Mercy Among the Children

The grandfather of Lyle Henderson and Sydney’s father, Roy is a simple and hardworking employee of McVicer. Despite originally owning McVicer’s land, the latter bought it out from under Roy. Unfairly dismissed, Roy tries to gain back McVicer’s favor by quelling an uprising amongst McVicer’s men, but Roy is blamed for that too by the local newspaper. Subsequently, Roy goes to jail, prevailing upon his son, Sydney, to beg for McVicer’s mercy. After McVicer refuses, Roy dies penniless in jail. Roy Henderson is described early in the novel as being “like some poor sad rustic angel confined to hell” (15), and like “some rustic prophet. But Sydney knew he was no prophet” (17). These quotes suggest that Roy, like Sydney, is a near-biblical figure humbled by circumstance. 

Sydney is the son of Roy Henderson and the father of the narrator, Lyle. His life with his family in the Stumps, near New Brunswick, is blighted by suffering and social ostracism. He is a kind of Everyman, at times resembling Albert Camus’s Sisyphus, the suffering biblical Christ, and Werther, from late-18th to early 19th-century writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Lyle reflects on his father, whose fate is at the heart of the novel, and determines to a large extent that of his family and community: