Dan Simmons - Black Hills

The Will Rogers twang of Governor Tom Berry is just wrapping up. The loudspeaker echoes off itself and the three intact Heads, the intact rock field where TR is meant to rise. Borglum begins to speak. The red flag is in his hand again… no, for the first time.

Paha Sapa wonders if he has died. Perhaps Hamlet was right—to sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub. Death would be welcome if it were dreamless, but to live this over and over in dreams…

Borglum is explaining that we—the royal we, the unnamed sixty workers and he—use dynamite to clear the surface rock but do all the actual carving by hand.

My ass , thinks Paha Sapa. He looks down. The cables are not connected to the detonators. The dream hangs on him like a wet, dead chimpanzee. His head pounds with pain and he feels as though he might have to vomit over the rim of the ledge… the ledge that crumbled under him only seconds ago. The vertigo still inhabits his inner ear and belly.

Borglum is raising the red flag.

Paha Sapa threads the wires, wraps them, presses down the Bakelite covers. His scarred, blunted hands have done this a thousand times, and he allows them to do it now without his intervention. The only intrusion he allows his mind is to check the color of the cables. Black. The demonstration charge. Wired, the voltage cranked up in four turns to the right, safety clicked left and off, plunger raised against the drag of coil. Paha Sapa keeps his right hand on the plunger and raises the binoculars with his left hand.

Unlike in the dream, Gutzon Borglum does not turn his back on the president or wave the red flag dramatically, as if he were a flagman at the Indianapolis 500. Borglum’s left arm is along the back of the president’s car seat, his body half turned toward the president, eyes lifted to the cliff, as he casually lets the flag drop.

BAM, BAM, BAMBAMBAM.

Paha Sapa has no physical memory of pushing the detonator box plunger, but it is pushed, the charges fired as fused.

To Paha Sapa’s blast-deafened ears, these quarter-charge reports are more like rifle shots than dynamite blasts. The amount of rock blown out is purely symbolic, the dust cloud negligible. But the audience below applauds. Oddly, President Roosevelt offers his hand to Borglum and the two men shake as if the outcome of the blast had been in question.

There is movement above Paha Sapa. Lincoln Borglum and his workers have swung the boom, lifted the flag. Thomas Jefferson ponders the blue sky. The sounds of the real applause and the delayed and overlapping amplified applause pitter-patter on the stone faces above and around Paha Sapa.

Borglum has leaned close to the microphone again. His tone is imperative; he is giving the president of the United States a direct order:

— I want you, Mr. President, to dedicate this memorial as a shrine to democracy; to call upon the people of the earth for one hundred thousand years to come to read the thought and to see what manner of men struggled here to establish self-determined government in the western world.

Applause again. Everything sounds very, very far away to Paha Sapa, whose hands are threading and wrapping the bare leads of the gray-painted cable to the terminals of the second detonator box. Borglum’s phrasing—“to call upon the people of the earth”—sounds familiar, derivative, to Paha Sapa as he cranks the detonator four times to the right, building the charge. Yes, he knows… it echoes the translated opening to the Berlin Olympic Games earlier this month: I call upon the youth of the world…

And it is just like Borglum to mention not the faces he’s not even finished carving, but the “shrine of democracy” and all its reading material tucked away in the Hall of Records that’s now just a test bore in the unknown canyon behind the heads.

One hundred thousand years of wasichu domination of the Black Hills. He pulls the detonator plunger up against its friction until it clicks into place. Ready.

FDR was not scheduled or invited to speak—Paha Sapa cannot remember if Abraham Lincoln had been invited to speak at Gettysburg (Robert could tell him), but he knows that the sixteenth president hadn’t been the main speaker, and now this thirty-second president was not invited to speak at all—but, overcome with emotion or politics (just as Paha Sapa expected), Franklin Delano Roosevelt reaches out and pulls the heavy circle of the microphone closer.

The familiar tones from radio, the reassuring cadence—still sounding as if it is on radio due to the speakers and echoes—blasts up and out from Doane Mountain to Mount Rushmore and then to the world.

—… I had seen the photographs, I had seen the drawings, and I had talked with those who are responsible for this great work, and yet I had no conception, until about ten minutes ago, not only of its magnitude, but also its permanent beauty and importance.

… I think that we can perhaps meditate on those Americans of ten thousand years from now… meditate and wonder what our descendants—and I think they will still be here—will think about us. Let us hope… that they will believe we have honestly striven every day and generation to preserve a decent land to live in and a decent form of government to operate under.

The applause is louder now and Paha Sapa can hear it before the speakers echo it around him. There are some cheers from the mostly Republican crowd. Paha Sapa lifts the binoculars again and catches FDR turning away from the beaming Borglum and waving that oft-parodied wave to the crowd, the magnificent head back, the grin locked and lacking only the cigarette holder and cigarette to make it whole. Paha Sapa sees that poor Senator Norbeck’s towel has slipped—the dream tries to slide in with its sickening reality—but the cancer-mauled creator and protector of Mount Rushmore is smiling a corpse’s smile.

Time seems to twist out from under Paha Sapa. Has he dozed again? Is he going mad? He lifts the sun-heated binoculars.

Borglum is leaning almost casually against the touring car. The sun has heated that metal as well and Paha Sapa can see how Borglum is using his white sleeves to protect his arms against the burning steel (is it bulletproof?) of the car’s black door. More VIPs are milling around the automobile now and frowning Secret Service men hold some back.

The microphone has been removed—or, rather, radio announcers are babbling into theirs, but the speakers here are not carrying their broadcasts—so there is no way that Paha Sapa can hear what the president and the Boss are saying. But he does.

Roosevelt’s voice is relaxed, satisfied, genuinely curious.

— Where are you going to put Teddy?

Borglum half turns and points to the left of Paha Sapa as he explains that the TR head will go in that lighter-granite area between Jefferson and the emerging Lincoln head.

— I have it all planned out in my studio.

Borglum is inviting the president up to the studio—right then. It would be like Borglum to expect the president of the United States to accept the impromptu invitation and to hang around while Borglum grills some steaks for everyone later.

Roosevelt is smiling and speaking.

— I will come back someday to look this over more fully.

Borglum is smiling and nodding, obviously believing FDR. Paha Sapa knows his boss, literally inside and out. How could someone not want to return to Mount Rushmore? Besides, there are so many more dedications ahead—the Abraham Lincoln head, probably next year in 1937, then Teddy Roosevelt, of course, by 1940 if Borglum’s schedule is kept to (and Paha Sapa knows that Borglum also expects Franklin Roosevelt to remain president for three or four more terms, at least), and then the Hall of Records before 1950 or so…