Dan Simmons - Black Hills

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Thanks, Art. I’ll be back.

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

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

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

That is funny, in a way, since most wasichu whom Paha Sapa has spoken with about the night sky in his seventy-one years, including Rain and her father, seem to think that one can see millions of individual stars in the night sky on a perfect, dark viewing night. But the Ikče Wičaśa knew that there are only about three thousand stars visible even on the clearest, darkest night. They knew because they had counted them.

Once, when Robert was very young, perhaps during that first camping trip to Bear Butte when they had let the fire die down to embers shedding almost no light and were lying back watching the stars, Paha Sapa asked his son to guess how many stars the full moon was hiding behind itself, on average, as it moved across the sky through the night. Robert guessed six. Paha Sapa explained that, on average, the full moon blocked no stars, and not just because its light made the stars fade from view. He remembers Robert’s little gasp from where he lay on his blanket that night and the five-year-old voice.

— Gosh, Father, it’s really empty up there, isn’t it?

Yes , thinks Paha Sapa now, it is .

HE AND RAIN never had a real honeymoon.

They were married at her father’s new mission church on the Pine Ridge Agency—already being called the Pine Ridge Reservation—that vast expanse of arid land and windblown dust east of the Black Hills in the southwest corner of what became the state of South Dakota. In the wet spring of 1894, Paha Sapa and a few Sioux friends—but mostly Paha Sapa—built the tiny wood-frame, four-room house that he and Mrs. Rain de Plachette Slow Horse moved into immediately following the ceremony in mid-June of that year. That time was warm in Paha Sapa’s memory, but it had been busy and cold and wet—the roof leaked terribly—in that strange June when summer just refused to come to the Plains. Billy was not working on the reservation where Rain was a teacher in the mission school and their little house was just over the rise from where her father’s larger home and the mission church sat at the crossroads of four wagon ruts; Billy, like many of the Natural Free Human Beings who’d come to Pine Ridge after the death of Sitting Bull and the slaughter at Chankpe Opi Wakpala , lived on the reservation but did day work as a hired hand and wrangler (although he was never good at cowboying) at various wasichus’ ranches in the richer grazing country north of Agency land.

Most mornings, even during their “honeymoon,” Paha Sapa had to be up and out and dressed and saddled up and off for the long ride to some neighboring white man’s ranch by no later than 4:30.

Rain never complained. (Thinking about it later, he could not remember a time when Rain ever complained.) She always insisted on getting up in the dark with him to make his coffee and a good breakfast, then make a solid lunch that he could take with him in the battered old gray lunch pail that he still used. It was usually something better than sandwiches, but when it was a sandwich, she always took a tiny bite out of one corner of the bread. It was her way of sending her love to him in the middle of the day. For more than three decades after she died, Paha Sapa would check the corner of any sandwich he was eating that day, just out of the echo-habit of that short time when he was loved.

Rain and Paha Sapa were both virgins when they consummated their marriage in that leaky small house on the Pine Ridge Reservation. This did not surprise Paha Sapa, but much later, when they shyly spoke of it, Rain confessed that it had surprised her that Paha Sapa, who was twenty-nine when they were wed, had not “had more experience.”

This was not a complaint. The two lovers learned together and taught each other.

Paha Sapa’s only regret was that he had Crazy Horse’s memories and Long Hair’s pornographic monologues in his head when he finally carried his own bride to their marriage bed. Of the two men whose memories Paha Sapa reluctantly carried with him, Crazy Horse had been the gentler lover—when his couplings had not been merely to satisfy a hunger—and the dead warrior’s illicit relationship with Red Cloud’s niece Black Buffalo Woman (who was married to No Water at the time, even while Crazy Horse was technically, although not in reality, bonded with the sickly woman Black Shawl in an arranged marriage) showed moments of true tenderness. Even Long Hair’s explicit recollections, once Paha Sapa had the bad luck to learn English and knew what the ghost was babbling on about, were merely examples of that most secret place of all in a human being’s life—the privacy of intimacy. Through the unwanted words and images, Paha Sapa could sense Custer’s real and abiding love for his lovely young wife and the couple’s sincere surprise at the sexual energy that Libbie had brought to the marriage.