He knows the price of weakness—his and his enemies’ both. But your so-called Natural Free Human Beings have lost the balls to live and die that way—through your own courage, taking what you want from those too weak to keep it. You’re all fat, slow reservation Indians now, wearing cowboy hats, working for wasichus, and waiting for handouts.”

Paha Sapa has no reply to that. He thinks of his own decades working for the Fat Takers. He thinks of the brash, ambitious, confrontational energy that Gutzon Borglum exudes, breathes in and exhales, and that he knows in none of his own kind any longer, including himself.

“When Mitchell and Fitzpatrick called that original eighteen fifty-one meeting at Fort Laramie, they had to deal with the Cheyenne who killed and scalped two Shoshones whom the Cheyenne had specifically given safe passage to so they could get to the council… ”

The ghost’s voice bores on like one of the pneumatic steam-powered drills that Paha Sapa has listened to most days of his life through the past five years.

“So when Mitchell helped calm things down and convinced the Cheyenne to say they’re sorry and to pay the Shoshones their blood price of knives and blankets and tobacco and colored cloth—all stuff the Cheyenne had received from the whites as bribes just weeks earlier—the Cheyenne couldn’t help but insult the Shoshones again at the peace banquet by serving boiled dog.”

Paha Sapa has to smile.

—Yes, the Shoshone never developed a taste for dog.

“But you did, didn’t you, my friend?”

Paha Sapa remembers well the feasts when he was a boy and the joy of spooning through the kettle with the other boys, searching for the dog’s head. It was a delicacy. Just the memory makes him salivate.

“Eaten any of your neighbors’ puppies in Keystone recently, Paha Sapa?”

—What are you doing, Long Hair? Trying to make me angry?

“Why would I do that? And what are you going to do if I am trying to provoke you… shoot me? Speaking of which, why the Little Big Horn? Why not here? One Montana river or creek is as good as another, isn’t it? And this way at least someone will get the use of the motorcycle. Old Mr. Strange Owl looks like a nice fellow to me… for a Northern Cheyenne, I mean. That greedy old bastard was probably there at the Little Big Horn as a greedy young bastard, fighting alongside your relatives and stealing from my brothers’ mutilated bodies on the day you all killed me.”

Paha Sapa realizes that the ghost is trying to make him angry. He has no idea why.

The ghost-voice continues.

“I have a question for you, Mr. Black Hills. Why didn’t you self-proclaimed Natural Free Noble Human Beings When Others Aren’t Human At All ever rub out—or try to rub out—the Nez Percé or Flatheads or Ute or Plains Cree or Piegan or Bannock or Blackfoot?”

—All the others were too far away or too high in their mountains—although we did try to wipe out some of them—but the Blackfoot are just too tough. They’re scary people, Long Hair. The men will kill you just to take your teeth to gamble with, rolling them on a blanket like dice, and the women will chop off your ce and hang it on their lodge pole as a children’s toy.

The ghost laughs again.

Paha Sapa returns to the campsite, folds up the dry tarps, closes his valise, and walks back to the town of Busby.

HE’S ON THE ROAD by midnight.

Poor Tommy Counts the Crows, assigned by Mr. Strange Owl to make sure that Paha Sapa did not steal anything, had fallen asleep by ten p.m. Paha Sapa made sure the tools were returned to their right places and left the young man sleeping, pushing the rebuilt motorcycle a hundred feet down the road before kick-starting it to life.

The electric headlamp was new to motorcycles in 1916 and Paha Sapa has repaired but never replaced the original one on Robert’s machine. The beam it casts is flickery and not very bright at the best of times. On the road headed west tonight, he would have turned it off completely and navigated by moonlight, except that a solid cloud cover has moved in and the moonlight is too diffused to drive by. It’s still bright enough, however, for Paha Sapa to see that the Crow houses he’s passing on either side of the road tend to be tumbledown hovels and shacks… not so very much different, he decides, from the majority of tumbledown hovels and shacks he saw on the Northern Cheyenne reservation or, for that matter, on Pine Ridge and the other Sioux reservations in South Dakota.

—Long Hair? General? You still here?

“You can call me Colonel. What do you want now? To tell me how tumbledown the shacks and hovels are here in Crow country?”

