Black Hills

by Simmons, Dan

  The boy’s name is Alex and he has been so inspired by the exhibits at the Fair—especially Mr. Tesla’s and Mr. Edison’s—that his new goal in life is to grow up to invent a mechanical adding machine that can think.

  Paha Sapa shakes his head to rid himself of these unwanted, swirling images and words and names and child-memories. His sensitivity to inward-seeing visions right now is as heightened as he’d feared, all because of his proximity to Miss de Plachette… and all the more reason to avoid any possible skin-to-skin contact with Miss de Plachette. He does not want to see into her mind or memories. It is very important to him that he does not do that. Not now. Not yet. With luck, never.

  He realizes that she is whispering to him.

  —Paha Sapa, are you all right?

  He opens his eyes and sees that her gloved hand hovers too near his wrist.

  He moves his arm away and smiles.

  —Perfect. Wonderful. I just discovered that I’m afraid of heights, is all.

  The guard-conductor with the waxed mustache, Kovacs, looks over at Paha Sapa suspiciously, as if this nonwhite passenger with the long braided hair may go berserk and begin battering the walls, shattering glass, and bending the iron of the door in his wild effort to escape, even though they are a hundred feet up, just as another height-crazed passenger was reported to have done just a week earlier. In that incident, so the newspaper accounts went, a woman finally stopped the crazy man by removing her skirt and throwing it over the man’s head, immediately causing him to become docile.

  Paha Sapa knows that such a blinding hood works with panicked horses. Why not with crazed Ferris Wheel passengers? More effective than the sap filled with shot purportedly in the guard’s pocket.

  Brakes release, the car wobbles again, and they resume their rise.

  It is at the apogee of their circle—apogee being a word Paha Sapa learned when the three Jesuits at the tiny tent school on the mountain above Deadwood attempted for a year to drive Greek into his unwilling head—that Miss de Plachette does something… extraordinary. And changes his life forever.

  The car stops suddenly at the top of the Wheel and begins rocking more noticeably than at their previous two stops. Rheva and her granddaughter let out moans. Little Alex shouts with joy at what he probably thinks to be their imminent destruction. Long-nosed Granddad Doyle pats the boy on the head.

  The conductor’s mouth slacks open. He cries out—

  —Miss!

  The shout is due to the fact that Miss de Plachette has suddenly moved to the center of the car, gathered her long skirt, jumped up onto one of the low, round plush velvet chairs, and is now standing there, balancing easily, very straight, arms full out from her sides, palms down, head back, eyes closed.

  —Miss, please… you mustn’t, ma’am!

  The guard, Kovacs, sounds sincerely alarmed, but when he moves toward Rain, Paha Sapa instinctively steps forward to come between them. No man is going to touch Miss de Plachette while he is around.

  Smiling broadly, head still far back as if tasting ocean air, Rain seems ready to leap forward and begin soaring out—magically, because of the glaze and wire mesh—through the windows into the blue Illinois sky. Instead, she lowers both arms and offers her right hand to Paha Sapa.

  —Your hand, please, dear sir?

  Paha Sapa takes it—grateful for his gloves and hers so that there can be no contact of skin on skin that might trigger any into-vision—and she steps down lightly and gracefully. The guard, Kovacs, returns to his post at the bolted south door and literally saves face by stroking his waxed mustache.

  Miss de Plachette speaks softly, no apology audible in her voice.

  —I just wanted to be the highest person in Illinois—perhaps in the country—for a few seconds. I’ve got that out of my system now.

  The Wheel begins to move again.

  Paha Sapa realizes in that second that he is going to love this woman for the rest of his life.

  Paha Sapa says nothing. The two move to the west-facing windows now—the grandparents Rheva and Doyle and little Alex and the other two children giving the madwoman room, but also smiling.

