Black Hills: A Novel

by Dan Simmons

  Five weeks after that, Paha Sapa came home from a twelve-hour shift at the Homestake to find his son standing in the kitchen and wearing the dark khaki uniform, the high puttees, and the flat-brimmed Montana peak hat of the American Expeditionary Force. Robert calmly explained that he’d driven the few miles to Wyoming to enlist as a private in the Army, in the 91st Division and would be leaving the next day for basic training at Camp Lewis in Washington state.

  Paha Sapa had never touched his son in anger. While all the white fathers he knew spanked their kids, especially their boys, whenever they got out of line, Paha Sapa had never raised a hand to Robert and almost never raised his voice. A look or slight lowering of his tone had always sufficed in terms of discipline and he had never been tempted to spank or strike his son.

  That moment, in the kitchen in the shack in Keystone on May 8, 1917, was the closest he ever came to striking Robert—and it would have been no token slap: Paha Sapa would have pummeled Robert with his fists, beating him into submission as he later beat the bullies on Mount Rushmore who insisted on picking fights with him, if he hadn’t forced himself to sit down at the kitchen table instead. He was so furious he was shaking.

  —Why, Robert? College? Dartmouth? Your future? Your mother’s hopes for you, Robert. My hopes. Why in God’s name?

  Robert had also been shaking with emotion, although which emotion—embarrassment, fear at his father’s potential wrath, excitement, chagrin, nervousness—Paha Sapa would never know. He only saw the trembling of his son’s always calm hands and heard the slightest hint of tremolo in the always calm voice.

  —I have to, Father. My country’s at war.

  —Your country!?

  Paha Sapa felt like jumping to his feet then and seizing his much taller son by the front of his oversized service coat, ripping the buttons off, and throwing the eighteen-year-old through the closed screen door.

  But all he could do was to say again in a strangled rasp—

  —Your country!?

  He felt then that he had failed completely in showing his son Bear Butte and the Badlands and the Paha Sapa themselves, the Six Grandfathers in the sunlight, the forests of aspen and ponderosa pine, the valley meadows and grassy hills farther south and the plains where the wind became a visible thing moving its invisible hand across the hide of the world. He realized, too late, that he should have taken Robert to the valley of the stream called Chankpe Opi Wakpala, where the scattered bones of Paha Sapa’s beloved tunkašila lay bleaching beneath an ancient cottonwood tree and where Crazy Horse’s heart had been secretly buried so that no wasichu could ever disturb it.

  All he could say, for the third and final time, was—

  —Your… country?

  Robert de Plachette Slow Horse had not cried, to his father’s knowledge, since he was one and a half years old, but he looked as if he was going to cry now.

  —My country, Father. And yours. We’re at war.

  Paha Sapa came very close to being physically ill. He gripped the edge of the kitchen table with all his strength.

  —It’s a war between a wasichu kaiser and a wasichu king, Robert, with lots of other wasichu parliaments and prime ministers and foul-breathed old men speaking a score of languages all swept up in it. For no reason. For no reason. Do you know how many young English boys died at the Battle of the Somme, Robert… on just the first day?

  —More than nineteen thousand dead, Father… before breakfast that first day. More than fifty-seven thousand casualties that entire first day. More than four hundred thousand soldiers from the British Empire dead or injured before the battle was over, more than two hundred thousand French casualties—and it wasn’t their battle—more than four hundred and sixty thousand German casualties.

  —More than a million men dead or wounded in one battle, Robert… for what? What was gained by either side when that battle was over?

  —Nothing, Father.

  —And you’re volunteering for that? To join that absolute… madness.

  —Yes. I have to. My country’s at war.

  He sat down across from his father and leaned across the table.

  —Father, do you remember when I was about five and you took me to Bear Butte for the first time?

  Paha Sapa could only stare sickly at his son.

  —Do you remember that I disappeared for several hours and all that I’d tell you when I came back to our campsite was that I’d been with a nice man who had the same name as I did? Robert Sweet Medicine—you also met him. I know you did.

  Paha Sapa could not even nod or shake his head. He looked at his son as if he were already in the grave.