—No. I wanted to explain to you why I didn’t push the plunger down on Mount Rushmore. But the shacks did make me think of it.

“I know why you didn’t push the plunger down on Mount Rushmore, Paha Sapa. You lost your nerve. But do you have another explanation?”

—The cemetery on Pine Ridge Reservation… the one at the Episcopal mission church and school. The cemetery where Rain and her father are buried.

The ghost says nothing. The purr and putter of the Harley-Davidson J’s rebuilt engine, working perfectly now, is the only sound in the night. It’s cool enough that Paha Sapa is wearing the long leather jacket Robert left him.

Paha Sapa considers not continuing—this ungrateful ghost does not deserve a conversation, much less an explanation—but after a while he goes on:

—Every once in a while some boys… men too, I think… on the reservation would sneak into the cemetery at night and carry out some vandalism there. Most of the crosses and headstones were made of wood, of course, so they just kicked those apart, but a few of the larger headstones—the Reverend de Plachette’s, for instance—were of stone, and the vandals took crowbars or sledgehammers to the stone, smashing it as much as they could, tipping over what they couldn’t smash.

The ghost’s voice sounds weary.

“You didn’t want to be just another cemetery vandal.”

—When I heard both Borglum and the president say that the Mount Rushmore heads would be there for a hundred thousand years, I could imagine the vandalized and broken fragments of the heads being there that long. Every culture honors its dead leaders—you’re honored at this place we’re headed. The thought of being like those vandals who come to the cemetery out of their stupidity and frustration and urge to destroy other people’s remembrances because they’re unable to create anything themselves… it felt wrong.

“Very noble, Paha Sapa. So you’ll let the Wasichu Stone Giants stand astride your sacred Paha Sapa and prairie rather than be a vandal.”

—Your Wasichu Stone Giants have already risen and done what they did to us, Long Hair. Vandalizing Borglum’s life’s work wouldn’t have changed that. Look on either side of the road.

The headlight flickered and danced, illuminating little. But visible in the cloud-filtered moonlight were more shacks with packed dirt for front yards, a huddling of shacks in lieu of a community, filth where high-grass prairie had once grown.

“I know. I came this way in my last days alive, remember? I remember this prairie glistening after morning rains. I remember the flowers stretching from horizon to horizon here, just as the buffalo herds did. You Indians were always filthy in your ways, Paha Sapa. We could smell your garbage heaps from twenty miles away. The only thing that made you look and seem noble was the fact that you could keep moving, leaving your buffalo-run heaps of rotting carcasses and giant mounds of stinking garbage behind you. Then we came and you ran out of room.”

—Yes.

It’s not the truth of it, or at least not all the truth, but Paha Sapa is too weary to argue.

HE REACHES A HARD ROAD—paved—before two a.m. and has seen signs to the battlefield from his road from Busby and now more directing him south along this paved highway. One way or the other, the Custer battlefield is less than a mile to the south and then back a mile or two the way he has come.

The town of Garryowen—obviously named after Custer’s and his regiment’s favorite song—appears to be composed of two houses along the road to the south, and the placed called Crow Agency looks to be composed of three buildings along the road to the north. He turns right and drives the eleven miles north to the little town of Hardin—small, but big enough to have a five-and-dime and a post office. The motorcycle’s tires sound strange to him as they hiss and hum on pavement.

HE DOES NOT GET BACK to the battlefield until almost eleven a.m.

Not wanting to be arrested for vagrancy in Hardin (and, as a strange Indian hanging around a wasichu town in the middle of the night, Paha Sapa knows this is a real possibility even with his motorcycle to show he’s not a hobo freshly hopped from a freight train and with a pocket full of money to back up that argument), after finding the five-and-dime and post office in the darkness, he drove back out of town and down by the river, rolling out of sight behind willows, and lay on the tarp until sunrise. Why he felt he had to do what he is going to do at the battlefield in the daylight rather than in darkness was a mystery even to him, but he knew he was not going out there at night.

Perhaps, he thought wryly as he lay there counting the few stars that deigned to show themselves between the slow-moving clouds, this Indian who has spent most of his life carrying a ghost from that battlefield is afraid of ghosts after all.

