Mercy Among the Children

“I often wanted to enter the world of the stained glass—to find myself walking along the purple road, with the Mount of Olives behind me. I suppose because I wanted to be good.” 

Lyle’s desire to enter the sacred dimension is a fantasy of becoming a saint, an anagram and antonym of “stained.” This he accomplishes by canonizing his life and sufferings through the novel. Saints’ suffering is reified by their canonization, and it is as though Lyle’s narrative were an attempt to redeem his family’s struggles and deaths by telling their story of martyrdom. Lyle’s narrative also resembles a Catholic or criminal confession, as through confessing to his transgressions will relieve him of his guilt. 

“‘God tricked you into this masochistic devotion. God has made you His slave because of your unnatural self-condemnation.’” 

Lyle proclaims the pact Sydney Henderson makes with God after he pushes Connie Devlin off the roof “terrible” because it leads to the dissolution of his family. Sydney’s Stoic refusal to use his voice in a conflict and his promise to attend church every day could be as much a pact with the devil as a covenant with God, Lyle implies. Sydney’s resignation and monk-like retreat into scripture places his family at risk and forces Lyle into the role of devil’s advocate. Belief and disbelief are held in contention throughout the family’s story, which unfolds with the ambiguity that characterizes contemporary life. 

“Mother’s thoughts might have been as flat, her face may have been as uncommunicative as Joseph Conrad’s Captain McWhirr, the hero of ‘Typhoon,’ who wrote to his parents, when a very young seaman, that his ship one Christmas day ‘fell in with some icebergs.’” 

The ill-fated date with Mat Pit is the first of several assaults on Elly. Her passivity allows or requires Lyle to project his own image of her expression as collages from literature. Lyle’s choice seems incongruous, since Elly in her vulnerability to assault contrasts with the indomitable courage of McWhirr in the face of the titular typhoon. Yet it is an important parallel, since McWhirr is emotionally distant from his family in the same way that Sydney, and later Lyle, are distant from theirs. McWhirr also “never walked on this earth,” in which he and Elly resemble each other. From her orphan upbringing to Sydney’s first vision of her floating in the moonlight, naming her daughter after a wind, and her haunting death, Elly is somewhat surreal. Even Lyle frames her in the realm of fiction. Yet at this moment of acute vulnerability, a certain dissociation from reality might have been as likely as her son’s inclination to reify his deceased mother and associate her with the holy mother, Catholicism’s Virgin Mary.

“But to Father the vision was accurate. The night was drowned by soft and splendid moonlight, moonlight in every direction. It had formed a gliding path on the water from the east to his feet beneath him. It was as if he could walk on this moonbeam, see for miles, and not bother touching the ground. It was as if my mother was standing naked, with angels on her right and left shoulders.” 

It is unclear whether the vision that Sydney Henderson has of Elly is from God, a temptation of the devil, or the after effect of the acid with which the Pits spiked his drink earlier in the night. The vision is one of several numinous experiences in the novel that make readers conscious of their own activity of interpretation or exegesis. Percy’s vision of the man in the cornfield with the glowing heart who may or may not be Mat Pit, and Elly’s misperception that the return of the church chalice is “a miracle,” are other examples of ambivalent events upon which the characters confer special meaning. Perhaps the central instance of this is Sydney Henderson’s covenant with God, which he abides by religiously, bringing his family to ruin.  

“Sydney pressed his hands together like a child forming a church steeple.” 

A microcosm of the novel, Sydney’s gesture in response to the injustice dealt to him by Connie Devlin is both childlike and devout. Mercy Among the Children unfolds like a seismic confrontation between these two aspects of prayer: make believe and deeply meaningful. The novel form too involves such a confrontation. Just as Jesus teaches in the New Testament that the kingdom of heaven belongs to the children, so Richards reveals the childlike nature of the adults in his tale through their experience of impotence. The community’s poverty and isolation seem to prevent upward social mobility or maturation, rendering them eternally childlike. Faith is profoundly ambivalent, though central, in Richards’s tale. 

“[…] the language of a social contract that mattered so little in true human affairs. That is, Cynthia could easily talk about dispossessed, and marginal, and traumatized, and underprivileged, and emancipation, and victims, and family unit in the jargon of the social worker whenever it was to her advantage. And she could drop it in a second when it wasn’t.” 

