Dan Simmons - Black Hills

The night has not been hard work for Paha Sapa, at least after Advocatus and Diaboli realized—somewhere around the beginning of the third trip uphill to the canyon—that they were, at least for this one night, beasts of burden again rather than coddled priest’s pets.

When he stacks the last crate inside the tunnel and covers it with the last tarp—the gray-white canvas almost indistinguishable from the granite in the quickly disappearing moonlight—one of the donkeys sneezes and Paha Sapa allows this to substitute for his own tired sigh.

Walking back down the narrow canyon, he realizes that as the moon has moved to the west, shining now through the trees on the high ridge wall to the west of the canyon, all of the ink-black shadows from his early trips are now bright stripes and trapezoids of milk-white moonlight, and all of the formerly safe areas to step are now treacherous shadows. It does not matter. He has every step of the way memorized after his seven trips up (including the first one on foot carrying the box of detonators) and seven trips back.

Remembering the long telling of Limps-a-Lot’s final story to Robert, Paha Sapa is reminded of that same long-ago time in 1890 at Chankpe Opi Wakpala . While searching the faces of the frozen, snow-covered forms in that field for Limps-a-Lot’s corpse, he had, for the first time, reached into the black place where Long Hair’s ghost had resided those fourteen years, babbling away in English about his pornographic memories of his wife, and dragged that ghost kicking and screaming to a place behind his, Paha Sapa’s, eyes, forcing it to watch and to look and to see, forbidding it with his own Voice of God to say nothing.

After Limps-a-Lot’s burial, Paha Sapa threw Long Hair’s ghost back into the silent, lightless place where it had resided until then. He did not speak to it again (or allow it to speak to him) for another eleven months, but the oft-interrupted conversation began that day. Custer’s ghost was later to tell Paha Sapa that he, Custer’s ghost, was certain that he’d arrived in Hell and that his punishment would be to look at such sights as the field at Chankpe Opi Wakpala for all the rest of eternity. Paha Sapa immediately reminded Long Hair’s ghost that the snowy field and the frozen dead men, women, and children could just as easily have been at Washita .

It was another year before he and the ghost spoke again.

The ghost has said nothing this night. Of course, he has not spoken at all in the past three and a half years, not since the trip to New York in the spring of 1933.

Paha Sapa skirts the parking lot and cuts downhill through the woods to where he has hidden the Dodge truck. Advocatus and Diaboli seem almost too weary to climb the ramp up into the truck and then are too weary even to chew on the straw.

The moon has disappeared to the west; the eastern sky is already growing light. Paha Sapa checks his old watch. Almost five a.m. He has time to drive back to Keystone, load Robert’s motorcycle into the back of the truck with the donkeys—there was room to load it with the dynamite crates earlier, but Paha Sapa was stupidly sentimental about not blowing up his son’s machine if the nitroglycerine detonated—and then make the trip to Deadwood to return the two tired beasts to Father Pierre Marie and the Dodge truck to Howdy Peterson’s cousin. He’d come home on the motorcycle and have time to make some breakfast for himself before coming up the hill again to start a long Saturday of work supervising the drilling of the face in preparation for tomorrow’s—Sunday’s—demonstration explosion for the president, honored guests, and newsreel cameras.

Paha Sapa is so exhausted that far more than the cancer hurts him this beautiful but hot morning. Everything hurts, down to the marrow of his bones. He knows that this night, Saturday night to Sunday morning, even with the moron Mune’s help, he will have much more hard labor to do through the night than merely walking donkeys up a hill and canyon a few times and transferring twenty-one relatively light crates of dynamite. And he will have to start earlier to have any chance of finishing the placement of the charges and wires before sunrise, and this on a Saturday night, when everyone stays awake partying until late.

Driving the heavy Dodge truck down the bumpy road toward Keystone, flinching for no reason every time the wheels hit a deep pothole, he tries to think of a prayer asking Wakan Tanka or the Six Forces of the Universe or the Mystery itself for strength, but he cannot remember the words for any such prayer.

Instead, he remembers a Grandfather Chant that Limps-a-Lot taught him when he was very little and he sings it now—

Then he comes out of the forest just as the sun rises over the hills to the east, temporarily blinding Paha Sapa—who has to fumble in the tangle of junk in the lidless glove compartment to find his sunglasses—and he remembers and sings a song that the Sun himself taught his people—

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

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

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

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

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

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