Winter's Bone

I just finished Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell. Winter is brutal. Ree Dolly, the book’s 15-year-old protagonist, knows that. Winter means chopping firewood, killing squirrels for supper, looking after her nearly-catatonic mother, making sure her brothers get to school and hoping the neighbors from across the way will spare some deer meat.

Even on the best days, life is rough for Ree, but this winter brings even tougher news. Her father, a noted meth cook and continual law breaker, is out on bail and put the family’s house and land up as collateral. When the bondsman comes calling, Ree has to track down daddy. Not easy. The families in her community adhere to a strict and brutal code of secrecy. I’ll leave it at that. This book is a reminder that the “no snitching” code so glorified by hip-hop artists is just as strong in backwoods and hollers. 

Woodrell’s sentences charge off the page, a .45 bunched in their waistband and carrying a greasy nylon cord. They require total submission and you sit helpless while they drop a noose over your head and leave you dangling in the moonlight from a solitary pine. 

Elegant prose can only do much to disguise the pain in this novel. Ree receives a beating so brutal it made my head ache. And it makes you wonder how many places in America are like the places Woodrell describes. I’m sure in my native Southern West Virginia, more than one abandoned mine shaft is crunchy with the bones of those who leaned into a police cruiser and said too much. In one noted case, a woman who was working with the federal government was killed and later buried face down because according to the local drug kingpin who ordered the murder “snitches get buried face down so they can see hell.” (Thankfully, this man was later sentenced to death in federal court).

Next up is Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.