Dan Simmons - Black Hills

— But chosen to do what? One man can’t stop the Wasicun Stone Giants or bring the buffalo back or return the Wakan— the sacred Mystery—to his people who have lost it. So… chosen to do what?

— You’ll know when the time comes, my dearest. I know you will.

They did not speak again on the slow walk down Harney Peak, but they held hands much of the way.

THE IMPORTANT GUESTS are arriving in the front-row stands far below.

Through the melded twin Zeiss circles, Paha Sapa can see the gleaming bald head of his old mentor Doane Robinson. He knows that Doane will be eighty years old this coming October, but the poet and historian would never miss a ceremony like this, a celebration of the next visible part of a shared reality that was once just Doane Robinson’s solitary dream (however much that dream has changed).

Near Robinson in the front row is an older man who looks as if he has a bulky towel wrapped around his chin and left cheek and neck. This is US senator Peter Norbeck and Paha Sapa knows that Norbeck—along with the dreamer Doane Robinson and pragmatic congressman William Williamson—is part of the troika who actually had argued for, pushed ahead, presented to the Senate and House, found funding for, begged for, and tirelessly defended the Mount Rushmore project (often from the excesses of Gutzon Borglum himself) all the way to its current three-heads-almost-finished reality. But Senator Peter Norbeck, who had taken more verbal abuse from Borglum over the years than most men would permit from their wives, is now dying of recurring cancer of the jaw and tongue. The cancer and repeated surgeries for it have finally robbed him of his speech and turned the lower half of his face into a nightmare guaranteed to frighten children and some constituents, but Norbeck has grown a beard to hide some of these ravages and has draped this towel-scarf around the lower part of his face as if it were a normal part of his wardrobe—a second tie, perhaps, or a flashy cravat.

As Paha Sapa watches through the binoculars he’s steadying with his elbow on his left knee, he sees Norbeck leaning back to say something to three men in the row behind him. Pointing toward the gang of straining reporters held back by their rope, the dying senator makes quick pantomine motions that end with an upward spiral of his fingers. All three of the politicians—plus Doane Robinson sitting three chairs to Norbeck’s right—throw back their heads and laugh heartily.

William Williamson is not laughing. The congressman chosen to lead the welcoming delegation for FDR is pacing nervously back and forth in front of the stand of tall microphones.

Paha Sapa glances at his own watch—2:28. He can see that Gutzon Borglum is far too busy down there now, talking to important people, to have time to run up and stop Paha Sapa even if he were to see something out of the ordinary through his binoculars. But Borglum does have a telephone connection to his son, Lincoln, who’s in charge of the eight men at the crane and boom atop the Jefferson head, and the official program for the dedication says that it will be Lincoln who will, with a touch of a button, detonate the demonstration blast at the drop of his father’s red flag—but in reality it’s always the chief powderman who sets off the shot. Paha Sapa is sitting far enough forward along Lincoln’s cheek—also covered with a sort of towel, he realizes now, looking down at the granite he’s sitting on—that he’ll be able to see Lincoln Borglum’s waved flag, half red, half white, when his father’s second-in-command down there phones up the order to blast as a sort of backup command.

But the detonator boxes are with Paha Sapa.

For the hundredth time, he looks at the twenty sites where he’s planted the dynamite crates with their detonators. His worry is the same one he’s always had: that the power of the explosions will send large rocks or small boulders all the way to the crowd and reviewing stands. It shouldn’t, the way he’s half buried the dynamite in the spots he’s chosen. Big Bill Slovak, who had briefly worked with an urban demolition crew in Denver after leaving a Cripple Creek gold mine where unsafe practices by the owners had resulted in the deaths of twenty-three miners in one collapse, always liked to point out to the younger Paha Sapa that gravity was the real force involved when one was trying to collapse large structures, not the dynamite blast itself. Imploding rather than exploding had been the demolition crew’s motto. Give me one stick of dynamite , Big Bill used to say on their lunch breaks down there in the Holy Terror amid the glow of carbide helmet lamps and the taste of rock dust, and I’ll bring down Notre Dame. Just take out the right parts of the right buttresses, and gravity will do all the rest.

Paha Sapa hopes that will be true on this blast, but there is always the threat of flying debris. He’s calculated for the safety of the men atop the cliff and is almost sure that the president and all the guests and visitors at the viewing area on Doane Mountain are safe from small flying rocks, much less the inevitable rolling boulder debris from the blast, but he still worries.

Paha Sapa realizes that he should have said to his son years ago— I am no warrior and never will be. I lack the ability to willingly hurt people.

It was true, he sees now. Despite the necessary fistfights he’s had in his long life, including those in his early months on this job five years ago, he’s never willingly acted to hurt or kill another human being. Even when he’s fought in self-defense or to stop some racist bullying at his expense, he’s done so with the least force necessary—while at the same time knowing, from both Crazy Horse’s vivid memories and from the rants of Long Hair’s ghost, that there are times when the greatest force possible is the answer.

But he knows now, as he sits on this crate of dynamite with both detonator boxes within easy reach, that he chose not to throw himself and Gutzon Borglum out of the rising tramway bucket because he refused to kill Borglum if he had any choice left. And he does have a choice. At least for the next few minutes.

There’s a ripple of noise from below, then applause, and the motorcade is pulling into the parking area. Other vehicles pull to one side or the other but one long black touring car, men in dark suits now walking ahead of it protectively, bounces down the new road and comes to a stop in front of the viewing stands with the microphones just outside the front passenger-side door.

A man gets out of the backseat of the open car and receives a wave of cheers. Paha Sapa steadies the binoculars. It’s South Dakota’s popular cowboy governor, Tom Berry. The governor leans over and talks to the man sitting in the front passenger seat for a few seconds and then steps back and waves to the crowd again.

Now the high school band is playing “Hail to the Chief ”—Paha Sapa hears it twice, once regularly and the second, tinny time through all the microphones hooked to loudspeakers—and Franklin D. Roosevelt, still seated in the front passenger seat, of course, wearing no hat, his head thrown back, sunlight glinting on the gold frames of his sunglasses, raises an open palm and turns away from Paha Sapa and the waiting Borglum and waves at each part of the semicircle of the crowd, including both those seated and those standing. The standing crowd is relatively quiet but the VIPs on the closer reviewing platform respond so enthusiastically that the last notes of “Hail to the Chief ” are drowned out. Three radio reporters are babbling wildly into their bulky microphones, but those devices aren’t hooked up to the natural amphitheater’s loudspeakers. All Paha Sapa can hear, delayed and overlaid like a ghostly stutter, is the somewhat tepid applause and soft cheers of the crowd. It is, after all, a mostly Republican South Dakota audience.