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 3, Chapters 7-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Love”
Part 3, Chapters 7-13 Summary
Lyle often comes home drunk. No girls are interested in him. He attacks Hanny Brown to prove his worth and returns home to shout at his mother, who is sick. Lyle associates with Mat Pit. Autumn has a poem published. Lyle overhears his mother talking to Percy and wishes she would call him brave.
Jay Beard scolds Lyle for hitting Hanny Brown. Some days later, Lyle loses Percy and finds him at Jay Beard’s, who is playing guitar for Percy. Mat Pit intercepts Lyle and takes him to see Lyle’s grandfather’s grave. Mat is planning to steal Leo McVicer’s money. When he returns home, Percy is alone, and Elly has gone to the hospital.
Lyle and Percy visit Elly at the hospital. She is suffering from internal bleeding. Inspector Morris and John Delano tell Lyle they no longer suspect Sydney of his alleged crimes. Lyle carries Percy home and becomes nostalgic.
Elly arranges for Percy’s first communion from her hospital bed, and Darren Voteur comes to look after Percy. Darren abuses Percy, but Jay Beard saves him. Percy tells Lyle he is waiting for his father to return.
Deidre Whyne tells Lyle that the tax office is dropping the charges, and that some girls from the Convent are bringing charges against her. Lyle gives her Isabel Young’s card. Two days later, the new constable, Constable Delano, comes to the house to inspect the bullet hole from when Mat shot Sydney. He warns Lyle not to do anything in revenge.
When Lyle goes to the church to register Percy for his first communion, Father Porier tells him that Isabel Young has discovered that she and Deidre Whyne are Elly’s sisters, McVicer’s children. Lyle laughs.
Autumn comes to find Lyle because Elly is dying. Percy believes that Elly will recover. When they arrive, Elly is unconscious, with her sisters by her side. Elly has left notes for them all. Autumn gives Lyle back his ring. The children return home and Lyle hides his tears. They have Elly buried.
Part 3, Chapters 7-13 Analysis
The sight of the graveyard in which Roy Henderson is buried prefigures the deaths of Elly and Percy. Lyle’s neglect of Percy re-enacts the neglect that he resented so much at the hands of the community and social welfare system. Percy’s proclivity for becoming lost echoes Lyle’s own wandering into sin.
Child abuse is a theme in these chapters, which place abuser and abused on a continuum. Deidre, though herself an abuser, is now at the mercy of the authorities. McVicer, once so apparently omnipotent, has become frail and old. Mat Pit is about to go to prison for his crimes. One of the signs of this reversal of fortune is the replacement of Inspector Morris by Constable Delano, who tells Lyle that the truth does, in fact, matter.
Though the innocent victim at the mercy of others more powerful than himself, Percy is the emotional heart of the novel. Indeed, his own heart keeps Teresa May alive: “‘I see into your heart,’ Percy whispered. ‘I see into everyone’s heart. It is sad, just like Darren’s heart, and Mathew Pit’s heart. But the man in the field’s heart doesn’t beat—it glows’” (330). Jesus preaches in the bible that the kingdom of heaven belongs to the children, so it is only appropriate that Percy should join the holy family of his mother and father, much like Christ himself. The identity of the man Percy sees in the field is a mystery. It might have been Mat Pit, whose clothes he seemed to be wearing, or it might be that Percy, like the child from Yugoslavia, is also having divinely inspired visions.
In the final chapter of “Love,” Elly dies, untethering the family. Autumn gives Lyle back the ring that tied them together during their unhappy childhood. Through Elly’s will, Lyle receives the stone that Sydney threw the night he declared his love for Elly. These items are tangible representations of love. Just as religious belief pertains to the invisible, so does love. Lyle marvels “[a]s if it was all preordained” (338). Of course, in a literal sense, Richards preordained the novel. Autumn escapes her family’s fate by identifying with the arts (through her novel poetry and plays) and by becoming the writer of her own destiny.
