Summary
A sense of calm pervades the house in the morning, with soothing fiddle music playing in the distance. After the boys leave for school, Gail takes Ree in the truck down to Bucket Spring, a natural cold water spring in the mountainside. Ree complains that it’ll be too cold, but Gail says it’s the cold that will help her bruises heal. They strip naked and get in the water, warming themselves on the fire Gail lights. Heading back, Ree suggests selling the timber on her land to Floyd and his father, saying she would rather they go to Gail’s people if she has to sell.
Ree spends the day bedridden on pills. Snow falls outside, piling white on the windowsill. From the blackness of her sleep, Ree gets up and dresses in her mother’s coat. Before she knows exactly what is happening, she smells that she is with Teardrop. They are in his truck, and he is talking about going to “poke ‘em where they live a little bit ’n see what happens.” She realizes on the way that he is headed for Buster Leroy’s house. He gives her whiskey to drink and says he’s been running on crank and no sleep or food for days. He says he’s tired of waiting around for “shit to happen.”
Teardrop stops at a bar, bringing Ree in. After they leave, Teardrop reconsiders the way the bartender said something to him and so turns back. He gets out of his truck and wipes snow off one of the cars in the lot. He then smashes in the windshield with an ax and begins driving again. They stop at an old graveyard full of tombstones with the surname Dolly on them. Teardrop says he’s looking for “humps” of Earth, where the ground has recently been dug up. But they leave, Teardrop saying the snow makes it not the right night to look there.
Driving again, Teardrop pulls over at the sound of a siren behind him. The officer is Baskin, who orders Teardrop to get out. Teardrop refuses and says he isn’t doing anything he says tonight. While Teardrop reaches for the rifle at his side, Baskin withdraws and aims his pistol. Ree quakes and sweats as she considers the sawed-off shotgun on the seat next to her. Teardrop shouts at Baskin, asking who he told about Jessup. Baskin doesn’t answer. Rather than shoot it out, Teardrop takes his foot off the brake and rolls off, beginning to drive. In the rearview mirror, Ree sees Baskin lower to his knees and let his gun hang at his side.
Hungover at home, Ree looks at old family photos that she shows to her brothers. They comment on how pretty their mother used to be, how much hair their father had once had. It is part of Ree’s mission to sort the house out, burning in a bonfire everything that had no value. She and her brothers watch the ash rush up into the sky from the flame-filled trash can in their yard.
After nightfall, Merab and two of her sisters knock on the door. Ree points a shotgun at them, but they tell her to smarten up and come with them: they are going to fix her problem for her by bringing her to Jessup’s bones. With reluctance, Ree gets in their sedan. They put a burlap bag over her head so she doesn’t know where they’re going. Eventually they park and take the bag off, warning her not to remember where she is. They tromp through the snowy woods with an axe and chainsaw, bringing Ree to the pond where her father’s body has been submerged, tied to an engine block.
Thump instructs Ree to hack at the ice and reach under the frigid water until she can grab her father’s body. At the sight of his ear, Ree pukes. Thump explains that the chainsaw is so she can remove his hands for the authorities to identify his body. Ree falls in the water as she does what she is told to do. A hallucinatory, hypothermic walk back to the car follows. The sisters strip her wet clothes and bundle her in her mother’s coat.
The next morning, Baskin comes to collect the hands. Ree says someone threw them on the porch the night before. Baskin doesn’t believe her, but doesn’t pry. He says he’ll take them to town so the fingerprints can be checked. Later, Teardrop is there when Mike Satterfield arrives. Mike hands Ree a blue plastic bag of cash and says it’s hers now: she earned it with blood. A “fella with no name” posted the bail for Jessup, and Mike doesn’t think he is coming back for it.
The bondsman adds: “I couldn’t say for sure the man was ever even all the way awake, but he was sure ’nough good news for you-all when he put this down on Jessup.” Mike and the bail bond people already took their cut, and this is left over. Satterfield says they could sure use her for driving to places and tracking down Dollys. He says almost all the Dollys get bailed out by them.
Mike leaves. Teardrop goes pale and tells Ree he knows who did it now. Ree holds her uncle close and then weeps into his chest. He hugs her tight, then breaks away, hurrying to his truck. Ree sits on the steps and wipes her eyes. Her brothers lean against her and ask if the money means she is going away. She says she’d get lost without the weight of them on her back. They ask what the first thing they’ll buy is. The novel ends with her answer: “Wheels.”
Analysis
The final chapters of Winter’s Bone depict Ree recovering from her injuries with the help of Gail—who has become a mothering figure in lieu of her actual mother—and other women of Rathlin Valley, who bring strong painkillers. The normally solitary Ree also has the protective support of her uncle, who arms her with a shotgun in case Thump’s people decide to go back on their agreement with him.
The dullness of waiting for something to happen gets to Teardrop, and, in a meth-fueled and sleep-deprived state, he wakes Ree up to go hunting for Jessup’s bones. Teardrop’s unpredictability and destructiveness is on display when he suddenly feels slighted by a bartender and retaliates by breaking a windshield with an ax. In her own drugged-out state, Ree woozily follows her uncle into a graveyard, where they attempt to find Jessup in a freshly dug grave.
The fruitless night searching with Teardrop reaches a climax when Baskin pulls over the truck. In a tense exchange, Teardrop refuses to obey Baskin by getting out of the truck. With each of the men's guns drawn, Ree finds herself in the middle of a standoff. However, Ree doesn’t realize that her uncle has some power over the sheriff. In a blunt statement, Teardrop makes it known that he believes Baskin was the cop who let someone outside law enforcement know that Jessup was an informer. By extension, Baskin is responsible for Jessup being murdered. In a visual omission of guilt, Baskin slumps to his knees while Teardrop drives off.
While the fact that Ree goes through their possessions to declutter the house suggests she has given up on believing she can save it, Woodrell presents an instance of situational irony with help from an unexpected source. Although Merab and her sisters beat Ree senseless only days earlier, Ree shows composure as she travels in their car to the site where Jessup’s body was dumped. Ree continues to show inhuman perseverance as she goes through the gruesome task of removing her father’s hands so she may prove his death. She knows it is what she must do to ensure her family’s survival.
After passing the hands over to Sheriff Baskin—along with the obvious lie that someone simply threw them on the porch—Ree secures her family’s home from being seized. In an instance of situational irony, she discovers that some of Jessup’s sizable bail was posted by an anonymous man. Because the bail cannot be returned to him, the bondsman gives it to Ree—a reward for the hell she has been through. He commends her for her efforts and suggests he could use an employee like her if she was able to drive around and track people down.
Although the bail money is an undoubtedly positive development for the impoverished Dolly family, the bail bondsman’s visit brings unintended consequences. Mike Satterfield’s casual description of the anonymous bail donor as someone who didn’t appear to be “all the way awake” leads Teardrop to conclude that Jessup’s killer must have been the droopy-eyed Sleepy John. Presumably working on Thump's behalf, John bailed out Jessup so he could murder him. Having made it clear earlier that he will inevitably seek revenge if he knows who killed his brother, Teardrop hugs Ree goodbye and gets in his truck, heading off to kill Sleepy John and provoke Thump’s wrath as a result.
Woodrell ends the novel by emphasizing the themes of responsibility and escape. While Ree’s brothers believe Ree might leave them now that she has enough money to get away, she reassures them she wouldn’t abandon them. Instead, she intends to buy a car (“wheels”). The implication is that she will seek a job with the bail bondsman driving through the region and tracking down people with outstanding debts. While it is not a glamorous existence, such a job is among the better options available.
