Winter's Bone

Uncle Teardrop is Jessup Dolly’s brother and is first introduced as an intimating character. Like his brother, he cooks meth but a lab explosion left him mutilated and scarred. Teardrop earned his moniker for the three blue teardrops tattooed under his eye during his time in prison. Although Ree tells us that no one knew what the teardrops signified, common gossip said they represented three “grisly prison deeds that needed doing but didn’t need to be gabbed about” (24).

Teardrop is described as a daunting character. His arrival in Hawkfall to rescue Ree incites fear amongst the people there, and he later threatens Deputy Baskin with a rifle. His erratic behavior can be explained by his drug use, and he admittedly gets violent and loses his self-control after consuming too much meth.

His relationship with Ree evolves throughout the novel, however, and he becomes an important presence in her life. He often offers financial support to Ree’s struggling family and provides insight into her father’s past several times. He becomes a kind of mentor to Ree, as he explains the nature of the Dolly families and the hardships of growing up in the brutal Ozark valleys.

Teardrop’s fate is uncertain at the end of the novel. After discovering the identity of Jessup’s murderer, he hugs Ree, who recognizes the gesture as a farewell and feels as if she was “holding somebody doomed who was already vanishing” (192). 

Jessup is an absent presence throughout the novel, with his disappearance providing the catalyst for the action. Jessup Dolly is a largely absent father to Ree, Sonny, and Harold. He had an unsettled marriage with Connie, Ree’s mother, and a known affair with a woman named April in another town. Ree summarizes his personality neatly, stating, “He’s a goddamn promiser. He’ll promise anything that sets him loose” (57).

Jessup is known throughout the various Ozark valleys as being “the best crank chef these Dollys and them ever have had” (14). Jessup had served several prison sentences due to his work as a crank chef, and his ultimate dissatisfaction with the job’s consequences for him and his family led him to provide intelligence to Deputy Baskin. His betrayal of the Dolly family led to his murder and his disappearance incites Ree’s problematic investigation into the Dolly family’s secrets.

Although Jessup’s betrayal broke the moral code the Dolly family lived by, Ree and Uncle Teardrop make it clear that Jessup maintained a sense of honor by not betraying the Rathlin Valley Dollys. Similarly, Teardrop tells Ree that Jessup’s love for his family was “where he went weak” (149), a statement that illustrates Jessup’s attachment to his family.  

Gail Lockrum is Ree Dolly’s best friend. Gail is described as being an attractive, thin, redhead who recently married and had a child, Ned, with Floyd Langan. Gail’s marriage is troubled throughout the novel, as she and Floyd only married due to an unplanned pregnancy after a two night fling. Gail struggles with Floyd’s controlling nature as well as his ongoing affair with his childhood sweetheart, Heather. When visiting Gail in her home, Ree describes her as having “…a new look of baffled hurt, a left-behind sadness, like she saw that the great world kept spinning onward and away while she’d overnight become glued to her spot” (32).

Although Gail wrestles with her relatively estranged husband, she dearly loves her child, Ned. While Gail and Floyd separate briefly, she ultimately decides to stay in the marriage, for Ned’s sake.  

Gail also has a close relationship with Ree that becomes increasingly intimate throughout the novel—something that makes Gail’s decision to return to Floyd particularly difficult for Ree to understand. While Gail cares for Ree after Ree’s injuries and stays with them for some time, she tells Ree that she “liked it, but not enough” (161).

Ree Dolly’s mother Connie has become mentally unstable over time, due to the physical and verbal abuse she has suffered over the years, as well as the stress of being a Dolly.

“One night is forgot like a fart, two like a pang, but after three nights lain together there is a hurt, and to soothe the hurt there will be night four, and five, and nights unnumbered. The heart’s in it, the spinning dreams, and torment is on the way. The heart makes dreams seem like ideas” (43). 

Sonny Dolly is Ree Dolly’s ten-year-old half-brother, the son of an affair between Connie Dolly and Blond Milton. Sonny resembles Blond Milton: “seed from a brute, strong, hostile, and direct” (7). Sonny is often protective of his family and obviously close to Harold, his younger brother. It is unclear if he is aware of his parentage, but does not show favoritism toward Blond Milton or his wife, Sonya, although it becomes apparent that both would gladly adopt him into their family. 

Harold Dolly is Ree Dolly’s younger brother. At eight, he is the youngest of the three siblings and incredibly close to his older brother, Sonny. However, Ree describes Harold as lacking the “same sort of punishing spirit and muscle” (8) as Sonny. Uncle Teardrop remarks that “Harold better like guns” (112) because of his lack of coordination and strength. He often shows a more sensitive spirit, asking to feed coyotes or trying to avoid cleaning squirrel after a hunt. Ree and others often voice concern about Harold’s ability to survive in the ruthless world of the Dollys. 

Thump Milton serves is the Dolly patriarch in Hawkfall Valley. He has a frightening reputation among both his close and his extended family. Ree visits Thump Milton twice to inquire after Jessup’s whereabouts, although she only sees him once. Ree describes Thump Milton as “…a fabled man, his face a monument of Ozark stone, with juts and angles and cold shaded parts the sun never touched [….] His eyes went inside you to the depths without asking and helped themselves to anything they wanted” (133). Although Thump Milton plays a significant role as the patriarch of the Dolly family, he often works in conjunction with his wife, Merab.