An hour after he left the home where his old friend Jimmy Devine was born and raised, Gannon, taking the back streets, came across a Little League baseball game.
In the distance, the field was startling. There was a softness of evening light on it and its flatness and its pale green color gave a feeling of openness and hope. He pulled up to watch the kids taking the field.
As he stood watching them, he saw in the crowd a woman with the sunlight on her face as well, a brunette woman in her twenties, and in her pale delicate hands was a child of maybe two. A cute little blond boy.
Just then, a high school boy with a bugle began to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Gannon thought he’d done enough crying for one day.
But there are times in life when emotions you don’t even know you’ve been suppressing sneak up and catch you cold with a startling force like you just stepped face-first into the path of a speeding freight train.
Because the woman reminded him of his wife, Annette. And she was gone. She was dead. Irrevocably, irretrievably dead. And the knowledge and memory of this, as he watched the young woman, reminded Gannon of all of her efforts, all of her hopes, her struggles. Their struggles together, their work together, and their life raising their son.
And as the bugler played the hopeful song of their country, there suddenly was such an incredible sadness in it.
And in that sadness was an echo of all the struggles of all the people he had ever known. His mom and dad and brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts. And when he looked at the crowd, the echo of the sadness resounded through those people as well. And in the memory of all their families and friends who were alive and who had died.
Gannon felt his breath catch.
A moment before, they had been strangers to him. But as he looked at them now, he saw that they were connected. All of them together in a communion of struggling and hoping and sadness.
As he sat there, it was like all the lives of people living everywhere on the planet became manifest. From the field beyond, it all seemed to come forward on the breeze. From Virginia, from Mexico, where the boy had died atop the old prison roof. From the little farmhouse where he had killed those men in Peru. Suddenly there in the evening air came all the hoping and struggling and innocent dreams of every human being who had ever lived and the weight seemed to press in around him as he sat there, and as this happened, something inside of Gannon seemed to break.
He was still bent forward against the steering wheel, weeping, when Bright’s dog began licking at his cheeks.
Gannon looked at him and then laughed as he scratched at his fuzzy head.
“You’re right, Moonshine,” he said. “I know, I know. No crying in baseball.”