And while I am neither ghost nor liberated soul, I have learned something about death in these years in the cradle of darkness, Libbie. I tremble to tell you that I do not think that there is anything beyond this life, my dearest, which is all the more reason I wish you had decided to live with another man and build a new life rather than choose to bury your future with me fifty-seven years ago.
But I am still glad that Paha Sapa—the loneliest man you have ever met or ever could meet, my love, a man who has lost his name, his relatives, his honor, his wife, his son, his gods, his future, his hopes, and every sacred thing ever entrusted to him—I am still glad that Paha Sapa brought me to New York on that first day of April 1933.
We were delayed a day and a night due to a freak spring snowstorm near Grand Isle, Nebraska, and two days after we finally got back to Mount Rushmore, the Rapid City Journal carried this, dated April 5 and reprinted from the New York Times—
MRS. CUSTER DEAD
IN HER 91ST YEAR
Mrs. Elizabeth Bacon Custer, widow of General George A. Custer, famous Indian fighter of post Civil War days, died at 5:30 yesterday afternoon in her apartment at 71 Park Avenue after a heart attack that occurred Sunday evening. She would have been 91 years old on Saturday. She had been in her usual health and good spirit lately and had indulged in occasional drives and short walks.
At Mrs. Custer’s bedside yesterday were two nieces, Mrs. Charles W. Elmer of 14 Clark street, Brooklyn, and Miss Lula Custer, who had been summoned from her home on the old Custer farm at Monroe Mich., and Mr. Elmer.
It is expected that the funeral service will be held at West Point. Announcement of the arrangements will be made later.
For many years, almost up to the end of her long, eventful life, Mrs. Elizabeth Bacon Custer kept vividly alive the memories of the gallant cavalry commander, whose death in the Battle of Little Big Horn in Montana, in 1876, when his battalion was annihilated by the Indians, made one of the most tragic and dramatic pages of American history.
Mrs. Custer was born in Monroe, Mich., the daughter of Judge Daniel S. Bacon, where she led a peaceful and sheltered life until 1864, when she married “the boy General with the golden locks.” Her youthful soldier husband, General Custer, was born in New Rumley, Harrison County, Ohio, and was graduated at West Point in 1861. At the time of their marriage, he had already served successfully and won promotion in the Civil War, after having arrived fresh from the front on the day of the first battle of Bull Run.
He was then a Brigadier General in command of a brigade of Michigan volunteer cavalry, which under his leadership became one of the most efficient and best-trained bodies of cavalry in the Federal Army. After their marriage Mrs. Custer trod the unfrequented path for a woman of open campaigning. She slept where she could, drank water that in her own words contained “natural History,” and never dared confess to a headache, depression or fatigue.
She followed the General until the close of the Civil War. She was near him at Richmond, Va., when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. He was one of the officers in attendance on General Phil H. Sheridan, who bought the little table on which the conditions for the surrender of the Confederate Army were written by General Grant, and presented it to Mrs. Custer.
Indian Campaign in 1867
After the Civil War General Custer, who was still under 26, was transferred to Texas. As Lieutenant Colonel of the Seventh Cavalry, in 1867–68, he gained his first experience as an Indian fighter. For two years he was stationed with his regiment in Kentucky, and in the Spring of 1873 he was ordered to Dakota Territory to protect the surveyors of the Northern Pacific Railway while locating that line through the Indian country west of the Missouri River.
Mrs. Custer personally attended her husband on many of his most daring expeditions against the Indians. This was the era of the covered wagon, when the transcontinental trek was made by stage, canal boat, prairie schooner and afoot, and there was prairie fire and ever-lurking Indian peril to contend with.
Steamer Brought News
Finally, at Fort Abraham Lincoln, at Bismarck, N.D., Mrs. Custer waited while General Custer joined a huge expeditionary force in a campaign against the Indians that General Sheridan hoped would be decisive. Three weeks after the massacre, when General Custer with his entire command of five companies of Seventh Cavalry, numbering 207, were annihilated in about twenty minutes by the redskins, a slow-moving steamer brought the tragic news from up the river.
