Black Hills: A Novel Read online

  2

  On the Six Grandfathers

  February 1934

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  3

  Along the Greasy Grass

  June 1876

  PAHA SAPA SIPS THE WARM SOUP. ALL THE FINELY SCRAPED buffalo hide walls of Limps-a-Lot’s lodge glow orange from the multitude of fires burning in the village outside. It is very late, but a cacophony of singing and chants and the thudding of drums can be heard—cacophony to Paha Sapa’s ears because it is a harsh and unusual mixture of celebrations and mournings, peppered throughout by screams of mourning women, exultant cries from celebrating warriors, and the continued rifle shots from both within the camp and from more distant shots echoing from the dark hills across the river to the southeast. Hundreds of warriors, many of them blind drunk by now, are taking turns trying to sneak up on the surviving wasichus surrounded up there, shooting at the soldiers whenever they think they see the dark shape of a head or body poke up from the dug-in circle of bluecoats cowering on the dark hilltop.

  Besides Limps-a-Lot, there are three other older men in the lodge: Tatanka Iyotake (Sitting Bull), Foolish Elk, and an old Rock-dreamer yuwipi holy man named Long Turd. Paha Sapa, only half listening to the desultory talk among the old men, realizes that Long Turd is saying that he spent much of the afternoon’s battle conferring with Crazy Horse, even going so far as to build a holy fire of buffalo chips to pray over during one of the pauses when Crazy Horse and his men were gathering fresh ponies. At the mention of Crazy Horse’s name, Paha Sapa flushes with shame. He hopes he will never have to see Limps-a-Lot’s older wife’s cousin again.

  —Black Hills, tell us what you have to tell us.

  It is Sitting Bill who gives the command. Even though most of the younger warriors have been talking and celebrating as if the day’s work has been a huge victory, Sitting Bull sounds so sad that one would think it has been a great defeat for the Lakota and Cheyenne. And while Limps-a-Lot, Long Turd, and the younger Foolish Elk have all dressed more formally for the evening, Sitting Bull, who is old—he has seen at least forty-two summers according to Limps-a-Lot—is wearing his everyday outfit of a fringed buckskin shirt embroidered only with green porcupine quills and modest tassels of human hair attached at the shoulders, leggings, moccasins, and a red breechcloth. His braids are wrapped in otter skins and adorned with a single eagle feather set upright.

  Paha Sapa nods, sets down his soup, composes himself cross-legged on the soft hide, and thinks about what he will say. Limps-a-Lot has told the other three men about the ghost—it is why they are here tonight listening to a boy rather than out celebrating or mourning or, in Foolish Elk’s case, up the hill shooting at the surviving wasichus—and Paha Sapa knows that it is the identity of the bluecoat whose ghost he carries that most interests the two holy men and the warrior-friend of Crazy Horse here.

  Paha Sapa closes his eyes for a minute to bring the afternoon’s events out of the smoke and haze of the day’s terrible memory. He hopes that when he opens his eyes to speak—and to speak as succinctly as Limps-a-Lot taught him as a small boy and as clearly as he can given the Wasicun’s ghost’s continued gibbering and throbbing in his mind—the few flat, emotionless words will emerge almost in the form of a monotone chant. But before he opens his eyes to speak briefly, Paha Sapa takes time to recall it all in detail.

  HE HAD NOT COME TO FIGHT. Paha Sapa knew he was no warrior—his single, sad expedition against the Crow the previous spring had taught him that—but that afternoon, when the shooting started at the southeast end of the huge village of tipis that filled the valley, he and Limps-a-Lot ran out of the older man’s lodge. It was very exciting. Akicita were trying to keep order, but the young warriors were ignoring the tribal police, shouting and leaping onto their mounts and riding toward the noise of battle. Other braves were rushing to put on their war paint, find their weapons, and chant their death songs. Although Paha Sapa knew he was no warrior at heart, he felt the excitement rise in him as the sound of shooting continued, the dust clouds rose from the east and from the bluffs across the river, and the men of all ages continued to ride out of the village in whooping packs.

  —The fighting is at the far end of the village.

  Limps-a-Lot pointed to the southeast.

  —I want you to stay here until I get back.

  And, carrying no weapons, Limps-a-Lot walked slowly away toward the shooting.

  Paha Sapa tried to stay put, even when Wolf Eyes, Left Foot, and several other young men he’d met here at the giant gathering rode by, taunting him and shouting for him to find a pony. But they had ridden off to the south before Paha Sapa could decide what to do.