  —Well, I told Mr. Sweet Medicine that I’d never repeat the things he told me that day, Father, but I’ll break that promise and tell you this…. He told me that I was not destined to die a warrior’s death. That I would never die on a battlefield or from another warrior’s hand. Does that make you feel better, Father?

  Paha Sapa grasped his son’s wrist so hard the bones groaned.

  —Why, Robert? Dartmouth? Your real life ahead of you? Why… this?

  Robert looked down a moment and then met his father’s gaze.

  —A couple of months ago when we were working on the Harley, you asked me what I wanted to do… with my life. I didn’t answer. I’ve been afraid for years to tell you the truth. But I’ve known for years what I want to do, must do…. I want to be a writer.

  The words made no real sense to Paha Sapa. All he could see was the campaign hat, now laid on the table, the black eagle with the spread-wings buttons on the coat, and the bronze disks on the high khaki collar of the uniform jacket—the disk on the left with the embossed letters U.S. and the disk on the right showing the crossed rifles of the infantry.

  —A writer? Do you mean like a journalist? A newspaperman?

  —No, Father. A novelist. You love to read…. You read novels all the time. I learned my love of books and of Dickens and of Cervantes and of Mark Twain and of all the others from you, Father. You know that. I’m sure that Mother would have led me to books in the same way; she was a teacher, I know, but she wasn’t there and you were. I want to be a writer… a novelist… but to write about something, I have to have lived. This war, this so-called War to End All Wars, as obscene as it is—and I know it’s obscene, Father, just as you do: I know it has no more glory in it than a terrible train wreck or auto accident… but it will be the major event of this century, Father. You know that. How will I ever know who I am or what I’m made of or how I’ll react under fire—perhaps I’m a coward, I have no idea now—but how will I know any of these things or learn about myself unless I go? I have to go. I love you, Father—I love you beyond all words in any language I know or could ever learn—but I have to do this thing. And I swear to you on everything sacred to both of us—on Mother’s grave and the memory of her love for both of us—that I will not fall in battle.

  And he had not. He had been as good as his—or Robert Sweet Medicine’s—word.

  After ten months of training, the 91st Division was shipped first to England and then to France in the late summer of 1918. The little blue unfolding army-issued envelope-letters with Robert’s tight script filling each page arrived weekly, without fail, just as they had for all his years away at school.

  August 1918 was filled with even more training near Montigny-le-Roi.

  Paha Sapa bought a large map which he affixed to the kitchen wall.

  In September, Robert’s division marched to the front and the letters began listing addresses such as Void, Pagny-sur-Meuse, and Sorcy-sur-Meuse, and Sorcy.

  Paha Sapa bought a pack of children’s crayons and made red and blue circles on the wall map.

  That September and October, Robert and his division fought in the reduction of the German St.-Mihiel salient, then in the ferocious Meuse-Argonne offensive, then regrouped in places with such horribly familiar names as Flanders and Ypres. Robert wrote of amusing little incidents in the trenches, about the sense of humor
of the western-states young men he spent time with, of the habits and manners of the French and Belgians—on October 26, in a place called Chateau-Rumbeke, King Albert of the Belgians phoned the division’s headquarters to express his welcome to the Americans. Robert reported that although it was a rainy, hot, steaming, flea-bitten, rat-biting night in the Allied trenches, the men of the 91st were thrilled to death by the king’s welcoming phone call.

  Later, Paha Sapa would learn how terrible the fighting in the so-called Ypres-Lys Offensive from October 30 to November 11, 1918, really was. Robert had been in the midst of the worst of it. His commanding officer wrote a letter of praise and commendation to go along with three medals that the private-promoted-to-sergeant would receive in that time. He was not touched by shell or wire or bullet or poison gas or bayonet.

  At eleven a.m. on the eleventh of November 1918, an armistice was signed in a railroad car at Compiègne and a cease-fire went into effect. All of the opposing armies began to pull back from their front lines. The last Allied soldier to die on the Western Front was reported to be a Canadian named George Lawrence Price, killed by a German sniper at 10:58 a.m. that day.