Sunrise was a cloudy, milky affair and the air was far cooler than normal for the fifth of September, the breeze chilly enough to send Paha Sapa rummaging in his gladstone for a sweater to slip on under Robert’s wonderful, perfectly aged and faded leather jacket. Unlike Mr. Strange Owl’s emporium in Busby, both the five-and-dime and post office were open on Saturday here in Hardin, but the latter did not open until nine thirty. Before he finally weighed, stamped, and handed James’s The Ambassadors to the postal clerk for mailing back to the Rapid City public library, he had put in a dollar, although he was certain that the overdue fines would be much less than that. Leaving town, he suddenly realized that he was ravenous. He saw Indians—Crow men with their black cowboy hats and distinctive Crow way of walking, half cowboy and half ruptured duck—going into a diner on Main Street. Paha Sapa parked the motorcycle diagonally at the curb alongside the old Model T’s and various jury-rigged attempts at ranch-worthy pickup trucks and went in to have breakfast. He ordered two eggs (sunny-side up), steak (medium rare), pancakes on the side, toast, orange juice, and asked the waitress—also a Crow, but not as sullen as most he’d known—to keep the coffee and maple syrup coming.

“A hearty meal for the condemned man?”

Paha Sapa jumped at the sudden sound of the voice in his ear and looked around. No one was near. Paha Sapa’s lips didn’t visibly move as he answered.

—Something like that. I’m hungry.

“Have you composed your Death Song yet?”

A wave of guilt flowed over Paha Sapa. Lakota warriors were not fanatical about singing their death songs when they had little time to do so before the end—sometimes the death songs were composed by relatives and friends and chanted after the man’s death—but Paha Sapa had no relatives or Lakota friends left alive and he felt that he’d be betraying Limps-a-Lot, who believed in such things, if he didn’t at least try. Often he wondered if Limps-a-Lot had found time to chant his own Death Song before the Hotchkiss guns had opened up.

No personal death songs had occurred to Paha Sapa and none did now in the glow of the largest breakfast he’d eaten in years and five cups of coffee. The only song that came to mind had been one that Limps-a-Lot himself had shared when Paha Sapa was nine or ten years old:

It sounded good. If he thought of nothing else between here and the battlefield only some fifteen miles south, he might try chanting that in his last seconds.

But now he whispered to the ghost—

—Not yet. I’ll think of something.

The ghost’s reply was low and—Paha Sapa realized to his surprise—serious.

“Next to ‘Garry Owen,’ I was always partial to ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me.’ I had the regimental band play it the day we rode out from Fort Abraham Lincoln that last time. It always made some of the troopers and all of the watching, waving wives blubber.”

—Let me get this straight, Long Hair. You want me to chant “The Girl I Left Behind Me” as my Death Song?

“Why not? It sort of applies to both of us, although Rain left you behind rather than the other way around. I left Libbie behind—we both knew it could happen, although I don’t think either one of us really believed it—but she never abandoned me. All those years alone as a widow… ”

Paha Sapa was in a good mood from the giant breakfast—certainly the best breakfast he’d eaten since Rain had died—and he didn’t want it spoiled by morose thoughts, his or his ghost’s.

—Well, I don’t have a regimental band with me today, so I don’t think I’ll try “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”

Then, without thinking about it, he whispered—

—Are you frightened, Long Hair?

Paha Sapa half-expected the irritating boyish laughter, but it did not come.

“Of the bullet in the brain… your brain… no. Not at all. But since you asked, what I’m frightened of is that this magic forty-five-caliber bullet might put you out of your misery forever but won’t kill me—since I am, after all, only a ghost. Imagine still being conscious and thinking and aware, through what’s left of your senses, after they bury your dead and rotting body in the ground… down there in the darkness and loam, with the worms, for how long until the last of your brain is consumed and…”

—All right, all right. Do you want me to leave a note asking that my remains be cremated?

Paha Sapa meant it as a joke, although he was feeling a little ill after the helpful cascade of images, but Long Hair’s ghost evidently took him seriously.

“I’d appreciate it, my friend.”

Paha Sapa shook his head, noticed that other men in other booths had noticed him whispering to himself, left a very large tip, paid his check, and went back to the restroom—the first indoor plumbing he’d had at his disposal in many, many weeks (his shack in Keystone had an outhouse) and a great luxury.

