A Secret Ambition

XXXVII

"Unraveling external selves and coming home to our real identity is the true meaning of soul work." Sue Monk Kidd

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XXXVII.

Perhaps it was the fact that his office was in London and he had not spent much time in the English countryside, save for his rescue dash to Plymouth, but Callan was certain that there was no green that ever could compare to that of Irish land.

And yet, as Callan looked out at the emerald pastures of County Clare from the back of the horse and cart he had rented for the journey, there was a sharp sadness that came over him. It was hard to separate the beautiful land from the people who worked it. The Irish Catholics, the oppressed people who broke their backs over land they would never own.

But even so, this land had been home. It had been home for all his life before his father had made the decision for Callan to leave. Callan wondered if he had imagined that he would feel some connection to it upon seeing it again, but he felt like a stranger.

As the cart jostled over the uneven road, Callan sat with that feeling. It was a feeling that made him feel like he had betrayed his roots by leaving, and yet at the same time, he did not belong to the other side either.

Was this what being stateless felt like?

He no longer belonged to the labourers who toiled away in the fields, but he certainly did not belong to the aristocratic overlords who benefited from the sweat and brawn of the Irish.

Was it a natural desire to want to belong somewhere? It had to be. Humans needed a home, and that home did not always have four walls and a hearth. In Callan's delusional mind, his home had blue eyes, a talent for arson, and a heart that saw beyond his cold, cantankerous exterior.

But as a stateless man, no matter his delusions, Callan knew that he would never be one of them. It was what kept the world turning. It was what kept their world turning. High did not mix with low.

If they did, it was shameful. One only had to look at what had happened to his mother when she had done just that.

A grand house came into view in the distance. From where Callan was, it looked quite modest, and yet as he had been inside of it, Callan knew that it was a stone behemoth as cold as its owner. It was the home of his grandfather. The house belonging to the landlord who presided over everything the eye could see.

He was close.

His grandfather's house was visible from the small window in the kitchen of the cottage his parents rented, of the cottage his mother still lived in. It was quite a cruel trick, really, for his mother to be forced to look upon her former home while she worked on the land she had once benefited from. But if it had ever haunted Siobhan McCarthy, she never made it known.

"Here's grand!" Callan called to the famer driving the cart, who promptly pulled on his horse's reins, and slowed him down to a stop.

Callan jumped down from the back of the cart, his feet landing on a tuft of the soft grass he had once known so well.

He paid the man, who tipped his hat, before urging his horse on down the road.

His body took him home, and not his mind, as though he had no control over his feet. No matter the time that had passed since he had wandered over this land, he walked home as though he had merely stepped out for a brief breath of air.

His mother's cottage, in comparison to the ostentatious stone dungeon she had grown up in, was modest and ordinary. Though, as soon as the thought had crossed his mind, he wondered if Lily would think the same. What he thought was ordinary, normal, she would probably think was the home of a peasant.