Black Hills

by Dan Simmons

  Paha Sapa feels right now much as he felt that day on the Ferris Wheel on the Midway of the Great White City—the first hours he spent with Rain.

  He thinks—I don’t need to go. I’m already in a better version of Heaven than my people or Rain’s father could ever concoct. But if it’s time to go to Heaven, I’m ready.

  The voices’ collective laugh sounds a bit like Robert’s, much like Rain’s, only a little like Limps-a-Lot’s, some like a lady’s he’s never met, and not at all that much like the Six Grandfathers’. The last words they will ever say to him are odd.

  —Go to Heaven? Like hell. That baptism went to your head, Paha Sapa. There’s too much work left undone.

  THE RAVEN FLIES DUE WEST and then north by west.

  The ocean of time flows in, covering everything below like low clouds, and the shafts of sunlight on the water seem to move with the flying bird. Paha Sapa tries to remember the sentence he likes from Bleak House, but he is not able to form coherent thoughts.

  The sea of time ebbs away. The low, rolling hills below are brown and tan and brown again, the only green in the meandering river valley with its picket line of old cottonwoods.

  The raven does not swoop this time; it drops in a near-vertical high-speed dive that terrifies Paha Sapa.

  No… I cannot… I’m not ready… I don’t…

  Ravens listen to no one. It does not slow as it continues its mad dive toward the brown hill with its high brown grass.

  The impact is terrible.

  THEY LIED.

  As much as they love him—and he knows they do—they lied.

  This is Heaven.

  Paha Sapa is lying on the top step of the stairs leading down to the Great Basin near the Columbian Fountain in front of the main Administration Building in the White City, with his head in Rain’s lap and with Rain looking down at him with concern. He does not even care that other people have gathered around.

  His lips are dry, but he whispers up to his concerned darling—Tokša ake wancinyankin ktelo.

  “I will see you later.” It’s the phrase he taught her just two hours ago in the Ferris Wheel and it is their bond of betrothal. Both know it. Neither have acknowledged it yet.

  —Oh, Monsieur Slow Horse, we are so relieved.

  It is not Rain speaking but the older woman. The mother.

  His daughter-in-law. Madame Renée Zigmond Adler de Plachette. (How strange to meet someone with his darling’s last name.)

  And the woman on whose lap his head is resting is not twenty-year-old Rain but his seventeen-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, the only-just-pregnant and engaged-to-be-married Mademoiselle Flora Daelen de Plachette.

  Paha Sapa tries to sit up but three pairs of hands push him back down.

  The mustached chauffeur—Roger—has joined them, Paha Sapa realizes. Roger has brought water in—amazingly—a crystal pitcher. He offers a crystal glass with—more amazingly, impossibly—real ice in it and Paha Sapa obediently sips the iced water. It tastes wonderful.

  Roger helps him to a sitting postion, and while the ladies are standing and brushing off dried grass and briars, the chauffeur whispers something in French or Belgian or, more likely, Irish, and surreptitiously hands Paha Sapa a small silver flask. Paha Sapa drinks.

  It is the first whiskey he has drunk since he was seventeen years old, and it is by far the best he has ever drunk.

  Roger helps him to his feet while both the ladies ineffectually paw and push and pull at him with their little white hands. Paha Sapa sways but, with Roger’s help, stays standing.

  —I was sure I was dead. Certain I’d had a stroke.

  Roger says in an American-enough accent now—

  —Sunstroke, more likely. Better get in out of the sun.

  Paha Sapa can hear the unspoken “old timer” at the end of that. He just nods.

  His son’s strangely middle-aged wife, Renée (he hopes to God that they’ll be on a first-name basis soon), says—

  —Monsieur… I am sorry, I must become used to the American expression…Mister Slow Horse…

  —Please call me Paha Sapa. It means Black Hills, and it’s my real name.

  —Ah, oui… yes… of course. Robert did tell me this. Mr. Paha Sapa, we are staying at the… oh, I can’t think of the name of it, but it appears to be the only decent hotel in Billings… Roger knows the name… and if we leave now, we could have lunch together in the dining room there. We have much, I think, to talk about.