“A hearty bowel movement for the condemned man.”

—Oh, do shut the hell up. I beseech you.

Paha Sapa thought that he had never used the word beseech aloud before, and he felt ridiculous doing so then. But the ghost of General (Colonel at the time of his death) George Armstrong Custer did shut up long enough for Paha Sapa to enjoy the miracle of indoor plumbing.

The restroom was very clean.

IT IS LATE MORNING when he turns off Highway 87—a modern two-lane highway busy with trucks and dark cars—back onto the gravel road he took from Busby. The entrance to the battlefield park runs off to the right of this smaller road. There is a sort of gate at the entrance to the park or monument or whatever it’s become, but no one is there, and Paha Sapa is relieved at that. He spent enough of his life’s savings on the huge breakfast.

Paha Sapa has almost no sense of recogntion as he rides his son’s motorcycle down the narrow strip of road along the ridge where Custer died. Below is the Greasy Grass—what wasichus still call the Little Big Horn—and he can see the giant cottonwoods where the hundreds of lodges of the Sioux and Cheyenne had stretched out of sight around the bend in the valley to the south.

The ghost’s self-imposed silence has not lasted long.

“I do have one regret.”

—Other than getting yourself and a third of your regiment killed, you mean?

Paha Sapa feels sorry he’s thought that even as he thinks it. It’s too late in the game, as the Mount Rushmore workers and baseball players might say, for petty jibes.

The ghost doesn’t seem to have heard.

“I just wish I’d had a chance to drive—ride—whatever you do—this motorcycle you and your boy rebuilt. I rode a bicycle once, but it’s not the same.”

Paha Sapa has to chuckle.

—I can see the whole Seventh Cavalry on Harley-Davidsons.

“We’d need leather jackets. And some sort of new insignia.”

—Skulls, perhaps.

They arrive at what a small sign announces as last stand hill. Paha Sapa parks the motorcycle and starts to take the valise with him but then thinks better of it. He’s put the Colt into a canvas bag with a shoulder strap, but he leaves that in the valise. This isn’t the place. There are three cars parked here: two old Fords and a fancier Chevrolet. He sees a few people in summer linens moving among the white crosses and headstones on the grassy hillside.

Paha Sapa stops at a stone monument put up not long after the battle here. The names of the Seventh Cavalry dead are listed on a bronze plaque burnished gold by age and touch.

“Are we tourists today, Mr. Paha Sapa?”

—I thought you might want to see where you fell.

“I don’t, especially. Besides, my bones aren’t buried there. They moved me to West Point. Libbie’s buried there next to me.”

Paha Sapa looks down across the hillside, opening his vision to the ghost within him. The headstones, not all with names, were set where the men’s mutilated bodies were found and buried where they fell.

Why did he ride up the couloir onto the bluffs with the warriors that day? He can’t really remember. To count coup? Why? As a young wikasa wakan in training, he hadn’t even cared about such things… or so he’d thought.

Paha Sapa goes back to the motorcycle and drives south along the ridgetop, the gravel road barely wider than a walking path. There are no other cars here beyond Last Stand Hill. In ten minutes, the slowly moving motorcycle covers the three or four miles that separated Custer and his men from the rest of the Seventh Cavalry—and rescue. But Reno and Benteen didn’t attempt a rescue, Paha Sapa knows; they merely listened to the shooting go on and on to the north and then, horribly, fall silent. They had their own problems to deal with.

A little sign by a walking path says weir’s ATTEM TO RESC E C TER. Someone has shot the missing letters out with a high-power rifle. Paha Sapa drives on to a gravel parking area where an intact sign reads reno and benteen monument and battlefield.

The ghost’s whisper is almost inaudible even coming from inside Paha Sapa’s head.

“Libbie fought until she died to keep Reno from having a monument or mention anywhere on the battlefield. As soon as she died, they gave him one.”

—Do you care?

“No.”

This time, Paha Sapa leaves the gladstone in the sidecar but takes the canvas bag, hitching the strap easily over his shoulder. In the bag is some bread, bologna, and the loaded Colt.

He walks across the broad crown of the hill toward the cliffs and valley.

“You’re hurting terribly, aren’t you, Black Hills?”

