From very early on in the story, we know that the explosion was no accident, and that in the years to come a conspiracy of silence would deny the truth. But the mystery is not the heart of the book. Rather, it is Alma's grief that makes this a truly memorable read. With no education and a drunken husband, Alma is left with three hungry boys to feed. She makes her way by turn as "a laundress, a cook, an all-purpose maid. She ... earned but little, always one dropped dish and a loud reprimand from complete and utter poverty. She lived scared and angry, a life full of permanent grievances, sharp animosities and cold memories for all who'd ever crossed us, any of us, ever. Alma DeGeer Dunahew, with her pinched, hostile nature, her dark obsessions and primal need for revenge."
This fury, and the telling of the story to young Alek, brings to life the glorious Ruby, a woman whose "sass and vinegar" and refusal to live a life dictated by circumstance is in sharp contrast to that of her sister. When, following the explosion, the bodies of the dead are laid out in a school gym, Alma finds that she has no way of knowing which casket holds Ruby. And so she stops at each one: "she treated every box as though her sister was inside in parts or whole and cried to the last." Undone by grief, she has a breakdown and is sent to a work farm, a sort of rural mental institution, abandoning the one son still living at home, our narrator's father, John Paul.
As Woodrell tells Alma's grief, he draws a sharp portrait of rural America in the years of the Great Depression. There is a clear sense of lives lived on the edge of destitution, and of the hardships to come. We witness Alma announcing to her sons that "there's gonna be supper" when she has managed to bring home stolen food: bones scrapped from the leftovers on the plates of her employer's children.
Meanwhile, the same employer (who is, coincidentally, Ruby's sometime lover) is credited with sparing the town's more affluent citizens the worst of the economic woes of the time through clever banking, while Alma and her kind are left to rely on each other — if they are lucky enough to have anyone to care for them.
Author Interviews
'Winter's Bone' Author Revisits A Tragedy In His Ozarks Hometown