  Paha Sapa’s answer is said from a great distance but sincere.

  —Yes, I would like that.

  —And, of course, you need to get out of the sun at once. You must ride with us. Roger, would you please give Monsieur… Mister… Paha Sapa a hand back to the car.

  Paha Sapa stops Roger’s helpful hand before it can touch him. He looks at his son’s wife.

  —It’s just Paha Sapa, Mademoiselle… may I call you Renée? It’s such a pretty name, and it reminds me of one I love dearly.

  Madame Renée Zigmond Adler de Plachette blushes fiercely and for a second Paha Sapa can clearly see the beautiful young nineteen-year-old girl with whom his romantic son fell in love. He realizes that the marriage must have been just days before the influenza and overwhelming pneumonia descended on Robert, and he also knows that there is a long and serious story—possibly having to do with the father’s and family’s horror that she married a gentile—behind her having never contacted him before this.

  He wants to hear it all. He says softly—

  —I’ll follow you into town on the motorcycle. It’s Robert’s, as you know, and I don’t want to leave it here. I’ll be all right. Just keep an eye on me in the mirror, Roger, and if I start driving or acting goofy again, you can stop for me.

  The chauffeur grins under his mustache and nods. The four begin walking back toward the road and parking area.

  —Oh, monsieur… sir… you have forgotten this.

  His granddaughter is holding out the canvas shoulder bag with the Colt revolver in it. If she is surprised by the heaviness of the bag or if she has peeked inside, she says and shows nothing.

  —Thank you, mademoiselle.

  They discuss logistics again and then the small procession is moving, the long white Pierce-Arrow turning around in three tries and the Harley-Davidson J putt-putting along behind it.

  As they pass Last Stand Hill on the left, Paha Sapa stops, lets the motorcycle idle while the sedan moves on ahead of him. Looking at the stone monument and the white headstones dotting the hillside, he suddenly realizes—My ghost is gone.

  It is not an altogether pleasant sensation. As he realized only yesterday, George Armstrong Custer had been married to his Libbie for twelve years when he died; Paha Sapa had been married to Rain de Plachette for four years when she died. But Paha Sapa and Custer’s ghost were together for sixty years, two months, and some days.

  Paha Sapa shakes his head. The pain in him seems to have receded a bit.

  He looks to the southeast, toward the distant and quite invisible Black Hills and all he has left behind there… and all he might yet see and do there.

  When he whispers the next words, they are not offered to the bones or memories buried on this battlefield hill in Montana, but to those people he has loved and fought against and lived with and worked alongside of and held close and seen slip away and lost forever and found again in sacred places elsewhere, not close to this place, and yet also not so very far away from this place.

  —Toksha ake čante ista wacinyanktin ktelo. Hecetu. Mitakuye oyasin!

  I shall see you again with the the eye of my heart. So be it. All my relatives—every one of us!

  Epilogue

  GUTZON BORGLUM’S VISION OF MOUNT RUSHMORE WAS NEVER COMPLETED.

  Besides specific plans to finish carving elements of Washington’s, Jefferson’s, and Lincoln’s upper bodies, including coats and lapels, with Abraham Lincoln’s left arm and hand grasping his lapel to be finished in some detail, Borglum also in
sisted on the necessity of completing the long-planned Entablature and the Hall of Records, which had already been begun.

  Originally, as part of Borglum’s search for money and official support in the late 1920s, the Entablature was to be a huge area of the mountain to the right of the four heads, words chiseled onto a flattened, clean white surface in the shape of the Louisiana Territory, each letter of each word taller than a man. It was (according to Borglum’s insistence and early announcements) to have carried an appropriate passage to be written by Calvin Coolidge. Borglum had begged Coolidge to compose this message when the president was there at the first dedication of the Mount Rushmore site in 1927, and Coolidge had reluctanctly promised to do so.

