Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Borglum is finishing his short talk about the combined use of explosives, drills, and chisels on the giant sculpture that is Mount Rushmore, emphasizing, as he always does, the sculptor’s tools that have, in truth, done less than 3 percent of the actual work of removing rock.

Borglum turns his back on the president and the crowd and theatrically raises the red flag. Up on the ridge above the flag-covered Jefferson head, Borglum’s son, Lincoln, on the phone with someone down there, raises his own red-and-white flag.

At the last second, Paha Sapa glances down to make sure it’s the five-stick demo-charge detonator box that he’s charged, and not the box linked by gray cables to twenty crates of dynamite. But his vision is foggy with fatigue and he has to look back through the binoculars quickly or miss the signal.

Borglum drops the red flag with a dramatic flourish, as if he’s a flagman at the Indianapolis 500.

Paha Sapa pushes the plunger all the way down.

HE HAD NEVER FELT AS ANGRY as he did the day in May of 1917 when his son, Robert, told him that he had joined the United States Army and was prepared to go fight in Europe.

Robert had graduated from his private Denver school in December of 1916 and spent the spring months living with his father in the shack in Keystone and then in Deadwood, finishing applications to various colleges and universities, and generally being lazy. Paha Sapa had disapproved when Robert had spent too much of his savings on the almost-new Harley-Davidson J. (A rich classmate of Robert’s in Denver had received the motorcycle as a graduation present and immediately smashed it up. Robert had purchased the broken 1916 machine for a few cents on the dollar, had shipped the pieces to his father’s address, and spent the majority of January through April happily rebuilding it.) Despite his original disapproval, Paha Sapa had pitched in to help Robert on Sundays and other odd hours when he wasn’t working in the Homestake Mine, and he had to admit to himself that he loved the quiet hours working next to his son in the shed they were using as a garage. It was the kind of mostly silent, mostly working separately, but strangely close activity that perhaps only fathers and sons could share. Paha Sapa thought of it often in the years to come.

Robert’s grades—which Paha Sapa had always known were good but had little idea of how good—along with enthusiastic recommendations from relatively famous faculty there in Denver had, by April of 1917, earned the boy eight scholarship offers. In Robert’s usual inexplicable (to his father) way of doing things, he had made separate applications to the same colleges and universities under two names, both of them legally belonging to him due to the quirks of various state and federal registrations—Robert Slow Horse and Robert de Plachette. The latter applications had stressed his connection to his late mother and white grandfather, as if Robert were an orphan, and listed the Denver boarding school as his address for the past nine years. The former applications specified his living Lakota Sioux father and listed the Pine Ridge Reservation and Paha Sapa’s shack in Keystone as Robert’s former homes.

By late April, Robert could inform his father that Robert de Plachette had not only been accepted by Princeton, Yale, and three other top Ivy League universities, he had received generous scholarship offers from those top schools. Robert Slow Horse, on the other hand, received scholarship offers from Dartmouth College, Oberlin College, and Black Hills State University in nearby Spearfish, South Dakota… the little town Silent Cal Coolidge’s liver-fed trout had come from.

Paha Sapa was irritated at the games his son had been playing with something so vitally important as a college education, but he was also proud. Then he became irritated again when he heard that Robert, who had long stated his intention of going to school not only out of state but away from the West, was considering the lesser known of the schools that had accepted him.

— Where are Dartmouth and Oberlin colleges, Robert? Why even consider them when Princeton and Yale have offered you scholarships?

It was late at night and they were working on the final reconstruction touches to the Harley-Davidson J’s sidecar when this conversation came up. Robert had flashed that wide, slow grin that made him so popular with the girls.

— Dartmouth’s in New Hampshire and Oberlin’s in Ohio, Father. Could you hand me that three-eighths socket wrench?

— But what makes them contenders compared to the Ivy League schools?

— Well, Dartmouth is Ivy League… sort of. Founded in seventeen sixty-nine, I think, with a royal charter from whichever governor was representing George the Third at the time, chartered with a mission to educate and Christianize Indians in the region.

Paha Sapa had grunted and wiped sweat from his face, leaving a streak of grease on his cheek.

— And how many… Indians… have they graduated since then?

Robert’s smile was wide and bright under the hanging bare sixty-watt bulb.

— Almost none. But I like their motto —“ Vox Clamantis in Deserto.”

— “The Voice of the Climbing Flowering Plant in the Desert”?

— Almost, Father. “The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness.” I can sort of relate to that.

Paha Sapa had arched an eyebrow.

— Oh? Do you consider your home here, the sacred Black Hills, a wilderness?

Robert’s voice had turned quietly serious.

— No. I love the Hills and want to come back here someday. But I think that the voice of our people crying out here has gone without answer for too long.

Paha Sapa had stopped what he was working on and turned his head toward his son at the sound of that “our people”—he’d never heard that from Robert before—but his son was frowning at the bolt he was trying to tighten.

Paha Sapa cleared his suddenly tight throat.

— And what’s the appeal of the Ohio college… what’s the name… Oberlin? Do they have a catchy motto?

— Probably, but I forget what it is. No, I just like Oberlin’s style, Father. They admitted Negroes in eighteen thirty-four or some year around there… and women before that. After the Civil War, Oberlin graduates led the way to go down and teach in the Freedmen’s Bureau schools all over the South. Some of them were killed by night riders for doing it.

— So you’re telling me that you want to go teach Negroes in the South? Do you have any idea how strong the reconstituted Ku Klux Klan is getting? Not just in the South but everywhere?

— Yes, I’ve paid some attention to that. And no, I don’t want to teach—in the South or anywhere else.

— What do you want to do, Robert?

It was a question that had haunted Paha Sapa much more than had Custer’s ghost in recent years. His son was so bright, so good-looking, so personable, and such a fine student that—if he dropped the Indian last name that wasn’t really his father’s anyway—he could be anything: lawyer, doctor, scientist, mathematician, judge, businessman, politician. But Robert, who had always been curious about everything but who refused to focus on one single area of interest, seemed maddeningly indifferent to careers.

— I don’t know, Father. I guess I’ll have to go to Dartmouth for a few years…. It’s liberal arts, so they don’t demand you decide on a major of study or career path right away. In truth, I want to be just like you when I grow up, but I don’t know how to do that.