Following her husband’s death she wrote three books on his experiences, “Boots and Saddles, or Life With General Custer in Dakota,” “Tenting on the Plains” and “Following the Guidon.” This was a part of her fifty years and more task of defending his memory, around which controversy flamed. She lectured up and down the country and battled for his rights in Washington. In 1926 she expressed the feeling that the old wounds had been healed.
While the widow viewed the massacre at the Little Big Horn River in Montana as a terrible tragedy, she said at one time, that “perhaps it was necessary in the scheme of things, for the public clamor that rose after the battle resulted in better equipment for the soldiers everywhere, and very soon the Indian warfare came to its end.”
Before neuritis interfered with her walking she was a famous figure on the sunny side of Park Avenue as she took leisurely strolls about the neighborhood. She frequented the Cosmopolitan Club, which is near her home. She is quoted as saying that the modern club is a consolation for the widow and old maid. On her walks she was accompanied by her companion, Mrs. Margaret Flood, who, with her husband, Patrick Flood, an ex-service man, were permanent fixtures in the household.
In addition to war relics her apartment contained many Colonial treasures. One of her greatest treasures was the first Confederation flag of truce. In her hall was a long photograph showing the unveiling of a statue to her husband’s memory in Monroe, Neb.
Good-bye, Libbie. Farewell, my darling girl. We shall not meet again.
But, as Paha Sapa has taught me without knowing he has taught me—
Toksha ake čante ista wacinyanktin ktelo.
I shall see you again with the eye of my heart.
21
The Six Grandfathers
Friday, August 28, 1936
AFTER RIDING THE ABOMINABLE TRAMCAR BACK UP THE MOUNTAIN and standing there looking down at the Hall of Records canyon while listening to Gutzon Borglum talk about blasting out the rock saved for the Theodore Roosevelt head, Paha Sapa willingly rides with his boss down on the same tramcar rather than face the 506 steps again. He’s descended them once this hot August evening, and he hurts too much to do it again.
It’s the pain rather than the rock dust and sweat that sends Paha Sapa straight home to his shack in Keystone. Rather than make dinner—it’s almost seven p.m. by the time he gets home—he builds a fire in the woodstove, despite the remaining intense heat of the day, and heats up two big tubs of water he’s pumped outside. It takes six of these big buckets to get enough water in his bathtub for a real bath, and by the time he’s poured in the last two steaming tubs, the water from the first two are cooling off.
But most of it is still steaming hot as he strips off his work clothes and boots and socks and settles into the claw-footed freestanding bathtub.
The pain from the cancer has become a problem. Paha Sapa feels it creeping up from his colon or prostate or lower bowels or wherever it’s advancing from—threatening to overwhelm him for the first time in his frequently pain-filled life—and stealing his strength. His one great secret ally has been his strength, quite unusual for a man of his modest weight and height, and now it is leaking away like the heat from this water or like the water itself once he pulls out the plug.
Once dressed in clean clothes, Paha Sapa goes to feed the donkeys before he feeds himself.
They are both there in their rough new pen, both Advocatus and Diaboli. Paha Sapa refills their water and makes sure they have grain to eat as well as the hay scattered around their enc
losure. Diaboli tries to bite him, but Paha Sapa is prepared for that. He is not prepared for Advocatus’s sideways kick and that catches Paha Sapa squarely in the upper thigh, numbing his entire leg for a moment and causing him to have to lean on the fence while fighting the nausea rising in him.
The donkeys belong to Father Pierre Marie in Deadwood, the truly ancient priest and only survivor of the three friars who taught a young Indian boy so long ago, and Paha Sapa has promised to get the animals back by Saturday afternoon. He rented the old Dodge flatbed—the same one that transported the submarine engines from Colorado—from Howdy Peterson’s cousin, also from Deadwood, and Paha Sapa put fresh straw and hay in the now-fenced-in flatbed to transport the donkeys from Deadwood. He needs the truck again tonight but he plans to return it to Howdy after hauling the donkeys home early Saturday morning.