In Richards’s novel, the Hendersons are social outcasts. That society is constituted in opposition to an “other” is the main contention of French philosopher Paul-Michel Foucault’s influential work Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Foucault argues that the sanatorium as a place of incarceration as a foil for a “sane” society was a product of the post Enlightenment Age of Reason. Foucault argues that this separation between madness and sanity began in the 18th century and distinguishes the modern age. “There is no common language,” he writes. The characters in Richards’s tale are isolated from one another, and Lyle speaks scathingly about societal institutions: “I went to no doctor because none had the kindness to visit my mom during her miscarriages” (404), and earlier in the novel he claims: “There is no worse flaw in man’s character than that of wanting to belong” (98). Rather than sink into this social slavery, like Milton’s vengeful angel Lucifer, Lyle rebels against his father and transgresses against the law. 

“[…] what money would be worth the child’s life.” 

Cynthia distills one of the novel’s main ethical quandaries into one sentence. There is perhaps no more arresting ethical question for society to address than this one. In Richards’s novel, Lyle’s childhood is weighed against his family’s poverty. There is a didacticism to the narrative as though it were a parable, even though it is ultimately unclear what Lyle’s lesson is. Instead, the novel poses the philosophical question of the value of life. Sydney and Lyle Henderson are exemplars, whose experiences are offered to the reader as reference points in the living of their own lives. While Christ is “the Way,” Richards’s novel makes no such claims to ultimate truth, challenging his readers to derive its meaning for themselves. Just as the characters grapple with the meaning of life, applying various philosophies, so Richards’s readers are prompted to determine their stance in relation to existential questions.

“Both Mathew and Cynthia realized that the law, like their entire lives, was a game where truth did not matter, but the appearance of truth mattered.” 

The discussion of the nature of truth is a continual thread in the novel, as it has been in Western civilization. In the first phase of the narrative, we see Lyle suffering as it is shown time and again that the truth does not matter in his family members’ lives. Sydney is unjustly accused of murder, sexual deviance, and antisocial behavior, and his family is shunned by the community before evidence is brought to bear on the accusations. By the time that John Delano affirms “The truth does matter,” Lyle has already lost his moral compass. Rejecting his father’s commitment to spiritual truth at the expense of social truth, Lyle quickly discovers that his pursuit of the latter through criminal behavior loses him the benefits of spiritual truth. Overhearing Elly talking to Percy one day, he longs for his mother to call him “brave,” but she does not. Lyle admits that he “envies” his father, whose true character and dedication to the pursuit of the truth ultimately come to light, while Lyle remains tormented by guilt. If Sydney is like Christ, who calls himself “The Truth” in the New Testament, then Lyle is Lucifer, tempting the first parents in Eden with a knowledge for which the price is deceit, or a loss of truth. Lyle says that he cares for knowledge, not education. Lyle is incapable of prospering once the fortunes of his family (literally) turn, and he inherits McVicer’s fortune.

 “Yet there was a glass partition that kept us on the far side of the American experience.” 

A little like the rood screen in the Catholic Church, or the glass partition in a bank or store, Lyle feels divorced from America. His experience as a Canadian is defined through alienation from “the American experience.” The American dream is precisely what is lacking in Lyle’s life of hopeless poverty. The absence of hope that characterizes Richards’s novel reflects on the American national narrative, founded on enterprise and optimism. Without these virtues, life becomes as sorrowful and deathly as Lyle’s own ghostlike existence, which culminates in his disappearance. 

“Neither said anything, about the bullet hole through the side wall that had busted through Dad’s library and smashed a picture of Saint Thérèse of the child Jesus in the opposite room and caused a flesh wound on his arm that dripped blood like a tap.” 

