Dan Simmons - Black Hills

This thought reminds him of the flooding everywhere that rainiest-in-his-life month of August in 1876, and with that memory comes the wave of guilt and emptiness at the loss of the Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa , the most sacred Buffalo Calf Bone Pipe of his people. The despair and shame are as fresh as if he had lost the pipe yesterday.

And how does he feel after this most recent failure?

In 1925, on the recommendation of Doane Robinson, he read a poem called “The Hollow Men” by a certain T. S. Eliot. He still remembers the final two lines of that poem and they seem to fit his state of mind—

Doane Robinson told him that the bang and whimper in the poem related to the failure of Guy Fawkes’s Gunpowder Plot, whenever that was in English history. (Suddenly he imagines Robert’s voice, the tone always enthusiastic, never pedantic, whispering excitedly— Sixteen oh five, Father. Fawkes and some friends attempted to blow up Parliament, but the barrels of gunpowder were found in the vaults under the House of Lords before Fawkes could set them off, and the final whimper was his, you see, whimpering as he was tortured. His sentence was to be tortured and hanged and drawn and quartered, the hanging first and only to the point where he was almost but not quite dead, but he cheated them from the drawing-out-his-bowels-while-he-was-still-alive part by jumping from the gallows and breaking his own neck .)

— Thank you, Robert…

Paha Sapa whispers to his absent son—

— I needed that to cheer me up.

But joke as he may, he knows that he is one of the Hollow Men now.

Having silently promised his beloved tunkašila that he would protect the sacred Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa with his life, he lost it instead… while fleeing some fat, flea-bitten Crows.

Having promised Limps-a-Lot, Angry Badger, Loud Voice Hawk, and the other wičasa wakan that he would return with word of his Vision, he failed to return in time… failed even to tell them about the Vision. To this day he has never revealed the details of the Wasichu Stone Giant Vision to a single human being other than his wife.

Having promised his beloved wife on her deathbed that he would watch over and care for their son always, swearing to her that he would make sure that Robert became educated and would be happy as a man, he allowed the boy to go into the army and then to war and to die young in a strange land among strangers, his gifts and potential untapped.

Having promised himself that he would deny the Wasichu Stone Giants their destiny of rising from the sacred soil of the Black Hills and wiping out the buffalo while stealing the gods, past, and future of the Ikče Wičas´a and other tribes, Paha Sapa has totally failed at that as well. He couldn’t even manage to dynamite some fucking rock.

There is nothing left to fail at.

Or almost nothing. A week earlier, knowing that he could fail yet a final time, Paha Sapa went to Deadwood and purchased new cartridges for the Colt revolver, then test-fired twelve of them in a remote canyon. Even gunpowder, he knows, becomes weak and useless with age.

But he is tired of whimpering. And it is past time for the bang.

ON THURSDAY EVENING it begins to rain and by midnight it has become the downpour Paha Sapa has been warned about by his aching bones and sinews. He’s rigged the tarps well, high on a spot above the highest watermark of the old stream, the lean-to’s opening facing away from the wind, and the sweet geometry of the two tarps rigged on ropes well out from under the tall cottonwoods where lightning might strike or where heavy rotted-out limbs will fall at the slightest push of wind, and Paha Sapa stays comfortably dry between his blankets as the storm rages through the night.

He’s using this last luxury of the flashlight he bought from Mr. Strange Owl—at twice the price of any flashlight—to read Henry James’s The Ambassadors. Paha Sapa has been checking this book out of the Rapid City library—doggedly, between reading other books—for almost ten years now. He simply can not get through it . It’s not just the meaning of James’s book that eludes Paha Sapa, it’s the meaning of individual sentences themselves. The story itself seems so insignificant, so overblown, so petty and obscure, that Paha Sapa has actually wondered if Henry James tried to hide his complete lack of a tale to tell behind these wandering, convoluted, grammatically and syntactically indecipherable sentences and flurries of words and paragraphs seemingly unattached to thought or human communication. Trying to decode this thing reminds Paha Sapa of his first weeks of confusion and overload while trying to learn to read under the tutelage of the Jesuits at the Deadwood tent school, especially under the patient, never-frustrated guidance of Father Pierre Marie, who—Paha Sapa now realizes with a shock—must have been only around twenty years old when he taught Paha Sapa and the other boys.

But why, Paha Sapa asks himself as the storm attacks his tarp, has he persisted with this one unreadable novel when he’s read hundreds of others so easily? Just give it up.

But Robert admired Henry James and loved this book, so Paha Sapa has continued checking it out of the big library in Rapid City, returning it each time with no more than a few pages conquered. His struggle to finish this book reminds Paha Sapa of what he heard about the battles in the Great War, at least before the Americans (including his son) entered the war near the end: so much life’s energy and so many artillery shells expended for such terribly small patches of murky ground gained.

But the real problem, he thinks as he switches off the flashlight (although he could continue reading by the constant lightning flashes if he wished to), is that he still has to return the book to the library. It’s why he put it in his valise in the first place. He’s not a thief.

Somewhere between here and the Custer battlefield, he has to find a place to buy an envelope and then find a post office. All logic dictates that Mr. Strange Owl’s store should serve both purposes out here, alone as it is in the prairie, but it does not. When Paha Sapa asked to buy a large envelope and a stamp, Mr. Strange Owl stared at him—again—as if the Sioux were crazy.

The lightning flashes, the thunder rolls, and the creek rises, but Paha Sapa sleeps dry and dreamlessly in his well-lashed lean-to, with only the echoing whimpers of tortured Jamesian sentences to disturb his sleep.

ON FRIDAY MORNING the storm is gone and the skies are clear, although the air feels cooler than early September. Paha Sapa packs up his camp and hangs out the tarps in the sunlight to dry while he takes a walk north along the meandering stream.

It strikes him that his world has gotten smaller the older he’s become. When he was a boy, before Greasy Grass and the hard part of his life, Angry Badger’s tiyospaye had wandered together from the Missouri River in the east to Grandmother’s Country in the north to the Grand Tetons and west, then south along the Platte River to the Rocky Mountains, south almost to the Spanish town of Taos, east back a long loop through Kansas and Nebraska, back to the heart of the heart of the world near the Black Hills.