The Long and Storied Life of Jose Montoya

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The Long and Storied Life of Jose Montoya 96snow and other northern oddities did Jose ever mention Eudora until it was too late for them to attend.Eudora stayed in Rockville not only to plan the wedding, but also because the nursing schoolhad quietly but firmly reminded her that the duty of a nurse was to her patients, and not to a husband;as a woman who would lately find herself to be a wife, then, her presence at the school was no longerrequired. This was a blow to Eudora, but it was a blow which she decided to let stiffen her instead ofbreak her. Her textbooks were her own purchased copies, and she planned to continue studying them onher own. Like many good plans made by good people throughout human history, for the rest of her lifeEudora would occasionally remember her plan and take the more obscure books out of the closet toblow the dust off and briefly peruse them, confident to the end that at any time she could pick back upin nursing school right where she had left off.Jose went back to Camp Sherman, but the captain commanding his unit did not view marriagenearly as ruinously as did the nursing school. Just like there had been at the church in Rockville owingto his salvation, so too there was much backslapping in the captain’s office over Jose’s impendingnuptials. The captain, eager to keep Jose happily churning out the finest marksmen in all the war, notonly congratulated Jose but as a sort of early wedding present promoted Jose to sergeant right on thespot.For Jose, this was a dream come true: At long last he would be able to start growing a finemoustache, much better than the kind of mean moustaches that sergeants usually wore; and even if itwould never have the fine loops and curls of the moustaches that officers were allowed to wear,nonetheless Jose’s moustache would become a symbol of manhood and achievement that for the rest ofhis life would thrust straight out from his lip in much the same manner that the hair on top of his headalways seemed to be standing proudly at attention. Full of visions of his future mustachioed splendor,Jose first saluted the captain and then pumped his hand profusely before running out of the captain’soffice and three quarters of a mile down the road to his own barracks to see if his moustache stubble
The Long and Storied Life of Jose Montoya 97had already started to grow.The wedding at a month away seemed impossibly distant to Jose, but the daily ebb and flow oftrainees in and out of his rifle range kept his mind occupied with familiar business. If anything seemedto change, it was nothing more than the fact that tulips were starting to poke up through snow cover,and that Ned Skelly, Grayley, and Juan Paolo had taken to teasing Jose by frequently slapping eachother on the back and furiously pumping handshakes up and down ever since the trip to Rockville.The day of the ceremony found Jose getting ready in the back of Papa’s store next to therailroad tracks and up the hill from the house, which had been forcefully claimed by the bridal partyeven though Jose had never thought twice about commandeering it for his own preparations, whichwere in fact few: Wash. Try to smooth hair down. Get dressed. The washing and the getting dressed hadbeen easy, but true to its nature his hair had been wildly obstinate and refused to cooperate with beingslicked back. After a forty-five-minute struggle, the best that Jose could manage was to get his hair toagree to a part down the middle of his head, from whence it stuck straight out sideways and then curvedupwards as if he were an odd sort of suave water buffalo.At last, surrounded by Eudora’s anxious Papa, Gerald Ebbs, and two other church-goingsoldiers from Camp Sherman, Jose stepped out of the store for the short walk up Columbus Street tothe Rockville First Church of Christ. Ned Skelly and Juan Paolo were waiting for him. Jose noted withrelief that Grayley was not among them. Grayley’s non-stop giggling was far more trying on Jose’snerves than the big hole through the middle of Ned Skelly, and Jose had asked Grayley not to be visibleat the wedding so his jitters wouldn’t be any worse than they already were. The upside for Grayley wasthat without having to spend the energy to make himself visible he was able to project that much moreinto the physical world, and was finally able to muster enough wherewithal by the time of the receptionto actually pinch Eudora’s cousin Sarah on the backside, causing a minor but thankfully brief
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The Long and Storied Life of Jose Montoya

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