Joe

Quick Facts

• Role: Co-narrator; Mi’kmaq berry picker whose life is defined by his sister’s disappearance
• First appearance: As a six-year-old in the Maine blueberry fields on the day his sister vanishes
• Family: Older brother of Ruthie; son of Joe’s Mother and Lewis; brother to Ben, Mae, and Charlie; husband to Cora; father to Leah
• Life arc: Leaves home after a violent outburst; decades of isolation and hard labor; returns to Nova Scotia to die and make amends
• Essence in a line: A man who turns a child’s split-second mistake into a lifelong sentence—and spends his last months trying to commute it through love and truth

Who They Are

Bolded by grief from the age of six, Joe narrates a life bent around a single absence: Ruthie’s. His chapters trace how a boy’s private shame metastasizes into an adult’s rage, solitude, and self-punishment. Through his return home to die, the novel threads his story through Family, Loss, and Grief, Guilt and Atonement, Secrets and Lies, and Memory and Trauma. Even his dying body—“rail-thin,” “disease-ridden”—becomes a visible ledger of what he has carried since childhood.

Personality & Traits

Joe’s voice is plainspoken and unsparing, especially toward himself. He is not a moral exemplar but a man trying to tell the truth before the truth disappears with him. The same loyalty that binds him to his family becomes the instrument of his self-reproach; the same toughness that keeps him alive also isolates him.

• Guilt-ridden: He cannot outrun the memory of being the last to see Ruthie—and of telling her to keep a small secret moments before she vanished. This guilt fuels his exile, his avoidance of joy, and his conviction that he deserves pain.
• Prone to rage: After Charlie is killed, sorrow hardens into a “foul temper.” That rage culminates in assaulting Cora, a rupture so at odds with his values that he abandons his marriage rather than face who he has become.
• Solitary and stoic: He chooses remote lumber camps and the berry fields, working until he is bone-tired. “Alone was where I found my peace” functions as both shield and punishment, keeping others safe from his anger and himself locked inside it.
• Deeply loyal: Despite distance, he sends money home, reveres his parents’ teachings, and never stops loving Ruthie. His final journey back is an act of fidelity: to his people, to truth, and to the family he once fled.
• Regretful, but not evasive: In dying, he refuses easy absolution. He laments the father he wasn’t to Leah and the husband he failed to be to Cora, yet he insists on naming the harm, not softening it with excuses.
• Embodied suffering: The cancer-ravaged body—“rail-thin legs,” “disease-ridden bones”—mirrors decades of unhealed grief. The physical wasting externalizes the long attrition of carrying blame alone.

Character Journey

Joe’s arc begins with a child’s misstep—telling Ruthie to keep a secret about tossed bread—then detonates when she disappears. Grief first quiets him, then, after Charlie’s death, curdles into explosive anger. The night he attacks Cora, he confirms his worst fear: that the anger inside him harms the people he loves. He flees, entering a long season of penance by labor—lumber camps, boarded-up cabins, and finally the very fields that hold the original wound. When illness forces him home, he stops running. The return reframes his past not as a sentence to be served alone, but as a family story to be told together. In accepting care from Mae and Ben, meeting Leah, and finally holding Ruthie, he transforms punishment into accountability and finds a fragile, earned peace.

Key Relationships

• Ruthie: Her absence is his compass—pointing everywhere and nowhere at once. Joe’s lifelong guilt is less about culpability than about the intimacy of being the last to see her; their deathbed reunion releases him from the role of “the one who lost her” and returns him to being her brother.

• Joe’s Mother: He shares her stubborn hope and absorbs her sorrow, stepping into the baby’s place after Ruthie is gone. In his final months, acknowledging her endurance allows him to see his own story as part of hers rather than a private failure.

• Ben: Protective, steady, and unshakably loving, Ben carries Joe—literally as a child and figuratively at the end. Their bond survives Joe’s temper because Ben refuses the lie that Joe is irredeemable, bringing him home so he doesn’t die a runaway.