This passage parallels Christ’s wounds inflicted by the Romans. The traumatizing intrusion into the family’s home is palpable in the brutally utilitarian rendering of Sydney’s suffering. The attackers’ ability to injure Sydney by firing at the house suggests that it represents him. The bullet passes through the image of a saint and a library, both representations of Sydney himself. At the same time, as the wound’s overt parallel with the wounds of Christ, it is humdrum and wasteful, like the dripping of a tap. The most elevated story of suffering in Western culture is plunged bathetically into banality. It is possible to read Lyle’s dissociative reaction to this trauma in the disconnect between dripping tap and saint. Lyle aligns the two, suggesting that saintliness is in fact cowardice. Contrary to the present colloquial meaning of “drip,” in earlier colloquial usage the word denoted a flaccid, ineffectual person. Lyle perceives his father as such at the time, though he continues ruefully to conflate his father’s injury with Christ’s martyrdom.  

“Our lives were not the lives of Rhodes scholars, even if Autumn was brighter than one. We were instead people with a true destiny, recognizable only in our universal lunacy under the winter skies.” 

Just as Lyle is keen to affirm that his father, not Thoreau, is the “real article,” so he states here that his family members were “instead people with a true destiny.” Like Reformers’ debates about the “true church,” the authenticity of his family is juxtaposed against the falseness and hypocrisy of social structures. Lyle’s words here echo those of Saint Augustine in Book V of The City of God, where Augustine first seeks to discredit the practice of astrology, and then argues that God’s will is responsible for much of what people consider as “fate,” or “destiny.” Lyle seems to be saying that the Hendersons were saint-like, perhaps more saintly than canonized saints, their obscurity conferring upon them a kind of purity in his view.

“It was like Adam talking to Eve—I had left my mother and father, left the valley of the Saints, and had been thrust forward into the thorns.” 

Typographical parallels fill the novel, as various characters step into archetypal roles. Where Sydney and Elly were the innocent Adam and Eve in their rural home, Lyle promises his sister that they will no longer live as they had done before, that he will step into a Christ-like role, sacrificing himself for his sister. As in other instances of covenant making in the novel, the promise has ambivalent consequences. Elly moving into Sydney’s house, Sydney’s promise never to retaliate, and Lyle’s curse on his younger brother are all examples. Just as in biblical typography, there is a timelessness to the novel. Sydney is simultaneously God the father, God the son, and Adam. Lyle is both Lucifer and part of the holy family of the Hendersons. Elly is Eve, Virgin Mary, and Mary Magdalene, unfairly ostracized by society. Yet while the family members fit into these typographical roles, gaining first notoriety and then celebrity within the local community, they are humble, not holy. The Hendersons are not capable of performing miracles, but vulnerable to the vicissitudes of provenance or fate. It is only their humility that distinguishes them.

“‘Not one breath of air comes against us that does not harm them as well—if you have read The Forged Coupon by Tolstoy you know this.’” 

Sydney says the above quote to Lyle. Russian author Leo Tolstoy’s bipartite novella was written in his last few years of life, after his excommunication by the Catholic Church. The tale exposes the hypocrisy of organized religion while continuing in the pursuit of truth. When an indebted schoolboy forges a banknote, he unleashes a chain of events that culminates in a murder. This act is redeemed to some extent through recourse to religion in the second part of Tolstoy’s novel. The dual structure of the Tolstoy novel emulates the central notion of cause and effect that Lyle rebukes his father for citing. Lyle’s rejection of justice as a cosmological law emulates the intellectual stance of modern man. Lyle also resists the redemptive trajectory taken by the criminal in Tolstoy’s novel, as though to disprove his father’s faith in the necessity of repentance. 

“That he had ever thought (and why in God’s name should he?) he would be forced to literally live it with the excruciating balancing act of a man on a tightrope in the wind. But then again, in some way—don’t we all?” 

Lyle’s profanity in this citation is a product of his absurdist outlook. Hovering between tragedy and comedy, Lyle’s speech is sometimes heavily ironic or parodic. His images are those of a carnival or anti-masque: His father is an acrobat, and his grandfather is a tragic clown, chasing the wind-blown one dollar bills he was using to pay his lawyer. Lyle’s appreciation of the absurdity and futility of human existence also accounts for his disdain for social structures. The anti-masque allows for the reversal of hierarchies and the essential hypocrisy of society to be outed, just as the fool is the only one capable of telling the truth, so his family members, in their earnestness and honesty, become fools in his eyes. 

“All is madness without love.” 