Paha Sapa considers not answering but decides he will. What harm can it do now?

—Yes. The cancer has its grip on me today.

“Would you… do this thing… just because of the cancer? I mean, if you hadn’t failed at Mount Rushmore?”

Paha Sapa does not answer because he cannot. But he hopes he would not be here with the Colt just because of the pain and disease. It bothers him a little that he’ll never know.

Almost out of sight of the parking lot, he finds a smooth place to sit. The grasses here come up almost to his shoulder when he’s sitting in them. The clouds are breaking up some now, allowing patches of sunlight to move across the rolling hills and curving valley below, and everywhere the grasses are moving in languid thrall to the wind.

“Benteen and Reno had a better hill,” says the ghost, his tone calmly, coolly professional rather than wistful or envious. “I could have held out here all day and night with my men… if I’d had this hilltop.”

—Does it matter?

There comes the faintest echo of sad laughter. It’s as if the ghost is already leaving him. But not quite yet.

“Paha Sapa, did you see those ravens? They followed us down the road. All the way in.”

Paha Sapa saw them and sees them now, perching on a rail twenty yards away on a splintered old fence that runs from the parking lot, perhaps delineating the end of the park boundary. The two ravens are watching him. Watching them.

He doesn’t like this. Who would? Ravens are symbols of death for the Lakota, but then most things are in one story or another. Some say that it’s the ravens that carry the wanagi of dead people up to the Milky Way to begin the spirit-journey there. Others, including Limps-a-Lot, did not believe this.

He tries to remember the Lakota word for raven. Was it kagi taka or kan˙gi? He can’t recall. He’s losing his own language.

It doesn’t matter now.

Paha Sapa sits cross-legged in the grass and takes out the heavy revolver. It smells of gun oil and warm metal. He’s left one chamber empty under the hammer so he doesn’t accidentally blow his foot off—advice from a Seventh Cavalry Crow scout who’s been dead for more than fifty-five years—but a loaded chamber revolves into place as he thumbs the hammer back.

He has decided that he’s not going to draw this out. No Death Song nonsense. No ceremony. He’s decided on the right temple and sets the muzzle there now.

“Wait. You promised me… about the cremation.”

Paha Sapa lowers the pistol only slightly.

—I wrote it out. On a napkin. In the bathroom at the diner.

“I don’t believe you.”

—Where were you? Dozing?

“I don’t pay attention to everything you do, you know. Especially at times like that. Where is it? Is it somewhere people will find it?”

—It’s in my shirt pocket. Will you please shut up a minute? Just one minute.

“Show me the note.”

Paha Sapa sighs—truly irritated—and carefully lowers the hammer. He removes the napkin from his shirt pocket and holds it in front of his own eyes, thinking that Custer is being a shit to the last second of his unfairly extended existence. The note in pencil begins “My Wishes” and is only one sentence long.

—Satisfied?

“You misspelled remains—it’s not manes. There’s an I.”

—Do you want me to go back to town to the diner and get the pencil I borrowed from the waitress?

“No.”

—Good-bye, Long Hair.

“Good-bye, Paha Sapa.”

Paha Sapa lifts the revolver, cocks the hammer back, and sets his finger on the trigger. The sun is warm on his face. He takes a deep, sad breath.

—Mr. Slow Horse!

It’s not the ghost; it’s a woman’s voice. Paha Sapa is so startled that he almost pulls the trigger by accident. Lowering the cocked hammer and then the pistol and looking over his shoulder, he sees two women moving in his direction through the tall grass.

His body was turned away from them such that it’s probable that they did not see the pistol. He hurriedly slips the Colt into the canvas bag and awkwardly gets to his feet. Everything in him cries out in the pain of rising.

—Mr. Slow Horse! It is you, is it not? The motorcycle was Robert’s, I know. I’ve seen the photograph a thousand times. He gave it to me. I saw the photograph of you but did not get to keep it.

The women are dressed in expensive and stylish dresses and wide-brimmed hats. The older of the two looks to be in her late thirties and her accent seems to be French. The younger woman, who bears some resemblance to the first, can’t be older than seventeen or eighteen. Her eyes are a brilliant hazel.

