Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Borglum seems lost in thought for a minute.

— They’d have to be fairly small charges, Billy. I don’t want to blow Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s eardrums out. I like the New Deal.

Paha Sapa knows that he should smile at this, but he’s too tired. And too much is riding on Borglum’s answer.

— Small charges, sir. Except for beneath TR and below Lincoln, where we do have to move some real rock. But they’ll sound the same. And I’ll pack enough loose rock around the charges that there’ll be plenty of dust and rock fall…. The civilians always love that during a demonstration.

Borglum considers for only a second longer.

— All right, a twenty-one-blast salute it is, then. Good idea. But don’t kill yourself—or Palooka and Merle—tomorrow getting the blast holes ready. This damned heat… Well, do your best.

Borglum squints up to where the sun is disappearing beyond Washington’s head.

— I’ve told Roosevelt’s people that he has to be here by noon. If he’s not here by noon, I’ll do the unveiling of Jefferson without him.

— Why’s that, Mr. Borglum?

Borglum turns his fiercest countenance toward Paha Sapa.

— The shadows, of course. Any later than noon, and the features of the three heads will become somewhat obscured. Roosevelt has to see Jefferson and the others at their best. I told his people—damned bureaucrats—that if the president isn’t here for the ceremony’s beginning at eleven thirty, the president can go fuck himself.

Paha Sapa only nods. After five years with Borglum, he is not surprised or appalled that the sculptor thinks he can boss around the president of the United States. He also knows that Borglum will wait until dusk if he has to. In the end, Gutzon Borglum needs the patronage of the rich and powerful, and he does what he has to in order to get it.

As if to refute this thought, Borglum almost growls his next statement.

— Billy, let’s skip that twenty-one-blast-salute idea. FDR’s president, and I’m all for the New Deal, but five charges should serve. If they go off at once, no one can tell the difference.

— Yes, sir. Can I still have Palooka as my driller?

Borglum grunts assent and leans on the latched door of the cage, looking across and down at the white slope that will be Teddy Roosevelt. The air still ripples with heat.

— Old Man, you can see Teddy Roosevelt’s head there, can’t you?

— Yes.

— You know, Billy, you’re the only one on this project, other than me, who can see the full head while it’s still in the rock. Even my son… Lincoln… has to go refer to the new version of the models to understand just what we’ll be doing, just what Theodore Roosevelt will look like when he comes out. But you, Billy , you have always seen the figures in the stone. I know you have. It’s a little uncanny.

Of course he can see it. Of course he always has been able. Didn’t he watch that fourth head and the three others—and their giant bodies—rising out of this soil and mountain like newborn giants clawing and chewing through their cauls sixty years ago? And, he realizes now, not for the first time, he has been one of the midwives for this unholy birth. By his own count, Paha Sapa has been personally responsible for blasting away more than 15,000 tons of rock from the side of the Six Grandfathers this shortened year alone. His own rough calculations have told him that in his five years here as powderman, Paha Sapa has moved and removed more than five hundred million pounds of stone —a good portion of the more than eight hundred million pounds of moved rock that the project will probably require before it is finished, including that which was moved before he came on the job—and every pound he has helped remove, every ounce, has felt to Paha Sapa exactly like carving into and removing the flesh of a living relative.

Mitakuye oyasin! All my relatives—every one!

The irony of the Lakota ending-discussion statement, the bonding statement that ends argument and planning and any further discussion of an issue, hits him harder than ever. He is betraying all his relatives, Paha Sapa realizes. Every one.

Suddenly, with a wave of nausea, he also realizes that he will fail in his mission.

For months, for years, he has planned this final blast—the one that will bring down the heads—but suddenly everything is rushed. He is out of time and out of energy. Just when he needs his strength, the gods are taking it away from him.

As Borglum drones on about future blasting on the TR site, Paha Sapa reviews his options.

His plan was to work all this night preparing and transporting the twenty crates of old, unstable dynamite he has stored in his shed in Keystone. Then hide it here on the site somewhere.

But where? He’s scoured Doane Mountain and all the other areas. He can’t place that many crates of explosive on the face of the mountain two days early—the crates would be detected for sure. There will be fifty men putting in unpaid overtime tomorrow, Saturday, rigging the huge flag that will hang over the Jefferson face for the ceremony, drilling, doing last-minute finishing work, working as Paha Sapa will be to prepare the demonstration charge for Sunday.

No, the crates have to be transported here tonight, Friday night, and hidden so that they remain out of sight until Saturday night, when—if his energy returns—Paha Sapa can get the dynamite up onto the mountain and out onto the faces and concealed the way he has planned, and rigged and wired to detonators and his master detonators for Sunday’s final blast in full view of the president of the United States and the reporters and the newsreel cameras.

But he’s found no hiding place that will work. There are no guards, per se, on the Monument site, but various people—including Borglum and his family—live in the cluster of cabins on Doane Mountain. Any arrival of a truck in the middle of the night or starting up of the equipment would be heard at once. And investigated.

And there is simply no place secret enough to hide the twenty crates of dynamite for the busy Saturday ahead. Paha Sapa has considered the various storage sheds, including the huge one holding the delivered but never-used submarine engines now rusting away there, but the place is too close to Borglum’s and his son’s living quarters.

Borglum drones on.

Paha Sapa moves closer to him and stealthily lifts the latch to the tram cage’s door, hiding the motion with the bulk of his body. They are both leaning against that door now.

Paha Sapa knows how strong Gutzon Borglum is: the strength of the sculptor’s powerful arms and body are second only to the strength of his personality. In his suddenly weakened state, Paha Sapa knows that he could not win a fight or wrestling match with the always wary Wasicun , but all he has to do here is swing open the door with his left hand and throw himself forward against Borglum, sending both him and the sculptor out through the sudden emptiness where the door and fourth wall of the cage had been. They are more than three hundred feet above the valley floor.

Paha Sapa tenses his muscles. He is sorry now that he has never composed his Death Song. Limps-a-Lot was correct in saying that only arrogant men waited to do this important thing. He could not sing it aloud now, but he could be singing it in his mind as he throws himself against Borglum and as the two fall, entangled, kicking and gouging, all the way to the gray boulder field below.

Will Borglum curse and fight? wonders Paha Sapa. Will I scream despite myself ?

He hesitates. The carving of the heads is far along. Paha Sapa knows that Borglum anticipates never actually finishing the Mount Rushmore Monument; he sees himself working on it for another twenty years, twenty-five, thirty, for the rest of his life. But even with the addition of the ill-fated (until now) Entablature project and the Hall of Records in the canyon behind, a job almost equal to the carving of the Four Heads themselves, Paha Sapa knows that Borglum anticipates the bulk of the project being finished before the end of the 1940s.