  The 91st Division moved back into Belgium to wait for demobilization and shipment home. Robert wrote of how beautiful the early-winter countryside was there, despite the ravages of four years of war, and how he was seeing a young lady in the village during his free time, communicating with her and her parents and sisters through his high school French.

  What was later called the Spanish flu first broke out at Fort Riley, Kansas—General Custer’s and Libbie’s old stomping ground—and soon spread around the world. A strange mutation of a more common influenza virus, it was most deadly among the young and physically fit. The actual number of people killed by the influenza virus could never be certain, but some estimated up to 100 million people—a third of the entire population of Europe and more than twice the number of all the soldiers killed in the Great War.

  Robert died of pneumonia—the most common cause of death among the young with this influenza—in an army hospital near his billet south of Dunkerque and was buried in the Flanders Field American Cemetery along with 367 of his comrades near the village of Waregem in Belgium.

  Paha Sapa received the news on Christmas Eve 1918. Two more letters, following their slower and more circuitous route, arrived from Robert after the death notice, each letter celebrating the beauty of Belgium, his delight at seeing the young (unnamed and possibly not the same) lady, the pleasure he was receiving from the books he was reading in French, his profound gratitude just for surviving the war while suffering nothing worse than a slight cough he was fighting, and his eagerness to see his father when the 91st Division demobilized in earnest in February or March.

  PAHA SAPA KNOWS that something is horribly wrong just by the sound of the first explosion.

  The five charges he set for the demonstration explosion, one quarter of a stick of dynamite each, buried in deep holes in the raw rock beneath the slight rim ridge running from Washington past Jefferson, have been primed to detonate in such rapid series that they will sound almost simultaneous to the onlookers below—BAM,BAM,BAMBAMBAM. The demonstration blast was designed to make some enjoyable noise and kick up a maximum of granite dust with the minimum of loose stone actually moved through the air.

  But this explosion is far too loud. It feels too serious, the vibration flowing into Paha Sapa through the rock beneath him and through the curved vertical stone of Abraham Lincoln’s cheek and vibrating his teeth and bones and aching internal organs.

  And it’s too solitary.

  Paha Sapa looks up to see his worst fear realized.

  This is the “look up” blast he’s buried just to the right of George Washington’s cheek and it’s taken a large gouge out of the cheek itself.

  Paha Sapa looks down and sees the wrong detonator, the gray wires rather than black leading from it. He hears rather than sees the commotion in the sound-shocked side of Doane Mountain below as the newsreel cameras swing on their tripods and as everyone from the youngest child to the president of the United States raises a shocked gaze to the area of the mountain where several score tons of granite have just been lifted into the air in a mighty cloud of dust.

  There’s nothing Paha Sapa can do. The charges have been rigged in deliberate series, but the electrical charge has already been sent to the fuses of all twenty-one detonators.

  He has not meant for this to happen yet. Long Hair’s ghost distracted him just when…

  The second, third, fourth, and fifth blasts go off simultaneously. George Washington’s right eye socket explodes outward and the first president’s brow cracks, slumps, and falls, taking the aggressive beak of granite nose with it.

  The third blast has taken the mouth and chin and launched Model T–sized chunks of granite far, far out into the thick August air. The fourth explosion blows Washington’s right cheek, what was left of his mouth, and part of the left brow into the air. The fifth blast brings the teetering debris of the previous four sliding and crashing down.

  Chunks of rock larger than Paha Sapa strike and scar Abraham Lincoln’s face above and below and beside the Lakota powderman’s partially shielded roost. Below, people are screaming, the screeching microphones and loudspeakers still echoing the reality.

  Jefferson flies apart more efficiently than Washington, which is appropriate for the third in line in any profession rather than the first.

  But most of the five explosions here happen behind the huge flag that is still draped there, making the Jefferson Head seem like a firing-squad victim who’s chosen a large blindfold.

  Paha Sapa didn’t want this to happen when the flag was still in place. It’s a major reason why he was willing to wait.

  My country, Father. And yours. We’re at war.