Paha Sapa is very confused. He looks back toward the road and sees a long, sleek 1928 Pierce-Arrow sedan stopped there. The sun has come out from beneath the fast-moving clouds and turns the expensive white automobile into something too dazzingly beautiful for this world. There’s a mustached man standing by the car and Paha Sapa realizes stupidly that the man is a chauffeur.

The older woman is still speaking.

—… so we did not arrive at the Mount Rushmore until yesterday, and Mr. Borglum was very gracious, very sorry that we had missed you. All of our letters and telegrams had gone astray, you see, since we had been trying to reach you via the name William Slow Horse de Plachette, the name and the Keystone address Robert gave us in his delirium—and the returned letters said “undeliverable”—and we also wrote the mission on the Pine Ridge Reservation. But Mr. Borglum said you would be here at the Custer Battlefield, so I told Roger to drive like the very wind, and here we are and… oh!… you are Mr. William Slow Horse, are you not? Paha Sapa to your friends and family?

He can only gape stupidly. The Colt in its canvas shroud lies heavy at his feet. Finally he can make noises that simulate speech.

—Borglum? Borglum didn’t know where I was going. Borglum could not have told you…. No one knew where I was…

He stops, beginning to understand what the woman has said.

Her voice, with the accent, is almost musical.

—Oh, yes. He was quite certain about where you were headed… is “headed” the right word? He even told us that you would be at this second hill, not the first, where the big monument is.

Paha Sapa licks his lips. He cannot tear his gaze from the two women’s faces. On the fence far behind him, one of the ravens makes an accusatory noise.

—I’m sorry, miss. I’m… confused. What did you say your name is? You say you knew my son?

The woman blushes and for a second looks angry at herself, or perhaps as if she wants to cry.

—I am so sorry. Of course. You never received my letters… we know that now. Nor the telegrams the past months.

She holds out her hand. She is not wearing gloves.

—I am Madame Renée Zigmond Adler de Plachette. Your… what is the phrase in English? Yes. Daughter-in-law. I married Robert in November of nineteen eighteen… November fourteenth, to be precise. My father, Monsieur Vanden Daelen Adler of Belgium, was, of course, concerned about the marriage because Robert was…

She pauses. Paha Sapa prompts.

—An Indian?

Madame Renée Zigmond Adler de Plachette laughs softly.

—No, of course that was no problem. No problem whatsoever. It was that he was a… the word in English escapes me… a gentile. Yes, gentile. We are Jewish, you see, from one of the oldest diamond-cutting families of Jews in all of Belgium. But in the last few years… Well, you understand the situation growing in Germany and Europe, Herr Hitler and all… so Father is moving his business and our family to Denver and New York. To Denver, you see, because Flora’s fiancée, Maurice, has always wanted to start a—how do you say it?—a beef cows ranch, and of course to New York because of Father’s diamond business, since he was, it is not immodesty to say, the preeminent diamond cutter and then diamond merchant in Belgium and he hopes to build the same reputation here in America. Flora and I have come ahead in order to… Oh, my! Oh, dear!

She puts her hands to her cheeks.

—I have been so excited to meet you, my dear Mr. Slow Horse. I am chattering on like, how do you say it? A house aflame. My dearest apologies for forgetting to introduce… My darling Flora, I apologize to you as well.

She speaks in quick French or Belgian to the waiting, silent young woman with the so-familiar hazel eyes and then turns back to the stunned, numb Paha Sapa.

—Monsieur Slow Horse, may I present to you our daughter, my dear Robert’s and mine, and your granddaughter, Mademoiselle Flora Daelen de Plachette. Her fiancée has stayed behind in Brussels to help my father with the last of the business there but should be joining us next month in…

But the young woman has extended her hand, and all sound fades away as Paha Sapa stares at that hand. The shape and form and length and delicacy of the pale fingers—and even the mildly bitten nails—are so totally familiar to Paha Sapa that they make his old man’s heart hurt.

He takes her hand, that hand, her hand, in his.

And it is as if the bullet has been fired after all.

Bright lights explode in his skull. There is a final blinding flash, a terrible sense of all boundaries collapsing, a rushing in and flowing out, a terrible tsunami of noise that drowns all thought and sensation, and he is falling forward toward the astonished women… falling… falling… fading… gone.