Black Hills (8 page)

Never run from Indians
was the lesson I learned that July day nine years ago, standing there in the Kansas heat and stench watching the burial party inter the awful remains of Lieutenant Kidder and his men. And all that time I was sick with worry about you, my dearest—so worried that my belly constantly hurt and cramped with anxiety.

Kansas was burning. Pawnee Killer and the other hostile Sioux and Cheyenne had slaughtered more than two hundred whites, including many women and children, in the area I was supposed to patrol on my first western expedition, and the cavalry had shot and killed only two of the redmen—and those had been killed by Kidder’s party before they died.

So I called off the campaign and drove a hundred men and horses one hundred and fifty miles in fifty-five hours. Stragglers fell behind and were killed by Pawnee Killer’s braves, but I would not go back to recover our dead or to chase the hostiles. You were all that I could think of. On July 18, I reached Fort Hayes and left ninety-four of the men there, taking only my brother Tom, two officers, and two troopers on a sixty-mile ride to Fort Harker, which we covered in less than twelve hours. There I left Tom and the four men behind and took the three a.m. train to Fort Riley, where—I prayed to God—I would find you waiting for me in relative safety.

Do you remember our reunion, my darling?

You were in your quarters, pacing, wearing the green dress I had praised at Fort Hayes the previous month. You wrote me later that the vision of me when I threw open the door and entered the room was brighter than even the brilliant Kansas sun
—There before me, blithe and buoyant, stood my husband!—
you later told me that you wrote to your stepmother, but what you did not tell the dear second Mrs. Judge Bacon was that besides being visibly blithe and buoyant, I was also visibly aching for you, my sex as rigid and far more straight and much more in need of use right then than the securely sheathed saber banging at my leg.

Do you remember, my darling, me—still dusty from the trail and railway—slamming the door and lifting you up and carrying you to the bed there in your quarters, smothering you with kisses and fumbling in your clothes while you
fumbled at my buttons, then you unlacing your stays and lowering the top of your dress while I tore off your petticoats and pantaloons? Do you remember my spurs gouging the footboard of that bed that had been so carefully brought out all the way to Fort Riley while you rolled me onto my back, mounted me as I might leap onto Vic, seized me in your eager hand, and guided me into you?

You may remember that we were finished in seconds—our cries probably distracting the sentries on the ramparts—but, as has been our wont since our honeymoon, in minutes we started up again, tearing off the rest of our clothes even while we petted and kissed and stroked and suckled at each other.

I know I slept then, after the second bout of our lovemaking, slept for the first time in five hard-ridden days and more than five hundred miles, but you woke me two hours later. You’d had the orderlies and men carry in bucket after bucket of hot steaming water, them trying to tiptoe in their high boots past the bed where I snored naked under the light sheet (my clothes in disarray all over the floor, you not giving a fig what they might have thought), and when I woke, the curtains were closed and you were standing naked next to the bed, beckoning me to the bath.

Oh, the luxury of that claw-foot tub in that palace of a senior officer’s visiting wife’s billet in Fort Riley!

We had to leave by train that evening, taking you and your servant Eliza and the cookstove back to Fort Harker by rail so we could begin the long ride and wagon drive back to Fort Wallace, but that hour in the hot bath… Do you remember, my Libbie, my darling? Do you remember leaning back against me in the steam as I cupped your beautiful breasts and kissed your beautiful neck and your lovely ears and your luscious lips, kissing you again when you twisted around so that your lips could find me and so that you could turn and fall upon me, your hand going down in the hot water to find me again?

Oh, my darling Libbie—I remember my tongue against your sweet cunnie and your sweet mouth on my sex. We made love eight times that afternoon and you came ten times, both of us knowing even in our hunger and joy that it would be long days of hard travel and no privacy before we could so much as kiss again. I remember when we were dressing in a hurry to pay our compliments to the commander before rushing Eliza and the trunks and stove to the station—Eliza had taken and washed and ironed all my filthy clothes while you and I were alone and naked; she was used enough to that—and I started buttoning my fly, and you, in your corset and nothing else, the hair of the V of your sex still wet from the bath, stayed my hand and then went to your knees one final time….

You’ll remember, my sweet, that when I returned I was court-martialed for, among other things, abandoning my post. It was a year suspension without pay and reduction in rank. I would face a thousand courts-martial and suffer ten thousand suspensions for you, my dearest. But you know that. You’ve always known that.

I need you, Libbie. I do not know where I am. It is dark here, dark and cold. I hear sounds and voices, but they are muffled and seem to come from very, very far away. I am having trouble remembering the last hours, days, minutes, our march, the Indians, any battles we had… I remember almost nothing but the absolute verity of you, my sweetheart.

In truth, my love, I cannot recall where I have been or what has happened. My guess is that I have been wounded, perhaps seriously, although I cannot seem to gain consciousness sufficiently to know whether my body is intact, my limbs still attached. Sometimes I hear people speaking nearby, but I can never quite make out what they are saying. Perhaps I am in some hospital with German nurses. All I know is that I still retain my wits and my memories of you and our love here in this comatic darkness. I hope to God that it is mere sunstroke or concussion, which, as you know, has happened to me before, and that I will fully awaken soon.

You do not want your Autie damaged, your beautiful boy’s slim body inordinately scarred or missing necessary parts. I have promised you… I promised you when I left Fort Lincoln… I have always promised you, during the War, before every campaign out here on the plains… that I will return and that we will be together forever and forever and forever.

Oh, Libbie… Libbie, my darling… my dearest girl, my sweet wife. My love. My life.

