Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Paha Sapa just shook his head that day, not knowing how to answer the question but knowing that his son was right—he, Paha Sapa, had never been a coward, not in the usual sense—but also knowing the depths of his own failure as a father, as a husband, as a Natural Free Human Being. Paha Sapa had thought, before this summer’s trip in 1912, that he might tell Robert some of the details of his hanblečeya on this mountain thirty-six years earlier—perhaps even specifics of the Vision the Grandfathers had given him—but he realized now that he would never do that. Beyond telling Robert that he’d gone on vision quest here, he mentioned nothing of the vision itself during this week of camping around the mountain and—interestingly—Robert did not ask.

Robert Slow Horse had inherited his mother’s light skin color, hazel eyes, thin physique, and even her long eyelashes. The lashes did not make Robert look effeminate. Perhaps unlike his father, Robert was a born warrior, but a quiet one. There was none of the Crazy Horse rage and bluster in him. He allowed the bigger, older boys at his boarding school in Denver to tease him about his name or about being a “half-breed” for a while, then warned them softly, and then—when the bullies inevitably continued bullying—Robert would knock them on their asses. And he continued knocking them on their asses until they altered their behavior.

At fourteen, Robert was already four inches taller than his father. Where the height came from, Paha Sapa did not know, for Rain had been small, as had her father, the missionary minister and theologian, who had moved away from the Pine Ridge Reservation the year after his daughter’s death in 1899 and died himself before the actual new century arrived in 1901. Perhaps, Paha Sapa thought, his own father, the teenager Short Elk, had been tall despite his name. (Even a short elk, Paha Sapa realized, was relatively tall.) He had never thought to ask Limps-a-Lot or Angry Badger or Three Buffalo Woman or any of the others around him how tall his young father had been before he’d staked himself down to die fighting Pawnee.

The Reverend de Plachette had moved to Wyoming to be near his friend William Cody for that final year of the minister’s life. Cody had started a town named after himself there and built some hotels in it for the tourists he was sure would come to the beautiful West by way of the newly opened Burlington rail line. Buffalo Bill had named one of the big hotels after his daughter Irma and a road he’d paid to have built running from the town of Cody up to Yellowstone Park the Cody Road. Another sign of the aging entrepreneur’s wealth was the giant TE Ranch he established along the South Fork of the Shoshone River there. Cody had driven all of his cattle from his previous properties in Nebraska and South Dakota to the ranch.

When Paha Sapa and little Robert first visited the failing Reverend de Plachette and prosperous Cody there at the ranch in early 1900, Buffalo Bill’s operation was running more than a thousand head of cattle on more than seven thousand acres of prime grazing land.

Buffalo Bill, his hair white but still long and goatee still in place, had always insisted that his former employee and the boy stay with him in the big house when Paha Sapa visited, and it was that second and final visit, just before Reverend de Plachette died on the day of the first snowfall in Cody in autumn of 1900, that Cody had watched the two-year-old boy playing with some of the servants’ kids.

— Your son’s smarter than you, Billy.

Paha Sapa had not taken this as an insult. He already knew how intelligent his little son was. He’d only nodded.

Buffalo Bill had laughed.

— Hell, my guess is that he’ll grow up smarter than me. Did you see how he took that empty lantern apart and then put it back together? Didn’t even break the glass. Little fellow can hardly toddle and he’s already an engineer. What do you plan to do for his education, Billy?

That was a good question. Rain had made Paha Sapa swear that Robert would go to good schools and then to a college or university somewhere in the East. Of course, she’d been sure that her father would be there to help—the old man had taught natural and revealed religion and rhetoric at both Yale and Harvard at different times—but she hadn’t counted on her father dying so soon after her own death. And she hadn’t counted on her father dying broke.

The schools near Keystone and Deadwood where Paha Sapa had just begun working in the mines after leaving Pine Ridge Reservation were terrible and didn’t usually take Indian children anyway. The one school on the Pine Ridge Reservation was worse. Paha Sapa was saving money, but he had no idea how to buy his son an education.

William Cody had patted him softly on the back as they watched the children play.

— Leave it to me, Billy. My sister lives in Denver and I know of some good boarding schools there. The one I’m thinking of takes in boys starting at the age of nine and educates them right up to college age. It can be expensive, but I’ll be more than happy to…

— I have the money, Mr. Cody. But I would appreciate you putting in a good word with the school. It’s not every school that takes in an Indian child.

Cody had looked at the four toddlers playing on the floor.

— Who the hell can tell Robert’s part Indian, Billy? I couldn’t and I’ve been around your people for more than thirty years.

— He’ll still have the last name Slow Horse.

William Cody had grunted.

— Well, maybe he’s not as smart as we think he is, Billy, and he won’t need a good boarding school. Or maybe other people will get smarter in the future. One way or the other, we can always hope.

ROBERT HADN’T DISAPPOINTED his father. The boy had essentially taught himself to read before he was four; he was reading every book Paha Sapa could find for him by the time he was five. Somehow he learned to speak Lakota as if he’d been raised by Angry Badger’s band, but he was also speaking Spanish by the time he was six (almost certainly because of the Mexican woman and her family and friends who watched him while Paha Sapa was working in the mine). By the time Robert did go to the boarding school in Denver in 1907—the trip to Denver from the Black Hills was daunting then, since there was no direct rail service, but Mr. Cody himself had driven them down the unpaved roads from Wyoming—the boy had already begun speaking and reading some German and French. He had no problem with his studies in Denver despite the fact that he’d rarely attended a real school in the Hills and that his father had been his tutor.

In truth, Robert and his father had been inseparable until that day in September ’07 when Paha Sapa had looked out the oval rear window of Mr. Cody’s automobile in Denver and seen his son standing with strangers in front of a red-brick building with green shutters; Robert seemed too shy or stunned or perhaps just too interested in the strange situation to think to wave good-bye. But Robert had written every week that year and in the years since—good, long, information-filled letters—and although Paha Sapa knew that Robert had been terribly homesick all of that first year (Paha Sapa had felt his son’s aching homesickness in his own guts and heart), the boy had never once mentioned it in the letters. By January of each year they would be talking about where they would go camping together that summer.

— Did you ever bring Mother here?

Paha Sapa blinked out of his reverie.

— To the Black Hills? Of course.

— No, I mean here. To the Six Grandfathers.