That is, if he doesn’t blow himself and the Dodge to tiny bits tonight in the transfer of the dynamite. He plans to drive the donkeys to the site first and tie them up in the woods below the canyon, so that they don’t blow if the dynamite and he and the truck do on the next trip. With that possibility in mind, Paha Sapa has already written a note asking Hap Doland, his nearest neighbor there in Keystone, to drive the donkeys home “should something unforeseen happen to me.” The note is propped on his mantel. (Although he imagines that it will be the sheriff or Mr. Borglum who comes to the shack first, not Hap.)
Donkeys fed, Paha Sapa goes in to make some beans and franks and coffee for himself. He’s very tired and though the hot bath distracted him, this time it has not leached away any of the pain. Paha Sapa wonders if he should have taken the Casper doctor up on his offer of morphine tablets to be dissolved and injected with a syringe.
After dinner, with the Keystone valley in shadow—the evenings are growing shorter now at the end of August—and with V-tailed swallows and terns slicing the air into chorded arcs of pale blue in search of insects and the first bats emerging to their zigzag flights, Paha Sapa starts up Robert’s rackety motorcycle and drives the three miles up to Mune Mercer’s cabin.
The cabin looks dark as Paha Sapa approaches and for a moment he thinks he has lost his gamble that Mune wouldn’t have enough money to be out getting drunk this particular Friday night. Then the door opens and a huge, hulking form—Mune is six-foot-six and must weigh close to 300 pounds—steps out onto the rickety porch.
Paha Sapa turns off the motorcycle’s little engine.
—Don’t shoot, Mune. It’s me, Billy.
The massive silhouette grunts and lowers the double-barreled shotgun.
—’Bout goddamned time you got here, Slow Horse, Slovak, Slow Ass. You promised me the night work and money more ’n three weeks ago, goddamn your half-breed eyes.
Mune is fair on the way to getting drunk, Paha Sapa sees and hears, but only on his private moonshine, which will probably blind him within a year if it doesn’t kill him first. Paha Sapa can see now that there is the slightest lantern glow visible through the open door but that the blinds are closed tight on the front windows.
—You going to invite me in, Mune? I’ve got the details about tomorrow night’s job and I brought what’s left of a fifth for you.
Mune grunts again but takes a step sideways to allow Paha Sapa to squeeze through into the cluttered, filthy, and foul-smelling one-room cabin.
Mune Mercer, whose first name—probably a family name—has always been pronounced “Moon,” was invariably called “Moon Mullins” during the short time he worked on the Monument as a winch man and general laborer, and, like the cartoon character, Mune is rarely seen, even on the mountain, without his undersized derby squeezed down onto his short-stubbled dome of a skull and an unlit stogie clamped in his teeth. Mune even has a scruffy and surprisingly petite mutt who, like Moon Mullins’s little brother (or is he his son?), is named Kayo and, like the kid in the comic strip, sleeps in a lower drawer of a dresser next to Mune’s bed. Kayo—the canine version—looks up sleepily at Paha Sapa but does not bark. Paha Sapa wonders if the mutt has also been drinking.
There are two chairs at the small rough-planked table near the sink with a short-handed pump and stove and Paha Sapa drops tiredly into one without being invited to sit. He takes out the fifth of whiskey, about a third full, and sets it on the table.
—I see you helped your own fucking self to most of it. Some fucking gift, Tonto.
Paha Sapa blinks at the subtlety of the insult. There’s a sidekick Indian character named Tonto on a new cowboy radio drama that premiered on a Detroit radio station, WXYZ, the previous February. WXYZ is powerful enough that frequently, when the atmospherics are right, listeners with good sets or an understanding of the ionosphere can pick it up out here in the Hills. Paha Sapa has actually heard the station—and that cowboy show with the great opening music—on the earphones he had added to the little crystal set that Robert built the summer before he went into the Army, twenty years ago.
Paha Sapa smiles slightly and looks around the garbage heap of a room. The sheets on Mune’s unmade bed, once white, are mostly a caked yellow now.
—Tonto? Cute, Mune. I don’t see your radio, though. How have you been listening to The Lone Ranger?
Mune lets out a boozy breath and drops into his chair at the table. The chair groans but does not quite collapse.
—What the fuck’s the Lone Ranger? Tonto means “stupid” in Spanish, Tonto.
Well, so much for subtlety.