  Then there was more shooting coming from the direction of the coulee there at the north end of the village, almost in the opposite direction of the original firing. Paha Sapa had looked up minutes earlier and seen a line of wasichus on horseback moving northwest along the line of bluffs. Was the bluecoat attack at the southeast end of the village merely a feint, Paha Sapa wondered, a distraction—with the full attack coming here at the opposite end where the women and children were gathering? Sitting Bull himself had told Limps-a-Lot only three nights ago that this was a strategy that Long Hair had used when the Wasicun war leader attacked Black Kettle’s village.

  A woman screamed that the bluecoats were coming down the coulee and crossing the river at the ford not far from Limps-a-Lot’s lodge, close to where so many of the women and children had gathered. A group of warriors, their horses and their oiled bodies covered with dust from the fighting in the southeast, galloped north through the center of the village to face this new threat, scattering old men, women, and screaming toddlers as they came. A horse trailing that group was without a rider, showing a streak of blood on the blanket. As the riders paused briefly between the lodges to allow the scattering women to get out of their way, this riderless mare came almost to a stop at the rear of the mass of horses and shouting men, her eyes rolling whitely.

  Without thinking, Paha Sapa leaped up onto the mare’s back, wrapping both hands in its mane. When the mounted warriors forced past the screaming women and galloped toward the river, Paha Sapa hung on and kicked his heels into the mare’s heaving ribs. It was unnecessary—the animal’s blood was up and, like Paha Sapa’s, its instinct was to run with the herd.

  The sound of shooting still came from the long coulee that ran up to the bluffs from the river, and through the dust and smoke, Paha Sapa could see several bodies in the dirt there—some wasichus, several warriors from the village—but whoever was leading this band ignored the coulee and kept going northeast along the river, past bands of fleeing women and children, past the last Lakota and Cheyenne lodges, through the cottonwoods, until the thirty or so mounted warriors with Paha Sapa bringing up the rear splashed across at the second ford and galloped up a deep ravine toward the grassy bluffs above. Paha Sapa almost slipped off as the mare climbed the steep terrain but hung on to the mane with both hands and pressed his knees tight against the horse’s laboring barrel chest as the wheezing, frothing mare, her lungs sounding like a leaky bellows, staggered up onto the grassy ridge.

  Paha Sapa had time only for brief glimpses and scattered impressions—steep hogbacks to his right, warriors and wasichus on horseback there, another long ridge wreathed in smoke and dust ahead to his left, clumps of dismounted wasichus and disorganized bands of warriors shooting at one another there and struggling along the entire grassy stretch that rose toward another, higher ridgelin
e almost a mile to the northwest. Pulling himself upright, Paha Sapa glanced over his shoulder toward the valley but could not see the circles of a thousand tipis below due to the swirling dust and smoke.

  He realized that the band of warriors he was riding with was as disorganized as the other clumps of men he saw scattered all over the hillsides here—his group was mostly Lakota, some Miniconjou, a few Cheyenne. Their leader, a man he had never seen before, looked to be Hunkpapa. The man shouted—Hokahey!—and the band of warriors, followed by Paha Sapa, kicked and whipped their ponies toward groups of bluecoat wasichus firing in dismounted clumps scattered up the hillside to their left. Everywhere in the smoke, wasichu horses and warriors’ ponies were screaming and falling, some shot by their bluecoat owners to provide cover, others being shot out from under their riders or away from the soldiers who held their reins. The rattle of gunfire was constant but underlaid with a rising chorus of screams, cries, grunts, chants, and calls. Women on the hillsides were trilling their shrill tremolos of bloody praise as Paha Sapa followed the others out of the last high shrubs at the top of the ravine.

  The next few minutes were largely lost to Paha Sapa’s memory; he had blurred recollections of gunsmoke, jumbled impressions of waves of warriors on horseback flowing over and through and past dismounted wasichus, clouded images of warriors on foot encircling the bands of bluecoats and their dead horses, a nightmare sense of the horses—his mare included—simply stampeding back and forth mindlessly between men who were firing at them. He seemed to recall truly crazy sights, such as the Wasicun soldier galloping away with five Lakota warriors behind him. The soldier was getting away when he suddenly raised his revolver and blew his own brains out. Shocked, the warriors pulled their horses up, looked at one another, and rode south toward louder fighting; they wanted nothing to do with the crazy Wasicun’s corpse.