  Paha didn’t believe that then and doesn’t believe it now, when the country is not at war, but he had no intention of destroying the giant flag so patiently sewn by little old ladies and high school girls in Rapid City.

  Incredibly, the thin fabric actually muffles the explosions a tiny bit. Then, faster than the eye can follow, the giant flag is torn to shreds as ton after ton of pulverized rock flies outward and upward in an expanding cumulus cloud of gray dust and flame.

  The flag tatters are burning.

  Jefferson’s prodigious jaw goes first, sliding in fragments toward the heap of old boulders far below. Let gravity do the work, Billy, my lad.

  By the time the flag shroud is burned and blasted away, Jefferson’s nose and eyes and brow and entire left cheek are gone, pulverized. And now the unthinkable is happening.

  After Lincoln Borglum’s eight workers were to have swung the boom arm of the crane away, even while cranking up the flag on its various ropes and guy wires, the plan was for them to head for the 506 steps. The workers were finished for the day and Borglum wanted to introduce his son to President Roosevelt before the party broke up for good.

  But now Lincoln Borglum and his men seem to be trying to do something—crank up the flag? Reach the other charges before they detonate?

  No time for any of those things, but with a surge of nausea and terror, Paha Sapa sees the small black figures still wrestling with the crane boom arm when an explosion blasts that thick boom high into the air and sends flames from the burning flag fragments over the whole top of the now-shattered Jefferson head. Through the granite dust and real smoke he can see the tiny figures running, falling… is that a man falling with the flag fragments and blackened boulders?

  Paha Sapa prays to every God he knows that it is not.

  Then all five crates of dynamite in the Theodore Roosevelt field of granite go off.

  This throws the most rock of all at Paha Sapa and toward the crowds below. He has buried the dynamite crates deep in their niches—the idea, with each head, was not just to destroy what is there, but to deny Borglum or any future sculptor from ever finding enough rock for any future carving, and this goal has now been a
chieved, for the Washington and Jefferson heads as well as the shattered gray sheet that was the prepared field of granite for the TR carving. The good rock is gone. The shards of brow, ear, fragment of nose left of Washington and Jefferson will be ruins forever, but there is not enough rock for any more carving. And now none at all for the entire Teddy Roosevelt site.

  Amid the noise and rock-shrapnel and burgeoning dust cloud, Paha Sapa has seized the borrowed binoculars to get a last glance of Gutzon Borglum and the guests on Doane Mountain.

  Paha Sapa has calculated wrong. Rocks larger than his fist, larger than his head, are ripping through pine trees and aspen foliage to crash among the crowd like so many meteorites from space.

  Those who were standing have already fled like victims at Pompeii or Herculaneum, running across the parking lot, forgetting their cars in their panic. Those trapped in the closer reviewing stands are huddled on the wooden planks, husbands trying to shield their wives from falling debris, the white cloud almost to them now, and heavier rocks from the TR granite field blast beginning to fall. Paha Sapa sees Senator Norbeck standing, his towel blown away by successive shock waves and his cancer-ravaged jaw and chin and neck looking like a bloody preview of things to come for the others.

  And the president…

  Paha Sapa’s bowels clench at the thought.

  He had almost forgotten, until the presidential touring car with its special hand controls pulled up, that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a cripple, unable even to stand without steel braces locking his wasted, withered legs in place and unable even to pretend to walk without someone next to him bearing his full weight. The president of the United States can’t run.

  But in the three seconds he looks down there, before the expanding dust cloud and the final explosions eliminate his view forever, Paha Sapa sees a Secret Service man who was looking toward the reviewing stand and crowd, his back to the seated president and to Mount Rushmore, turn and leap into the driver’s seat of the powerful touring car, jam its gears into reverse, and roar backward away from the falling debris and approaching cloud, almost running over Governor Tom Berry as he does so. The roar of the car’s engine is audible even amid the explosions and screams and avalanches of rock. The president’s head is still thrown back almost jauntily, his smile replaced by a look of great interest if not wonder (but not horror, Paha Sapa notices), his eyes still fixed on the death of his four stone predecessors on the cliff above.