  The ex-president began slowly composing his message to people a hundred thousand years in the future after he’d left office in 1929, and in 1930 he’d completed the first two paragraphs, which were released to the world’s press by Gutzon Borglum. The world’s press almost hurt itself laughing and criticizing Coolidge’s stilted Entablature Message. In private, Coolidge was furious because these two paragraphs were not the paragraphs he had written. With typical arrogance, Borglum had taken the liberty of rewriting them before releasing them to the press.

  Despite the ex-president’s privately expressed anger, Borglum had begun the actual carving on the Entablature site, blasting and carving in a giant 1776 where the first paragraph would go. Coolidge then withdrew from the whole affair. Despite pleas from the Mount Rushmore Commission, the ex-president refused to write another word. In the following year, 1931, the retired president asked a friend, Paul Bellamy, who was visiting Coolidge at the ex-president’s home in Massachusetts, just how far Bellamy thought the distance was “from here to the Black Hills.” Bellamy opined that he thought it must be about fifteen hundred miles.

  “Well, y’know, Mr. Bellamy,” said Coolidge while drawing on his cigar, “that’s about as close to Mr. Borglum as I care to be.”

  Coolidge died in 1933. Undaunted, Borglum brought his Entablature idea to the Hearst newspaper chain in 1934, suggesting that there should be a national contest, open to all Americans, to write the Entablature “manuscript.” Borglum was willing to offer cash, medals (designed by himself, of course), and a college scholarship to the winner.

  The National Park Service, which was overseeing the Mount Rushmore Project by then, thought it was a terrible idea and so did Borglum’s and Mount Rushmore’s most faithful and successful backer, South Dakota’s Senator Peter Norbeck. Borglum ignored their warnings and concerns and went ahead with the national contest, convincing FDR to be on the judging committee along with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, nine US senators, and a sprinkling of other notables. The Underwood Typewriter Company agreed to donate twenty-two new typewriters as prizes.

  In 1935, the judging committee, including President Roosevelt and the First Lady, made its recommendation for five finalists. Borglum didn’t like them and tossed them all out. The grand prize was finally won by a young Nebraska man named William Burkett, and the money and scholarship allowed Burkett to attend four years of college during the depths of the Depression. Burkett was so grateful that he asked to be buried in the unfinished Hall of Records, where, in 1975, the Park Service installed a seven-foot-tall bronze plaque bearing the full script of his winning Rushmore Entablature Contest essay. The Park Service denied his request.

  The Hall of Records and the giant carved stairway leading to it were central parts of Gutzon Borglum’s design for the Mount Rushmore “Shrine to Democracy,” and he started serious work on the entrance tunnel in the winter of 1938–39. Both the noise of the jackhammers in the confined space and the incredible amount of fine dust kicked up made work in the tunnel dangerous and almost unbearable. Borglum pressed on.

  In the summer of 1939, Congressman Francis Case, on behalf of the appropriations committee, personally looked into working conditions inside the advancing Hall of Records entrance hallway and reported that working conditions there were nearly impossible and that the odds for the workers contracting silicosis and then suing the government were too high.

  Work on the Hall of Records ceased forever with the blowing of a whistle on a July afternoon in 1939. After workmen left the mountain in 1941, it was discovered that mountain goats had taken up residence in the 14-foot-wide-by-20-foot-high tunnel that ran 75 feet into the mountain.

  The Theodore Roosevelt head, the fourth and last figure to be completed on Mount Rushmore, was officially dedicated on the night of July 2, 1939, nine years after the George Washington head had been unveiled. That night was the first time the Mount Rushmore faces were fully lighted—however briefly—and Borglum did so first by skyrockets and aerial bombs and then by a battery of twelve powerful searchlights being switched on. Singer Richard Irving sang Irving Berlin’s brand-new song, “God Bless America.” Although President Roosevelt did not attend, some 12,000 guests turned out for this dedication of the final head, and silent-movie cowboy star William S. Hart and a group of “Sioux Indian dancers in full regalia” added excitement to the evening.

  Borglum announced that he had years, if not decades, of work still ahead of him at Mount Rushmore. Much “bumping”—refining of the facial features by specialized pneumatic hammers—remained, and he still had to blast out and carve the upper bodies, Lincoln’s hand, and so forth. Nor had he given up hope on the Hall of Records; he was looking at improved ventilation and other work safety features to put into place as soon as the funds flowed again.