Perhaps a misquotation of Nietzsche “there is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness” (Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Ernst Schmeitzner. 1883.), this maxim returns to Lyle after he loses Percy the first time and sits “crying and cursing God.” Percy is safe, but Lyle’s terror prefigures the deaths of his family members at the end of the novel. In his parents’ Catholic world view, God’s love comes to compensate for the suffering of humanity, but Lyle, with his absurdist philosophy and profound guilt, cannot accept this notion of Christ’s redemptive love. Instead, Lyle curses and bargains with God. Regardless of his absence of religious fervor, it is the curse that Lyle placed on Percy that returns to torment him after Percy’s death. 

“For the river was hurrying on, like the world, and had no time to stop to reflect on the greater ideas of where it was going.” 

The river running past the Hendersons’ house has symbolic value. Greek philosopher Heraclitus made the river a metaphor for time and his principle of constant flux, or change. Lyle, fishing in the river, stands outside of time, an analogue with the simple fishermen who become Christ’s disciples, but also a kind of Charon, arrested on the River Styx, surrounded by ghosts. This parallel is strengthened by the fact that Lyle is wading in the river when he forgets the children (the River Lethe of the Greek Underworld was also known as the river of forgetfulness). Ironically, it is his inability to forget his guilt and sufferings that ultimately leads him to return to fishing on the river. Lyle’s ideas about modern life reveal his sense of alienation, of having been left behind by his family and the culture. They are also reflective of the distinction made by Augustine between those who pursue the truth, and those who become absorbed in worldly affairs. Lyle, like his narrative that stands outside of time, is a kind of ghost and Everyman.

“King Lear—he read it when he was sixteen by himself.” 

Of all of the literary parallels that Sydney and Lyle find for their experiences, King Lear, as one of the fullest explorations of human life and suffering, is a natural choice. Besides obvious links between their plots like McVicer’s dominion, inheritance, and his three daughters, there are intriguing synergies. While Sydney might have found solace in the account of the aging and death of a father during the suffering and death of his own, Sydney becomes a kind of fool. Not only does his son Lyle call his father “a fool,” like Goneril, but Sydney is lost in a storm like Lear, and even climbs down a cliff, just as Lear is guided to do. Like King Lear, Richards’s tale investigates the root of human nature by removing the social structures and securities that typically mask it. Arguably, Sydney’s fixed ideas are a kind of madness that divides and destroys his family. His son’s itinerancy as a beggar, despite his substantial inheritance, recalls Lear’s exposure in the wilderness. Sydney’s vision of Elly as an “angel” in the opening chapters mirrors Lear’s hallucination of laughing “at gilded butterflies” with Cordelia (who also loves him and dies as a consequence of his folly).

“‘Man can be destroyed but not defeated.’ I told him it was from Hemingway.” 

McVicer’s words of wisdom for Lyle come from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, itself a kind of tragic parable in which an elderly fisherman endures deprivation and struggles to land a marlin that is eaten by sharks. He returns with nothing. Protagonist Santiago’s persistence despite the fruitlessness of his efforts parallels the struggles endured by Leo McVicer and Sydney Henderson, but which Lyle rejects. Lyle’s suffering defeats him, and he disappears from his own narrative as Santiago easily might have into the sea. 

“Saint Augustine wrote that men always believe they can con God into serving them, asking not for direction in their lives but for gain if they do right in service of Him, and he uses Cain’s discussions with God to prove this.” 

Lyle’s philosophical reflections reveal the deeper subtext of the novel, which engages robustly with the problems of existence. Augustine’s exegesis of scripture in The City of God is a central referent in both Western thought and the novel. God’s city is distinguished by the willingness of its citizens to forgo earthly pleasure in favor of divine truth. This is the philosophy lived by Sydney and Elly, which may be contrasted with their physical neighbors (an important and loaded word in the Gospels), the Pits. While the Hendersons live in Augustine’s “City of God,” the Pits inhabit the earthly city. Both families live in physical proximity to each other but inhabit radically different philosophical and spiritual worlds. In Augustine’s conception, institutions can function in the name of either God or the devil, and a spiritual war is continually waged between them within society. The community in Richards’s novel is, to some extent then, a microcosm for the ideas in Augustine’s seminal text.

