The Long and Storied Life of Jose Montoya

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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.

The Long and Storied Life of Jose Montoya 101As November began to rise from its austere sleep the influenza outbreak continued unabated.Health officials had banned all indoor public gatherings, and turned theaters into makeshift morgues tohandle the horrifying industriousness of the disease. Jose often wondered whether La Catrina walkedbetween the narrowly-spaced beds, tapping some men with her fan and passing others by as her whimsdictated. He would get pangs when he thought of her like that, because such thoughts reminded him ofthe way that he used to feel and the dreams that he used to dream, but he no longer ached to be one ofthe ones that she called to herself. Still, when a wagon full of stacked bodies would pass him on thecold mud roads of the Camp he would breathe deeply and smell for the scent of roses. It was a scentthat he was never to catch during the carnage of the flu. Neither did Jose ever see any of the spirits ofthe departed, although Ned Skelly reported that most of them were as surprised at their personal turn ofevents as he himself had been at his own death: After four years of war people had forgotten thatdisease, although not as efficient as machine guns, was in the end just as effective.The Great War was essentially over; it seemed it would be no more than a matter of days beforethe German capability to fight was completely broken. The Army, because it knew more about fightingwars than about fighting influenza, had decided several months earlier that because the end wasimminent even more soldiers should be crammed into Camp Sherman and trained to shoot. This leftJose with ever more and longer days of teaching new soldiers how to balance nickels on their rifles tosteady themselves. It was not a task that he took lightly, but fortunately neither was it a task that wasonerous to him. The only downside was that it kept him away from Eudora, and as her due date in themiddle of November grew closer and closer Jose grew more and more anxious during his long days outat the range.November 11 dawned so crisply that it cracked like a rifle shot, startling and amusing Jose as heclimbed off of the miniature train outside of his range headquarters and headed inside the spare woodframebuilding to prepare for another week. It was six a.m., and as happened every Monday a squad of

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