  Below them to the west, Paha Sapa and Miss de Plachette look down on the pretend turrets and towers of the Old Vienna attraction. Music from the multiple-domed Algerian Theater filters up to them. Farther up the Midway, a string of ostriches and reindeer from the Laplander Village mingle in wonderful but obscure mixed metaphor. To the north, there is a dark smudge above the city of Chicago and Paha Sapa realizes it must be from all the industry and smokestacks and locomotives and other machines there. He wonders how dark the sky gets in the winter with the hive-city’s tens or hundreds of thousands of coal fires burning. Chicago, he has already seen, is the Black City to the Fair’s pretend White City.

  Miss de Plachette smiles and points to the captive balloon farther west along the Midway Plaisance and to their right. The balloon is at least a hundred feet up on its thick tether, but it’s below them. (Three days later, on July 9, Paha Sapa will watch from the Wild West Show grounds as dark clouds gather, a funnel cloud appears, and then cyclone winds of more than 100 miles per hour lash the Midway, the Ferris Wheel, and all the buildings and exhibits. Huge glass panes will blow off the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building and a forty-foot segment of roof will be torn off the dome of the Machinery Building. The sudden winds will catch the empty captive balloon before it can be hauled down and the beautiful mushroom of colored silk he and Miss de Plachette are looking at now will be ripped into nine thousand yards of silk rags, many scattered more than a half mile away. Mr. Ferris’s Wheel, on the other hand, filled almost to capacity when the storm strikes it, will weather the wind’s impact without a problem.)

  They swoop down and start up again. There is no more loading or pausing. The second revolution is more wonderful than the first.

  Paha Sapa knows that the boilers that provide the steam for Ferris’s Wheel, for aesthetic reasons, are more than seven hundred feet away across Lexington Avenue, but he imagines as the great wheel accelerates that he can hear the boilers roar louder. He knows that he can hear the steam pressure in the giant cylinders of the thousand-horsepower engine at the base of the wheel rise in volume. One glance at Rain de Plachette’s flushed features and bright eyes tells him that she hears this as well.

  The rest is silence. Not even Doyle and Rheva and Alex and the other two children in the opposite corner make a noise. The conductor has turned his back to them and is at the door looking out his own window. The only hint of sound now is the whoosh of the large cabin through the air and the occasional creak of the cage shifting on the overhead trunnions or a low, almost inaudible grind from the gigantic central axle more than seventy feet from them.

  The Wheel rises higher, higher, the White City in the east distance coming back into full view as they rise smoothly and silently. Paha Sapa looks out past the wooded island and lagoons and treetops, out to Lake Michigan, and sees the high afternoon sun break through the clouds and shine a single shaft of light down on the waters of the lake. The shaft of sunlight is so bright that everything else seems to fade and darken—the Midway, the White City, the trees and lagoons, the people, the harbor and lake itself—until there is only that powerful searchlight of pure sunshine pouring down on a limited circle of Lake Michigan wave tops far to the east.

  Why is that image so hauntingly familiar? Why does it move him so?

  Paha Sapa realizes and remembers just as the car heads up over the curve of the high arc, leaving the White City, Lake Michigan, and the prophetic shaft of light behind; then the car completes its voyage over the top and shows them all the western end of the Midway Plaisance and the distant prairies again. Even this view is striking, with the many shades of green and brown receding to the distant horizon—toward the prairies he knows so well a thousand miles west—but also with a web of train tracks and moving locomotives moving in toward Chicago, streaking the sky with their plumes of dark smoke.

 
; But it is not the view that grips Paha Sapa and—he is sure, with no vision tricks necessary—Rain de Plachette on this second revolution and downward rush. It is the pure thrill and pleasure of speed and movement through space. Paha Sapa is surprised at the thought that strikes him next—Only the wasichu can do such things. The Fat Takers are wakan in their own way, and it is a powerful magic.

  Then it is over and they are stopped and the guard has taken his brass key and unlocked the north door and they are all disembarking the cabin as mobs wait to board on the opposite, south side. The platforms and steps under girders and metal arches around and beneath the huge Wheel are an environment out of Jules Verne. (The friars at the Deadwood tent school, for some inexplicable reason, had English-language versions—he was sure the friars had translated them themselves—of Voyage to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and the newest, Around the World in Eighty Days hidden away in a trunk in their own tent, and Paha Sapa crept in and stole—borrowed—and read all of them within weeks of his learning to read.)