• Mae: Sharp-tongued and pragmatic, Mae denies Joe the luxury of self-pity. Her caregiving is tough love: she names his guilt, pushes him toward Leah, and insists that contrition means changing how he shows up for family.

• Lewis (Dad): A model of quiet competence, he teaches patience, craft, and dignity in the woods and fields. Joe reveres him but feels he falls short; much of Joe’s anger is grief turned against himself for failing his father’s example.

• Cora: The marriage becomes the fault line where Joe’s unprocessed grief erupts. His assault on her is his moral nadir; his refusal to minimize it marks the start of real accountability.

• Leah: Meeting his adult daughter gives Joe a final purpose. Their brief time together lets him practice love without vanishing—showing up, listening, and accepting the version of himself she is willing to know.

Defining Moments

A life shaped by one disappearance accrues other ruptures. These turning points map how grief moves through Joe—from silence to rage to responsibility.

• The last conversation with Ruthie: He tells her not to tell their mother about feeding bread to crows. Why it matters: The tiny secret becomes a lifelong emblem of Secrets and Lies, convincing him that he taught Ruthie to hide—and that his smallest choices can have colossal consequences.

• The carnival beating: Joe runs for help as Charlie is fatally beaten. Why it matters: Powerlessness calcifies into self-blame; he mistakes witnessing for failure, and grief converts to rage that later injures the innocent.

• Assaulting Cora: Drunk and furious, he leaves his wife “bloody and bruised.” Why it matters: This is the point of no return—his fear of being dangerous becomes fact, and exile turns from avoidance to self-imposed punishment.

• Returning to the berry fields: He lives in the abandoned family cabin and works the same ground where Ruthie vanished. Why it matters: It is an attempt to live inside Memory and Trauma, repairing a cabin as a proxy for repairing a life he believes beyond mending.

• Coming home to die—and reuniting with Ruthie: Illness forces him back; family and truth gather around his bed. Why it matters: The circle closes. In the presence of Ruthie and Leah, guilt gives way to kinship, and punishment gives way to atonement.

Essential Quotes

The day Ruthie went missing, the blackflies seemed to be especially hungry. The white folks at the store where we got our supplies said that Indians made such good berry pickers because something sour in our blood kept the blackflies away. But even then, as a boy of six, I knew that wasn’t true. Blackflies don’t discriminate. But now, lying here almost fifty years to the day and getting eaten from the inside out by a disease I can’t even see, I’m not sure what’s true and what’s not anymore. Maybe we are sour.

This opening marries personal and communal histories—bias at the store, the ecology of blackflies, and the ecology of Joe’s cancer. “Maybe we are sour” collapses metaphor and body: inherited prejudice and internal disease fuse into a single, bitter taste, showing how external narratives seep into self-concept.

I have guilt, Mae. I wasn’t yelling but I was close. “And you should.” “I was the last one to see Ruthie. I was the one who lost her. I got guilt, Mae. Don’t tell me I don’t have guilt. Maybe not where you think it should be, but I got guilt.”

The repetition—“I got guilt”—sounds like both confession and incantation, as if saying it could purge it. His insistence that guilt may not sit “where you think it should be” hints at the novel’s nuance: responsibility in trauma is complex, but the feeling of blame often ignores complexity and brands the self.

I lost my sister when I was six, I let my brother die when I was fifteen, and I left my wife bloody and bruised two weeks ago. That’s my story.

This brutal summary compresses decades into three wounds, equating events he witnessed with harm he committed. The pivot—“That’s my story”—claims authorship without absolution; Joe owns his narrative so that it does not own everyone else in his family.

I hate that this is the way you are going to remember me. I hate it that you and my Leah will only ever know the sick Joe, the dying Joe. I wasn’t an angel—don’t let them tell you that after I’m gone. I ruined myself all by myself, but I just wish we could have known each other when I wasn’t like this. Before I got mad at the world.

Here, Joe resists both sainthood and erasure. He wants to be remembered accurately, not prettified, yet he also longs for the unlived version of himself—a father unwarped by anger and illness. The wish doesn’t undo harm, but it signals the tenderness that finally eclipses his self-punishment.