Mune is a dimwit but was a decent winch man the few weeks he worked at Mount Rushmore. But he is a drunkard as well as a dimwit—and a drunken Mune, it turns out, is invariably a mean Mune—and although Mr. Borglum tends to look the other way when men come to work hungover on Saturdays or even Mondays, he will not abide any drinking on the job or someone like Mune Mercer, who came in hungover every day of the week. Out on the cliff face, men’s lives depend upon the sobriety and sound judgment of the other men—especially winch men—and Mune was hungover, red-eyed, and surly until ten or eleven every morning.
When he wasn’t drunk, Mune was mostly a gentle dimwit giant, and the other workers tried to cover for him—for a while—but when Mr. Borglum, who’d been traveling, finally saw the truth of the matter, he fired Mune’s huge butt the same day.
So Mune had been both surprised and suspicious a week earlier when Paha Sapa came to him with the offer of a truly spectacular fifty dollars in exchange for some night work at the Monument.
Mune, mouth open and beady little eyes squinting under his derby, had cocked his giant thumb of a head to one side to show his cynicism.
—Night work? Whaddya talking about, ’breed? There ain’t no night work on Rushmore ’cause there ain’t no lights for it, so there’s no fucking night work.
—There will be a week from now, Mune—on the weekend before the president arrives on Sunday the thirtieth. You have heard the rumors about FDR coming up to the mountain, haven’t you?
—No.
One of the nice things about Mune Mercer is that he is never defensive or apologetic about his ignorance, which is vast.
Paha Sapa smiled then, a week ago this very night, and presented Mune with a full bottle of cheap whiskey, and said—
—Well, it seems sure now that the president is coming, on Sunday the thirtieth, Mune, and there’s going to be a big celebration and unveiling of the Jefferson head and Mr. Borglum wants me and you to do some night work so we can prepare a surprise he has in store for the president and for all the VIPs. And, for whatever reason, he wants this to be a surprise even for the rest of the guys working on the hill. And because we have to work alone and at night—but Mr. Borglum says it’ll be almost a full moon that Saturday night—he’s willing to pay us each fifty dollars.
Mune squinted his suspicion then, just as he is doing now. Fifty dollars is a fortune.
—Why would Mr. Borglum want me, Mr. Billy Half-breed? He fired me, remember? Right in front of all the fellows. Is he hiring me back for good?
Paha Sapa shook his
head.
—No, Mune. Mr. Borglum still doesn’t want a drunk on the payroll. But, like I said, he wants this to be a surprise for all the other workers and their wives, as well as for President Roosevelt and Senator Norbeck and the governor and the rest of the high muckety-mucks down below in the reviewing stand. It’s a onetime deal, Mune… but it’s fifty dollars.
Mune looked more ridiculous than usual that night as he squinted beneath his derby and above his cold cigar stump until his thin slits of eyes disappeared (as they are starting to now) in folds of lashless fat.
—Show me the money.
Paha Sapa brought out a wad of money, almost a year’s savings for him, and pulled fifty dollars from the roll.
—What’s so secret that Mr. Borglum would pay me an’ a half-breed to set it up at night? He going to blow up his own fucking heads or something?
Paha Sapa laughed politely at that, but his skin grew cold and clammy.
—It’ll be a sort of fireworks display. I guess there will be newsreel cameras there and Mr. Borglum wants to surprise everyone with a real spectacle.
—You sayin’ that that nigger lover Roosevelt is coming at night?
—No. Sometime in late morning, I think. While the shadows on the faces are still good.
—A fireworks show in the middle of the day. That don’t make no fucking sense.
Paha Sapa shrugged, obviously as amused by the Old Man’s whims and eccentricities as Mune was.
—It’s a fireworks show with quite a bit of dynamite behind it, Mune. I guess it’s going to be in the form of a twenty-one-gun salute to the president… you know, like the military gives him when the band plays “Hail to the Chief ”?… but with little blasts the whole length of the Monument, moving some of the stone that we’re gonna have to move anyway but making it sound like like a formal cannon salute. Anyway, Mr. Borglum said I could hire you for this one night only, partially because you’re not in touch with many people and won’t blab, but I have other men I can hire if you don’t want to do it. It’s fifty dollars, Mune.