5
06 STEPS
.

Paha Sapa pauses at the base of the stairway and looks up at the 506 steps he has to climb. They are the same 506 steps he has climbed almost every weekday morning for the past five years. It is 6:45 on a summer morning—Friday, 21 August—and already the sun has turned the air in the valley as hot as it gets here in the Black Hills. The air is filled with the sound of grasshoppers and the butterscotch scent of heated ponderosa pine. Because it’s Friday, Paha Sapa knows, the crew coming down from the top this evening will play their “mountain goating” game—the 506 steps are separated into flights by some forty-five ramps and platforms, and the goal of the cheering workmen will be to “mountain goat” down by leaping from platform to platform without touching any of the fifty or so steps in between. No one has ever done this successfully, Paha Sapa knows, but no one has broken his neck or leg either, so the mountain goating will happen at the end of this long workday as well, the wild leaping accompanied by the shouts and cheers of the hardworking drillmen and hoist men and miners and powdermen released for their weekend.

Paha Sapa looks up at the 506 steps and realizes that he is tired even before beginning the climb.

Of course, he is seventy-one years old this month, but this is not the reason for his fatigue so early in the day. The cancer that Paha Sapa was
diagnosed with just a month earlier—in Casper, Wyoming, so that no word would reach Borglum or the workers as it might if he’d gone to a doctor in nearby Rapid City—is already eating him from the inside out. He can feel it. It means that he has less time than he had hoped.

But Paha Sapa, even though he carries a forty-pound box of blasting caps and fresh dynamite on his shoulder, does not pause to rest on one of the forty-five ramps or landings on the way up. His strength has always been surprising for a man of his size, and he will not surrender to weakness now until it becomes absolutely necessary. And it is not yet necessary.

Paha Sapa has often heard visitors below estimate the height from the valley floor (where the parking lot and Borglum’s studio are) to the top of the stone heads as “thousands of feet,” but it’s only a little over four hundred feet from the lowest point at the base of the talings of tumbled shards and boulders to the tops of Washington’s and Jefferson’s and (emerging) Lincoln’s heads. Still, that’s the equivalent of climbing the stairs in a forty-story building—something that Paha Sapa has seen in New York—and it takes the men about fifteen minutes to climb to the top of what is now called Mount Rushmore.

Of course, there’s always the aerial tram—that open-topped, small-outhouse-sized box that is whizzing past Paha Sapa as he trudges up another flight of fifty steps—but even the new men know about the time some years ago when the A-frame tipi structure at the top of the mountain collapsed, sending the tram (and cable and A-frame and platform from above) hurtling to the floor of the canyon. Borglum was waiting to ride on the tram that day—he was always zipping up and down or hovering in it, studying some aspect of the work or hauling up VIPs—but the tram had just been loaded with casks of water, so Borglum waited and watched it fall. He still rides it daily.

But few of the other workers do, especially after a second accident earlier this summer in which the loosening setscrew had let go some two hundred feet from the top, sending the tram with five men aboard hurtling down toward the hoist house below. They’d rigged a hand brake since the first accident years ago, but the brake quickly overheated, so the only way they could slow the tram cage was by coming down in a series of spurts and jerks, pausing to let the brake cool, then
spurting and jerking their way down again. Then Gus Schramm, who must weigh 225 pounds, pulled on the chain so hard that the brake arm broke off completely, sending the cage hurtling down the last hundred feet or so. Luckily, Matt Riley in the hoist house had the presence of mind to brace a fat board against the cable drum, which slowed them slightly, but the five men still went flying out of the tram cage at the end, three landing on the loading platform, another on a roof, the last man in a tree. Lincoln Borglum, senior man on the site that day, sent the five men to the hospital for observation, but six men ended up spending the night there. Glenn Jones, the man assigned to drive the others to Rapid City, decided to get a good night’s sleep and some painkiller at the hospital.

In the summer, the workers are expected to be at work at 7 a.m. (7:30 in the winter), but Paha Sapa and the other powdermen are usually there by 6:30, since they have to start early in preparing the dynamite charges that will soon be placed in holes being drilled that morning. The first blow of the day will be at noon, while the drillers are off the face having lunch. Paha Sapa knows that “Whiskey Art” Johnson is already up there with his assistant, cutting the dynamite into smaller segments—sixty or seventy short sticks for each shot—and that Paha Sapa’s assistant will be there soon.

Reaching the halfway point on the 506 steps, Paha Sapa looks up at the three heads.

It has been a productive year so far, with more than 15,000 tons of granite removed—enough to pave a four-acre field with granite blocks a foot thick. Much of that rubble came from Washington’s chest, which is taking shape nicely, but they’ve also cleared out many tons from beneath Jefferson’s chin (where he now takes shape in his new spot to Washington’s left, looking out from the Monument) and in roughing out Abraham Lincoln’s forehead, eyebrows, and nose.

The majority of the rubble, though, came from the frenzied work on Thomas Jefferson’s face, which Borglum is rushing to get ready for a possible visit and dedication in late August by no less than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The presidential visit has been rumored for months, but now it seems certain to happen in just over a week—on Sunday, August 30.

Still climbing with the heavy box on his shoulder, Paha Sapa wonders if this should be the time for him to act.

Paha Sapa has no wish to harm President Roosevelt, but he still has every intention of blowing the other three presidents’ heads off the face of the Six Grandfathers. And would it be more symbolic, somehow, if he eradicated these
wasichu
excresences while the president of the United States sat in his open touring car below?