Dan Simmons - Black Hills

The men shuffled and looked at one another and then at the ground again.

— So either this crap stops or your jobs do. I need good powdermen more than I need stupid pugilists. Slovak’s staying—hell, he’s even playing first base on the team when summer comes—and the rest of you can make up your own minds as to whether you want and deserve to stay or not. I hear that finding a good-paying, solid job like this in this goddamned year of our Lord nineteen and thirty-one is a goddamned piece of fucking cake. So gang up on Slovak again—or anyone else I hire—and you can pick up your week’s wages from Denison and get out. Now… either head for your cars or get back to work.

As it turned out, sixty-six-year-old Paha Sapa didn’t play first base that first summer of 1931 or in the summers since. He played shortstop.

PAHA SAPA FINALLY PAUSES to breathe and set down the crate of dynamite and caps and wipe the sweat from his face when he reaches the top and walks over to the powder shed.

Can he be ready in eight days?

He has the explosives—almost two tons of them—stashed away in the falling-down shed and root cellar in the collapsing house he rents in Keystone.

Dynamite is much safer than most civilians imagine. New dynamite, that is. Paha Sapa has trained his new powdermen to understand that new, fresh dynamite can be dropped, kicked, tossed—even burned—with little or no risk of explosion. It takes the little copper-jacketed cylinders of the blasting caps, attached to each stick by a four-foot electric wire, to set off the dynamite proper.

With fresh dynamite, Paha Sapa explains to his nervous new men, it’s the electric detonator cap that is dangerous and that must always be handled with great care. They are touchy things at the best of times, and accidentally closing a circuit or dropping a cap or banging it against something will—even if the cap’s not attached to the dynamite sticks yet—blow off a powderman’s hands or face or belly.

But the nearly two tons of dynamite (and twenty cases of detonator caps) that Paha Sapa has stolen and hidden in his falling-down shed and old root cellar in Keystone is not new dynamite. It was old (and abandoned) when he stole it from the closed-up Holy Terror Mine—named after the owner’s wife—where he’d once worked as chief powderman. The owners of the Holy Terror had held life cheap, and the lives of its powdermen were held the cheapest of all. The owners had carried over dynamite from one season to the next, something absolutely prohibited in any gold or silver or coal mine where safety is a consideration.

Paha Sapa always enjoys showing new powdermen how dynamite sweats—the nitroglycerine leaking through the paper and beading up on the exterior—and how one can take a finger and snap a bead of dynamite sweat against a nearby boulder. The new men always flinch away when that hurled bead explodes against the stone with the sound of a .22 pistol being fired.

Then Paha Sapa explains about the dynamite headaches.

But the old dynamite stacked and stored in his cellar and shed does more than sweat death. The nitroglycerine in most of it has gathered and clumped and crystallized until it’s become so unstable that just shifting the crates—much less moving them in a car or truck or Paha Sapa’s own motorcycle sidecar—would be the equivalent of playing Russian roulette with all six cartridges loaded. (Paha Sapa is tempted to smile when he thinks of President Roosevelt’s caravan of cars on its way up here to the Monument on August 30, the president himself protected by Secret Service men, passing through Keystone and within thirty yards of Paha Sapa’s shed and root cellar, holding enough unstable explosive to blow all of Keystone a thousand feet into the air.)

But, he thinks again, it’s not the president he wishes to harm.

Even if Paha Sapa is able to get the unstable dynamite and the dangerous caps to the top of the mountain in the dark of night, past the few night guards Borglum has posted to watch over the tools and equipment, past the compressor house and hoist house and blacksmith shop and past Borglum’s studio and residence itself—then manages to somehow get the two tons of unstable explosives carried up these same 506 steps he’s just climbed—he’ll still need to drill hundreds of holes into the three faces.

On a regular day such as this one in August of 1936—normal except for the unusually brutal heat—there are already thirty or more men on the work areas of the three faces (and below them, a dozen men now on Washington’s chest), drilling, drilling—the compressors howling, the drill bits screaming—and many more “steel nippers,” workmen rushing up and down the cliff exchanging fresh drills and bits for old, sending the dulled bits down on the tramway to be sharpened at the blacksmith shop across the valley. Soon, Whiskey Art and Paha Sapa and their assistants will be swinging down onto the cliff faces and presidents’ faces to join the drillers there as they load the preset drill holes with their hundreds of charges, then carefully tie the charges into an electrical detonator cord.

It’s the loud, roaring work of scores—sometimes hundreds—of men, just for a minor blow at noon or four p.m., when the workers are off the face, to move a ton or two of stone. To kill the wasichu heads, Paha Sapa will have to do it all at night, with unstable dynamite in hundreds of holes all over the faces to move a hundred times as much stone as a regular blast, and do it all silently, in the dark, and by himself, alone.

Still—that’s what he will have to do if he’s to bring down the three heads already risen from the stone. And he has long since come up with a plan that may give him a chance. But now, between the news of his growing cancer and the confirmation of the date for Roosevelt’s visit for the dedication, Paha Sapa knows he will have to do it by a week from the day after tomorrow, so that the “demonstration blast” in front of President Roosevelt and the gathered dignitaries and cameras will be the end, forever, of the stone wasichus rising from his sacred hills.

LIMPS-A-LOT HAS NOT BROUGHT PAHA SAPA TO THE ROSEBUD AND the Greasy Grass to be there for the battle with the wasichu or for the rubbing out of Long Hair. They’ve ridden alone to the gathering of Sioux and Cheyenne for the giant gathering that Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse have called. Even though Paha Sapa will not see his eleventh birthday for another two months and thus is not quite ready for the manhood ceremony, Limps-a-Lot feels it is time for the boy with such special abilities to be introduced to Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and some of the wičasa wakans who will be at such a gathering.

And Limps-a-Lot brings Paha Sapa to see the wiwanyag wachipi —Sun Dance—that Sitting Bull has sent word he will be performing.

The time is more than two weeks before the battle. The place is not at the Greasy Grass, where Paha Sapa will be infected by the Wasicun’s ghost, but northeast of there, out on the dry, hot plains near the wide curve of the Rosebud River, near the Deer Medicine Rocks—odd, tall, freestanding boulders etched with carvings older than the First Man. Only the Lakota are to participate in this wiwanyag wachipi —the Sans Arcs and Hunkpapa and Minneconjou and Oglala and a handful of Brulé. There are some Shyelas—Cheyenne—there when Limps-a-Lot and young Paha Sapa arrive early in the Moon of Making Fat (the Shyelas also hold the Deer Medicine Rocks as wakan —sacred, powerful—but the Cheyenne are only observers for this event).