  In February of 1941, Borglum had begun a new charm offensive with FDR and Congress—insisting to the president that funding had to be improved so that the “Shrine of Democracy” could be fully finished, as he had promised Roosevelt in 1936, during the president’s time in office. Borglum set off for Washington to argue for increased funding—as he had every spring for the past fourteen years—and this time his wife, Mary, went with him. They stopped off in Chicago so that Borglum could give a speech and while there, Borglum saw a specialist about a prostate problem he’d been having.

  The doctor recommended surgery and Borglum decided to get it out of the way immediately so that he could lead the spring work rush back at Mount Rushmore.

  A series of blood clots from the surgery kept Borglum in the hospital for two weeks, and on February 28 a messenger arrived with the crushing news that President Roosevelt was cutting all non-defense spending to the bone and would no longer approve moneys for projects such as Mount Rushmore.

  On March 6, 1941, exactly one week after he received the news from Roosevelt and after a series of embolisms created by more blood clots, Gutzon Borglum died in the Chicago hospital.

  Many of the workers who’d labored on Mount Rushmore for almost fifteen years thought that Borglum’s body should be interred in the unfinished Hall of Records hallway tunnel, but the Park Service would not consider such a thing. Borglum’s remains were temporarily interred in Chicago and then moved to Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California, three years later. A memorial service for Borglum was held for the workers and local friends of the boss in Keystone’s white-steepled Congregational church.

  The Park Service, Congress, and the Mount Rushmore Commission were ready to shut down work that very week, but the Mount Rushmore workers petitioned the commission to appoint Borglum’s son, Lincoln, as the new director and to go on and “complete the work as to his father’s wishes.”

  The commission agreed, but it was only a token gesture. With only $50,000 in funds remaining, the twenty-nine-year-old Lincoln Borglum focused the last months of work on finishing up some of the fine details on Teddy Roosevelt’s face and doing some final touch-ups of George Washington’s collar and lapels.

  That last summer season of work went very well and seemed, at least to a visiting outsider, like all the other productive summers of work, with baseball games by the Rushmore team, horseplay coming down the 506 steps on Friday, Saturday night dances, free Sunday afternoon motion pictures at L
incoln Borglum’s place, and lots of hungover men not receiving to-MAH-to juice after climbing the 506 stairs on Monday morning.

  But it wasn’t the same, and every man still working on the project knew it. Nothing in the increasingly alarming world in the autumn of 1941 seemed quite the same.

  The last whistle blew and the last pneumatic drill and bumper fell silent on Mount Rushmore on October 31, 1941.

  THE STORY OF PAHA SAPA’S SON Robert’s Jewish-Belgian father-in-law, Monsieur Vanden Daelen Adler, was later told in the 1955 book Survival of a Belgian Jewish Diamond Cutter and was turned into the low-budget 1959 movie Diamonds or Death, starring Macdonald Carey as Adler and Ruth Roman as Adler’s wife (“Zigmond” in real life, “Suzanne” in the film) with the twenty-five-year-old Maggie Smith, in only her second film role, playing “Renée.” The film, never released on VHS or DVD, is known today to historians for the wonderful deep-focus photography by Paul Beeson and by its moody, totally inappropriate-to-the-subject score by jazz trumpeter Dizzy Reece. Some Star Trek fanatics are aware of the film due to the brief and rather awkward appearance in it of actor Leonard Nimoy (credited in the movie as “Leonard Nemoy”) as the Nazi sidekick to the Gestapo officer “Heinrich” who was so obsessed with stopping the Adler family from fleeing Belgium. (“Heinrich,” overplayed by Henry Rowland, had been an uncredited Nazi officer in the infinitely superior Casablanca seventeen years earlier. Nemoy-Nimoy had only four lines in the movie, but his atrocious German accent with those four lines somehow is well-known to serious Star Trek fans.)

  In reality, diamond cutter turned diamond merchant Vanden Daelen Adler had one of the greatest success stories of any Jew seeking to get his family out of Belgium before World War II.