The Long and Storied Life of Jose Montoya

The Long and Storied Life of Jose Montoya 100It’s November of 1918, and Jose Montoya is no longer on the run. He is in fact quite stationary,happily ensconced with a happily pregnant Eudora in a small wood-frame house that stood somewhereamongst numerous other, identical wood-frame houses built row after row in Chillicothe, outside ofCamp Sherman. He’s entitled to the house as a married sergeant, and although in truth it isn’t much of ahouse – the kitchen and the living room are in fact the same room, and the tiny bedroom is the onlyother room to the house – it’s a home. Jose happily gave up his barracks room by the firing range inexchange for this house, and now limped to the camp and rode the miniature train around it everymorning until he finally was able to jump off at the range as the train passed it by.If anything sullied Jose’s happiness, it was the threat of influenza that hung over Camp Shermanlike a great putrefying cloud. Spanish Flu had been raging its way across the country and around theworld since the previous spring, and when it finally arrived at Camp Sherman in force it barreled itsway through the soldiers like engineers cutting through Indian mounds, sweeping away almost twentymen in September and more than a thousand others in October. In Eudora’s eyes it was a crisis ofnursing that most likely stemmed from a failure of nursing. She argued with Jose that were she tovolunteer to aid in this smaller war she would doubtless raise the standard of nursing care in the Camp,but at seven months of pregnancy both Jose and her own common sense trumped her desire.This frustrated desire to heal in Eudora was so intense and so compressed into such a shortperiod of time that it was in fact to coalesce into a diamond inside of her abdomen. She would bear itthere the rest of her life, where it would cause her not only great physical discomfort but also be thesource of her miraculous powers to both kill (chickens) and to heal (children). She would ultimatelybecome so adept at the use of her powers that at her peak she could set and fuse broken bones justthrough a firm grasp on the affected area, and cause chickens to fall over in their tracks with a simpleglance.