Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Still, Paha Sapa wanted no one else’s sexual histories mixed with his own gentle memories and thoughts and he succeeded fairly well in mentally walling off those recollections of Crazy Horse and in ignoring the middle-of-the-night babblings of Long Hair’s ghost.

So their spring 1898 trip to the Black Hills was Rain’s and Paha Sapa’s first time away from the reservation together, except for the nightmare weeks the previous autumn when he took Rain to Chicago for the terrible surgery.

That train trip to Chicago—the Reverend Henry de Plachette accompanying them, since the surgeon was his trusted friend—and the surgery had taken place not long after Rain discovered the lump in her right breast. (In truth known only to the two of them, it had been Paha Sapa who discovered it, when he was kissing his darling.)

Dr. Compton had strongly recommended removing both breasts , as was the custom at the time, even though no tumor was detectable by touch in Rain’s left breast, but—defying both her father’s and her husband’s advice (for the first time)—Rain had refused. The couple had been married almost four years at this point and still no pregnancy, but Rain was determined that there would be a child someday. I can nurse the baby with the remaining breast , she had whispered to Paha Sapa minutes before they took her away to chloroform her. The remaining one will be closest to my heart.

The surgery seemed successful, all of the tumor was removed and no other cancer was found, but the operation took a terrible toll on Rain. She was too weak to travel. When it was certain that his daughter would recover, Reverend de Plachette returned to his church and flock at Pine Ridge, but Paha Sapa stayed another four weeks with his darling in that little boardinghouse near the hospital in Chicago.

The Lakota name for Chicago had long been Sotoju Otun Wake , which meant, more or less, “Smoky City,” but Paha Sapa had wondered if it had ever been as dark, smoky, sooty, black, and windy as during those endless November and December weeks he spent there with his beloved. The view out the window next to their bed in the boardinghouse was of warehouses and a huge switching yard where trains screamed and rumbled and backed day and night. The stockyards were close, and the stench aggravated the constant nausea caused by Rain’s medicine. Paha Sapa, refusing Rain’s father’s offer to pay for everything (the minister was suffering hard times after a lifetime of relative wealth), had borrowed money, an advance on his wages, from the white rancher Scott James Donovan, just to pay the room and board. He would be paying the medical bills for the next twenty-three years of his life.

And so it was that when they arrived home at the Agency on Christmas Day 1897, the train being delayed a day while a plow train cut a way through twenty-foot-high drifts southwest of Pierre, even the Pine Ridge barrens and their tiny home looked beautiful in the white snow under blue western sky. Rain vowed that this was a new start for her and for them and that she would not allow the cancer to return. (A year earlier she might have said, Paha Sapa later thought, that God would not allow it, but he’d watched his bride become more thoughtful about such things. She continued being the only teacher at the missionary school, she led the choir every Sunday, she taught Sunday school to the Indian children, and she had not objected or interfered when her father had asked Paha Sapa to be baptized before he could sanction their marriage. Rain still read the Bible every day. But Paha Sapa had silently watched some aspect of faith—at least the specific Episcopal faith of her father—slowly seep out of his wife, rather like the energy she never fully recovered after the surgery.)

But her happiness and high spirits did return. By spring of 1898, her light, quick laughter filled the house and Paha Sapa’s soul again. They made plans for building another room on the house the following summer after Paha Sapa finished paying back rancher Donovan. In April, smiling more broadly than Paha Sapa had ever seen her smile except on their wedding day, Rain announced that she was pregnant.

The late-May trip to the Black Hills came about by accident.

For his own reasons, the rancher, Donovan, had to lay off some of his hands for two months. Paha Sapa had found no other work for that time and was just helping Reverend de Plachette with repairs around the church and school and the old house everyone called the rectory. School was out—it always dismissed by the third week in May, since the families needed the children to work, plant, and herd on their tiny plots of land. Rain’s father had to return to Boston to deal with things after the death of his older brother there. Reverend de Plachette would be gone for at least a month and perhaps longer.

It was Rain who suggested that she and Paha Sapa take the church buckboard and mules and some camping equipment and go see the Black Hills. Living so near them now for four years, she had never really seen them. Her father had said that they could use the buckboard and mules. She was getting food ready for the trip even as she suggested the idea.

Absolutely not, Paha Sapa had said. He would not consider it. She was three months pregnant. They could not possibly take the chance.

What chance? insisted Rain. No more than if she stayed on the Agency. Her workload here, fetching the water and chopping wood all day and handling the work at the school and church, represented much more serious hard labor than a restful ride to the Hills. Besides, if there was a problem, they’d be closer to towns and doctors in the Black Hills than they were there at Pine Ridge. Also, her morning sickness had all but ended and she felt strong as an ox. If the mules didn’t want to pull the buckboard up into the Hills, she would… and still consider it a vacation.

No, said Paha Sapa. Absolutely not. The roads were terrible, the buckboard old, all the riding and jolting and…

Rain reminded him that while he was off working at the Donovan ranch, she was driving that same buckboard twenty miles and more some days, making her deliveries to the sick and shut-ins on the rez. Wouldn’t it be better if he were with her and if the next trip in the buckboard was a pleasure trip rather than just more work?

Absolutely not, said Paha Sapa. I won’t hear of it. I have spoken.

They left on a Monday morning and by evening were in the south end of the Black Hills. Paha Sapa had bartered an old single-shot rifle that he rarely used (he kept the Colt revolver) with a Seventh Cavalry sergeant for an army tent, two cots, and other camping materials that took up two-thirds of the space in the back of the buckboard. Spring had come earlier than usual this year, and the fields were bright with wildflowers. The first night was so warm that they didn’t even set up the tent; they slept in the back of the wagon with so many comforters and mattresses under them that they lay higher than the sidewalls of the buckboard. Paha Sapa pointed out the important stars and explained to his bride that there were about three thousand stars visible up there on this perfect viewing night.

She whispered—

— I would have guessed millions. I’ll have to tell the students next fall.

On the second day they followed a wide and usually empty new road up into the south edge of the Black Hills proper—the hills there were gentle, rolling, and rich with high grasses, the trees clustered near the tops of these knolls—and in the midst of the seemingly endless waves of low hills, he showed her where Washu Niya , “the Breathing Cave,” lay in a hidden and wooded little canyon. Unfortunately, a homesteading wasichu family, who’d gotten the land for free, had boarded up the entrance to the cave and locked the door and were charging fees for those tourists who wanted to see it. Paha Sapa could not imagine paying money to go into Washu Niya so they continued traveling north.