Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Paha Sapa nods and follows Borglum to the aerial tramway platform below the hoist house. Edwald Hayes is acting as hoist operator this Friday afternoon and touches his dusty cap as Mr. Borglum approaches.

Paha Sapa hates the tramway but says nothing as he and Borglum squeeze themselves into the upright, small-outhouse-sized space and Borglum signs to Edwald to start the ride up.

Paha Sapa knows that his fear of the tramway cage falling is foolish; he spends every day of his working life dangling from a one-eighth-inch steel cable, and the tram is suspended from huge pulleys running on a seven-eighths-inch cable stretched from the hoist house on Doane Mountain to the A-frame above the Roosevelt head thirteen hundred feet away and four hundred feet above the valley floor. The cage itself is propelled by a three-eighths-inch cable driven by a large drive wheel at the hoist house.

But Paha Sapa—along with all the other men after the accident with the tram—knows that while that drive wheel is supposed to be fixed on its axle by a steel key, and both wheel hub and axle contain key seats for such a steel key, in truth the wheel has always been fastened by only a single setscrew driven through the hub and into the key seat of the axle itself. That setscrew worked itself loose at least once, breaking the hoist shaft and sending the cage whizzing unstoppedly down the long wire while plucking the entire A-frame and its platform off the top of the mountain.

Gutzon Borglum was scheduled to be in the tramway for that ride but arrived a few minutes late, so Edwald sent a load of water cans up instead. Those cans were thrown over two acres of Doane Mountain and smashed to bits. If Borglum had been on time, the Mount Rushmore project would, most likely, have been shut down after the death of its sculptor.

Borglum shows no nervousness now as they rise higher and higher above the mountain, toward the basin between the three existing heads, rising directly toward the patch of smooth white granite that has been prepared for the Teddy Roosevelt head.

There is no breeze. If anything, the heat up here is worse than down below, with the white rock on three sides of them focusing and radiating the stored heat from the day’s worth of blazing sunlight. The temperatures in Rapid City have broken all records; Paha Sapa guesses that it must be a hundred and twenty degrees or more here at the locus of all that white heat. He has been hanging and dangling and moving and drilling and working in it since seven a.m.

Borglum waves to Edwald far below, and the tram cage stops suddenly, swinging sickeningly back and forth. Both men hang on to the chest-high edge of the wooden cage itself, and Borglum has his hand on the guide wire. Now the sculptor reaches up and cranks down the emergency brake that Julian Spotts, the most recent bureaucrat to be put “in charge” of the project (Mr. Borglum is, always, the man really in charge), ordered added to the tramway system after another brake failure had sent some men hurtling to the bottom.

They are very high: past Washington, even with Jefferson’s eye, looking across the rough mass of rock that delineates Abraham Lincoln’s shock of hair from his forehead. The Theodore Roosevelt head has not been begun yet and is present only as a near-vertical swath of blindingly white granite awaiting the last careful blasts and then the carvers.

The tramcar quits swaying. Both men lean on the northwest side of the cage, looking down at the white granite.

To say that no work has been done on the Roosevelt head would be a lie. Over the past year, especially the productive four months of summer, Borglum has penetrated and had Paha Sapa blast away more than eighty feet of the original gray, wrinkled, rotten granite here on the south face of the Six Grandfathers. During all that blasting and carving away, only Borglum was confident that they would find carvable stone beneath the rotten rock. But they did, finally, and enough… barely… to carve the Roosevelt head.

If there are no mistakes.

The problem is that there is only so much rock left, and they have used most of it up. To any observer on Doane Mountain or in the valley below the heads, Mount Rushmore looks like a deep, solid mountain—one could imagine walking out onto the summit from the forest and mountaintop behind it—but that continuity is an illusion, as Paha Sapa knows from his hanblečeya there exactly sixty years ago to this day.

Behind the north face of the Six Grandfathers, behind the three presidents’ heads now emerging from the granite and the fourth head ready to be carved, there is a long and deep canyon. This split in the rock begins just north of the Lincoln head and runs southwest behind the heads for about 350 feet.

The first three heads, already emerged from stone, had adequate rock behind them. The Teddy Roosevelt head, set so far back and near the hidden vertical cliff of this hidden canyon, has only thirty feet of rock left from which to carve this last president. Another ten feet of looking for carvable rock after the eighty feet he blasted away, Paha Sapa knows, and they would have had to give up on Roosevelt; there simply would not have been enough good rock there to work with.

Borglum takes off his white Stetson, mops his brow with the red handkerchief from his back pocket, and clears his throat.

— We’re within five feet of the nose, Billy.

— Yes.

The heat from the white granite is palpable. Sickening. Paha Sapa tries to blink away the black spots swarming in his vision.

— I’ve scheduled you to work both tomorrow and Sunday in preparation for the president’s visit.

— Yes.

— There will be a lot of VIPs down there besides Roosevelt. Senator Norbeck’ll be here—I don’t know how he’s lasted this long with that jaw cancer of his. Governor Berry, of course. Tom wouldn’t miss rubbing up against a president, even if the president is a New Deal Democrat. A bunch of others, including Doane Robinson and Mary Ellis.

Mary Ellis is Gutzon Borglum’s daughter. Paha Sapa nods.

— So I want the demonstration blast to go off really smooth, Billy. Really smooth. Five charges. I figure beneath the fresh granite here, cheating a little toward Lincoln so it’ll be more visible. Who would you like to do the drilling for you tomorrow? Merle Peterson? Palooka?

Paha Sapa rubs his jaw. Sensation there and everywhere is muted because of the pain throughout his body.

— Yes, Payne would be good. He knows what I want for the charges even before I say it.

Paha Sapa and Jack “Palooka” Payne have been working together almost every day of the blazing summer on both the Lincoln head and the granite field being readied for Teddy Roosevelt.

Borglum nods.

— I’ll tell Lincoln to assign Palooka to you tomorrow. Anything else you need? I do want this demonstration blast to go smoothly.

Paha Sapa looks Borglum in the eye. The intelligence and determination he sees looking back is—has always been—almost frightening. Is frightening to most people.

— Well, Mr. Borglum, this is the president of the United States.

Borglum scowls. His displeasure at the reminder rolls off him in a wave that is as palpable as the late-August heat.

— Damn it, Billy, I know that. What’s your point?

— My point is that the president is usually met with a twenty-one-gun salute. Isn’t that the protocol?

Borglum grunts.

— Anyway, it wouldn’t take that much more effort for me tomorrow, especially if I have Palooka and Merle as drillers, to rig twenty-one charges from just to the left of Washington’s lapel all the way around to where we’ll be blasting Lincoln’s chin out someday. And I could rig them in a series, so everyone could tell there were twenty-one separate blasts.