  Miss de Plachette’s expression is one of pure joy. She seizes his forearm in a death grip that shuts off all circulation.

  —Oh, Paha Sapa… I would give anything to experience that again.

  Paha Sapa removes from his pocket another dollar, a week’s wages for him, gently takes her by the elbow, and leads her around through the Jules Verne world-of-the-future girder-and-metal-arch maze to the back of the growing line waiting to board on the south side. He surreptitiously checked his watch while they were still riding. They have time.

  THEIR FIRST TWO TIMES AROUND, they were almost alone and hardly spoke at all. Their second two times around, there are at least twenty-five people in the car, but Paha Sapa and Rain de Plachette speak the entire time—softly, privately, secure in their own world somewhere between the Jackson Park–Midway Plaisance earth and the blue-sky-and-scattered-clouds Illinois heavens.

  —You’ll pardon me for asking a personal question, Miss de Plachette, but isn’t Rain an unusual name for wa… for white people? Beautiful… very beautiful… but I haven’t heard it before.

  Paha Sapa’s heart is pounding wildly. He is terrified of giving offense, of making her pull away from him—literally, as she rests her right shoulder against his left, but also in terms of offending her in any way. But he is aching from curiosity.

  She smiles at him as they rise on the eastern part of their first slow revolution.

  —It is an unusual name, Mr…. Paha Sapa. But my mother also thought it was beautiful. The most beautiful word she’d learned in the English language, is what she told my father. When I was born and she wanted to name me Rain, Father didn’t protest. He loved her very much. Did you know that my mother was Lakota?

  Paha Sapa feels a constriction in his chest and throat.

  —Yes. I mean, no… that is, I heard a rumor….

  She smiles again. The other passengers are making nervous noises as the large car sways and creaks on its trunnion when it stops, but they are veterans now.

  —Well, the rumor’s true. Her name was White Shawl and I’m told that she was very pale for a Sioux… a Lakota. She was Father’s choir director at the agency mission and they… Did I tell you that Father was doing mission work in Nebraska when they met?

  —No. Please go on. Tell me more.

  Miss de Plachette looks out as the car stops and rocks again—there are afternoon cloud shadows moving over the trees and lagoon and walkways and giant buildings of the White City now—and he sees the slight blush beneath the freckles that cross the bridge of her nose and become fewer in number on her cheeks.

  —That’s how Father met Mr. Cody, of course. Mr. Cody’s new ranch was right next to the agency—reservation—where father spent five years as a missionary. There were several groups… tribes… there. Lakota and Shoshoni and a few Cheyenne and Creek and one family of Cherokee. It was a small agency, but the church had been there a long time, and the people came from miles around. Not just Indians…

  She blushes again and Paha Sapa smiles, encouraging her to go on. They are at the last stop before the high point of the wheel’s circle. The crowded car is alive with oohs and ahhs and gasps and exclamations.

  —I mean, Mr. Cody and his ranch hands—some of them were Indians as well—of course you know that—would come over and the congregation was often more than a hundred people. Very large for that wild part of Nebraska. Mother was choir director, as I said, and she also taught all the children at the mission school there, and… well… Father and Mother fell in love and were married there…. Mr. Cody was Father’s best man at the wedding, and the Reverend Kyle came all the way from Omaha to perform the ceremony. And I was born a year later and, so my Father tells me, it was raining the week I was born that June… the first real rain in more than seven months of drought… and Mother named me Rain, and then she died when I was four and we moved East a few months later and I’ve never been back.

  Paha Sapa tries to imagine this—a wasichu wičasa wakan marrying a Lakota woman in 1870 or so. It is very hard to imagine. Perhaps, he thinks, the Natural Free Human Beings are—or were—very different in Nebraska. Then he thinks—What are Natural Free Human Beings doing in Nebraska? Are they lost?

