Black Hills Read Free

the briefest winter silence, unbroken even by crow call from the snowy ponderosa pines on either side and below or by the otherwise constant creak of the supply tram being hauled up or down, until suddenly three booms echo across the valley, and Jefferson’s forehead explodes outward. There is the briefest pause as rocks fall and dust dissipates—then another blast as Jefferson’s indistinct masses of hair and the overhang of brow explode into thousands of flying, falling granite shards, some as big as a Model T. This is followed by an even briefer pause during which more rocks clatter down the slope and crows whirl black above, and then Jefferson’s nose and right eye and the remaining hint of his cheek erupt outward in half a dozen simultaneous final blasts that roll down the valley and echo back, diminished and tinny sounding.
    The debris seems to fall and roll for long minutes, although the real work has been done in seconds. When the last smoke and dust drift away on the cold breeze, the rock face shows only a few subtle folds and minor spurs that will require burring away by hand. Thomas Jefferson is gone. It is as if he never existed there.
    Paha Sapa, against all rules but with special dispensation, has been hanging in his bosun’s chair out of view of the blast around the east side of Washington’s massive head during the explosions, his feet set against a subtle ridge on the long expanse of virgin white rock that has already been blasted down to good stone in preparation for carving at Jefferson’s new site. Now he kicks out, waves up to Gus, his winchman, and begins bouncing across the bulge of hair, cheek, and nose of George Washington, the winch crane above swiveling smoothly with him as he seems to fly. He thinks what he always thinks when he begins to move this way—
Peter Pan
! He saw the play performed on the Pine Ridge Reservation by a traveling troupe from Rapid City years ago and has always remembered how the young woman playing a boy flew around and above the stage on her all-too-visible wire harness. The steel wire that holds Paha Sapa hundreds of feet above the stone valley floor here is one-eighteenth of an inch thick, less visible than the girl–Peter Pan’s was, but he knows that it could hold eight men of his weight. He kicks harder and flies higher; he wants to be the first to seethe results of the fourteen large charges and eighty-six small charges he personally measured and drilled and tapped into place on Jefferson’s head that morning and afternoon.
    Balancing on Washington’s right cheek, waving to Gus to lower him to a point level with the first president’s still-being-worked lips and line of mouth, Paha Sapa looks to his left at his handiwork and finds it good.
    All one hundred of the charges have fired. The masses of parted hair, eyebrows, eye sockets, eye, nose, and first hint of lips are gone, but no errant gouges or lumps have been left in the inferior rock where the first Jefferson carving was mistakenly started.
    Paha Sapa is bouncing weightlessly from the right corner of Washington’s chin, still some hundred and fifty feet above the highest point of the rubbled slope below, when he senses rather than sees or hears Gutzon Borglum descending on a second line from the winch house above.
    The boss drops between Paha Sapa’s bosun’s chair and the remains of the first Jefferson rock face and Borglum glowers at the newly exposed rock for a minute before swiveling easily toward Paha Sapa.
    —
You missed some little spurs there on the far cheek, Old Man.
    Paha Sapa nods. The spurs are visible only as the slightest hint of shadows within the patch of weak February light reflected from Washington’s cheek and nose onto the now empty rock face. Paha Sapa feels the cold as the last of that reflected February light fades away on this south-facing slope. He knows that Borglum had to criticize
something
—he always does. As for being called Old Man, Paha Sapa knows that Borglum