Black Hills (69 page)

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.

P
AHA
S
APA 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 achieved, 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.

Gutzon Borglum, on the other hand, stands where he was, legs apart, his fists on his hips, staring at the approaching cloud of grit and dust and flying rock like a pugilist whose turn it is to await his opponent’s blow.

The Abraham Lincoln Head explodes above and around Paha Sapa.

Reacting from some atavistic survival instinct, he throws himself flat on the narrow ridge even as the cliff comes apart above and beneath him.

Lincoln’s heavy brow comes loose in one piece and falls past Paha Sapa, just feet away, with a horrible mass greater than a house, heavier than a battleship. The pupils of Lincoln’s eyes—carved granite rods three feet long that give the appearance of a real eye pupil glinting from a distance below—go firing across the valley like granite rockets, one cutting through the mushrooming dust cloud to pierce Borglum’s studio like a spear.

Lincoln’s nose also severs in one piece and takes off a seven-foot stretch of the ledge just inches away from Paha Sapa’s outstretched and wildly gripping fingers.

The next two blasts deafen Paha Sapa and throw him six feet into the air. He lands half off the ledge, legs dangling over hundreds of feet of empty, dust-filled air, but the bleeding fingers of his left hand find a rim and he grips and grunts and scrambles back up amid the pelting of
rock bits and blasts of unspeakable noise. His shirt and work pants have been ripped to shreds. He is bleeding in a hundred spots from rock splinter strikes, and his right eye is swollen shut.

But he is alive and—illogically, treacherously, hypocritically—he fights to stay on the collapsing ledge amid the chaos and to
stay
alive.

How can this be?

The final crate of dynamite is inches from his face. It should have gone off with the others. Has the delay fuse in the detonator been damaged?

Paha Sapa’s survival instincts tell him to shove the crate off the ledge before it does explode. Let it join the exploding, sliding, roiling, dust-clouded chaos below. In that fraction of a second, Paha Sapa confronts the full extent of his cowardice: he’d rather die from being hanged in a few weeks than be blown to atoms right now.

But he does not push the crate over the edge of the avalanching cliff.

Instead, Paha Sapa tears his nails as he claws the boards off the top of the crate. He has to know why it hasn’t detonated.

The reason, he sees through the enclosing, choking dust, is that there is no dynamite in the crate—not a single stick—although there was the night before when he hid this final crate here and carefully attached the interior detonator and detonator box wires.

There is just a single slip of paper.

Paha Sapa sees his name written on it and the few sentences scrawled beneath, the words not quite legible in the swirling dust, but the handwriting quite recognizable. There is no doubt as the dust occludes everything and shuts off Paha Sapa’s breathing as well as vision. The note is written in his son Robert’s bold but careful script.