  He says aloud—

  —And after you left, you lived in Boston and Washington and France?

  —Yes, and elsewhere… and, Paha Sapa, I’m ashamed to say that I know much more of the French language than I do my mother’s tongue. When Father and I have visited Mr. Cody’s Wild West Show, I’ve tried to use my few words and phrases to talk to the Lakota there, but the men just smile at me. I’m sure I have everything wrong.

  —I won’t just smile at you, Miss de Plachette. Try out one of your phrases.

  —Well, as I say, I only barely remember them, since Mother spoke English almost exclusively in the house when I was tiny, before she… before we moved… most probably at Father’s request. But I do remember some of the Lakota men talking to her at church and asking her how she was…. I’m pretty sure I remember “Hello” and “How are you?”

  —Say it. I will be your audience and noncritical coach. We still have ten minutes or more of this ride left. But let’s don’t forget to enjoy the scenery.

  —Oh, I assure you, Paha Sapa, I haven’t quit watching for a second. Even when I look your way, I am also looking beyond you to the south, or looking out at the prairie to the west. All right, “Hello, how are you?” in the Lakota I remember from the agency when I was four years old…Hau, Tanyan yaun he?

  Paha Sapa just smiles. He can’t help it.

  Miss de Plachette curls her hand into a tiny fist and hits him hard on the shoulder. Paha Sapa’s eyes widen—he’s not been struck by a woman since he was a young boy—and then he laughs, showing his strong white teeth. Luckily—his world would end then if it were not so—she is also smiling and laughing.

  —What was wrong with that, Paha Sapa? I have even heard your Wild West Sioux say that to one another!

  —Nothing’s wrong with it, Miss de Plachette… if you’re a man.

  —Oh, dear.

  —I’m afraid so. Did your mother not tell you that the Natural Free Human Beings have separate vocabularies and language rules for men and women?

  —No, she didn’t. I mean, I don’t remember if she… I don’t remember so much about Mother. Too much. I don’t even know who the Natural Free Human Beings are… the Sioux?

  —Yes.

  The young woman seems suddenly, strangely near tears, and Paha Sapa, without thinking, tenderly touches her shoulder.

  —The Lakota’s name for ourselves is Ikče Wičaśa—which more or less translates to Natural Free Human Beings, although it means more than that.

  She smiles again. They have passed through the loading area and are rising in the east on the beginning of their second, faster, more exciting revolution. Other passengers squeal. Paha Sapa and Miss de Plachette grin at each other again, prou
d of their seasoned-Ferris-Wheel-traveler status.

  —I certainly understand about feminine, masculine, and neuter nouns and verbs and such from my French and little bit of German and Italian, although the idea of an entire separate language for men and women is almost shocking to me.

  Paha Sapa smiles again.

  —Oh, we tend to understand each other, the Ikče Wičaśa men and women, when we talk to one another. As well as the two sexes do in any language or culture is my uneducated guess.

  —So how would I, a woman, say “Hello, Paha Sapa. How are you today?”

  Paha Sapa actually clears his throat. He’s very nervous and almost sorry this particular discussion began. He knows almost nothing about courting, but does know that one does not impress or ingratiate oneself with a beautiful woman by laughing at her or giving her primitive language lessons. “Courting? Is that what you think you’re doing here, you moron?” asks a voice in his head that sounds strongly and suspiciously like that of George Armstrong Custer.

  He says softly—

  —Well, first of all, the Hau greeting is used only by men. And the he at the end of the sentence…

  He desperately thinks back to Father John Bertrand, the fattest and smartest and gentlest friar at the Deadwood tent school, and the Latin and Greek he tried to drive into 12-year-old Paha Sapa’s thick skull… but all he can call back is the heat inside the tent in the summer, the strong smell of sun-warmed canvas and the straw that Father Pierre Marie used to lay down on the floor, as if the five boys there, two Mexican, one Negro, one white, and Paha Sapa, were barn animals rather than… no, wait…