“When my mother was buried the day was solid and white. Wisps of snow energized the graveyard, and the stones rose solidly from furrows of snow. It was strange how few people actually knew her compared to those who knew of her. It was as if she had never existed.” 

The ghostliness of the Hendersons is manifold. Like ghosts, they live in an old, dilapidated shack on the verge of the wilderness and inspire fear in the local community: “Those who are most mocked are generally most feared. My father was mocked all of his life” (90). The Hendersons are also ghostlike in their timeless quality. Elly’s problematic labors in the Hendersons’ hovel, close to their neighbors the Sheppards, could almost have been set in the manger in biblical Bethlehem, surrounded by shepherds. At the end of the novel, Lyle is distinctly ghostlike, drifting from place to place, refusing to participate in life.

The spiritual quality of the family is discernible in the rumors and even legends that they inspire in the community, in whose imagination they seem to function. Spectre-like, the Hendersons are a kind of virtual conscience for the community, as when Cynthia dreams of Sydney Henderson, who urges her to care for her child, not money. While Autumn as an albino literally looks like a ghost, her parents appear to each other as apparitions on the night Sydney confesses his love to Elly. The Hendersons’ ethereal nature is also revealed by their unconcern about worldly things. They live in poverty all their lives and remain passive like ghosts even when they are maligned. In a sense, they rise above their earthly struggles, in the pattern of the “Holy Family,” or the Holy Ghost, which triumphs over death, like the Hendersons’ legacy does theirs. At the close of the novel, when Terrieux visits the Henderson house, he notes that just as though he were in a church or sanctified spot, “a feeling of being in a sacred place overcame him” (413).

“But my father knew by heart the book of Job, where the world is not a certain place, where anything man has can be taken from him, leaving him to sit in stunned acceptance of the horrible Word of God. Only the young think there is freedom from that book—wise men and kings know it is the greatest and truest book in the world—and my father was nothing if not both of those.” 

Having read the Book of Job, Sydney refuses to curse God, despite the anguish that he and his family face. Lyle too has learned during the course of his experiences that rebellion against this Word or Law of God is fruitless. Having cursed the birth of his younger brother, Percy does in fact perish, and Lyle is spiritually lost and inconsolable. Sydney instead keeps his promise to God, only breaking his lifetime habit of attending church so that his family can attend in safety. While Sydney’s well-being is not restored like Job’s in the biblical parable, the fortunes of the Hendersons’ do turn: Lyle inherits a fortune, and Autumn attains her father’s ambition of becoming a writer. 

“‘Son, you are destroying yourself with guilt—it is you who have abandoned them, not your father and mother—’ ‘How—how have I abandoned them?’ ‘In your heart, son,’ he said, sobbing, ‘in your heart.’” 

For Catholics, Christ’s heart represents his physical suffering (his heart was said to have been pierced while he was on the cross by a spear), together with his spiritual love, which persisted after death. There are frequent references to love and broken heartedness in the novel, and even the literal transplantation of Percy’s heart, which saves the life of Teresa May. Thus, in saving the life of Teresa May (who is inadvertently named after a saint), Percy is resurrected and triumphs over death, like Christ. Sydney too views his suffering as a test of faith, identifying with Job. Sydney’s suffering and rejection by the community also echoes that of Christ. Christ’s compassion, made literal in Catholicism by the symbol of the heart, is a synonym for the “mercy” that finds its way into Richards’s title, and is a perennial concern throughout the novel. 

“[…] as if a wicked spell against my family had been broken.” 

While the biblical parallels in the novel are pervasive, there is also much to link it with fairy tale and fable. Christ preached in the form of parables, from which children’s fables descend. Mercy Among the Children occupies, or at the very least references, this didactic mode. Lyle’s narrative could almost be a kind of liturgy or testimony, except instead of salvation, he is beset by hopelessness. The irreverent tone of Lyle’s speech recalls the pagan origins of folklore. A house in the woods, becoming lost in a storm, visions, and orphans are all folkloric tropes. Richards does not deny but uses the fictional nature of the novel to confront the reader more roundly with the moral and ethical implications of these stories.