63 pages • 2 hours read
David Adams RichardsMercy Among the Children
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 1, Chapters 10-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Mercy”
Part 1, Chapters 10-16 Summary
Sydney and Elly set out to see McVicer, although Elly knows she can say nothing about the incident. McVicer fires Elly, and Sydney must pay back the money through his work on the bridge.
Two months pregnant, Elly goes to church to pray. She remembers how Sydney had corrected David Scone about a piece of poetry, but Scone refuted this some months earlier. Connie Devlin is fired for incompetence, and Sydney is meant to arbitrate on his behalf. Sydney does, but no one thanks him. Porier, jealous of Sydney, decides against giving him a raise.
After assaulting Elly, Rudy went to Mat Pit’s house, where he blamed Elly for what happened. Mat Pit had actually stolen McVicer’s $500, and Rudy implored him to give it back, but Mat refused. Mat is also planning to sabotage the bridge, and Rudy is having an affair with Cynthia Pit.
Connie Devlin publicly ridicules Sydney after news of Elly’s burglary spreads. The children at school taunt the Hendersons. Autumn does well at school, but Lyle does not. Trenton Pit regularly visits the bridge, and Sydney goes to talk to his mother, Alvina, about the Pit family’s bullying. The following day is Sydney’s last on the site. Afterwards, Trenton goes missing and Sydney helps the Pits search for him. Sydney discovers Trenton’s body and the burst span in the bridge. At this moment, Alvina arrives and accuses Sydney of murdering Trenton. Trenton has the money from McVicer in his pockets. Constable Morris decides Sydney is to blame for everything, without any evidence. It was this that made Lyle turn “renegade.” McVicer pays for Trenton’s funeral.
Before his death, Trenton was looking for Sydney when Mat parked the truck and exploded the bridge span with dynamite. He thought it was Connie Devlin he saw fall.
After Trenton’s death, the community views Autumn’s albino coloring as a sign of Sydney’s depravity. The newspaper publishes an image of the Hendersons’ shack house, and Elly goes to Connie Devlin to ask for help, but Connie refuses.
Elly and Sydney walk to the police station a few months before Percy is born because Sydney, who supposedly drove the truck onto the bridge, cannot drive.
Part 1, Chapters 10-16 Analysis
In Chapters 10 through 12, the Hendersons’ honesty and morality contrast with the deceit of their neighbors. The Hendersons’ failure to assert their innocence results in them becoming easy scapegoats for the community. In the same way that William Shakespeare’s Lear (from the tragedy King Lear, first performed in 1606) urges Cordelia to “speak again” of her love for him, but she refuses to do so out of her extreme honesty and falls from favor, so do the Hendersons. McVicer, the King Lear of the community, discovers all too late the true identities of his three daughters, Elly, Isabel Young, and Deidre Whyne, after Elly’s death. The demolition of the bridge is the final straw that segregates the Hendersons from the rest of the community. The breakdown of communication and of empathy, symbolized by the breaking of the bridge, is a central concept in the novel.
Sydney’s prediction of Trenton’s death is one of the many unfortunate coincidences in the novel that harm the Hendersons. While Elly identifies many such coincidences as “miracles,” Lyle increasingly becomes aware of their real significance. One example of this is the restitution of the church chalice. The prevalence of these synchronistic events, however, tempts the reader to consider that the family may indeed be subject to what Lyle calls in the early chapters their “terrible destiny.” So exquisite is the Hendersons’ misfortune throughout the novel that the reader is left questioning the plausibility of these events, and the possibility that there is indeed some didactic meaning to them.
In Chapter 16, another sign of the war waged over communication and meaning in the novel is the “fake news,” to use a contemporary phrase, promulgated by the newspaper. The tide of public opinion in the town vacillates based on rumors, and the newspapers continuously report fallacious information. Misinformation led to the imprisonment and death of Roy Henderson, and the struggles that beset the next two generations. This community only responds to the allure of money, and the literary aspirations of Sydney and Autumn Henderson alienate, rather than emancipate, them.
