CHARACTER
The Berry Pickersby Amanda Peters

Joe's Mother

Joe's Mother

Quick Facts

Who She Is

Joe’s Mother is a devout Catholic and resilient Mi’kmaq matriarch whose life is cleaved in two by Ruthie’s disappearance. She’s both the family’s steady center and its soft place to land—hands strong enough to mash alder pulp onto blackfly bites, gentle enough to comb comfort through a son’s hair. Her face, uncannily like Ruthie’s, and her “dark eyes that…still know every thought in my head,” make her presence felt even when she says little. She embodies the novel’s blend of spiritual endurance and practical care, transforming raw sorrow into a durable, daily hope.

Personality & Traits

At once watchful and exacting, tender and unbending, she balances faith with fierce pragmatism. She does not erase grief; she learns to carry it, turning mourning into a disciplined commitment to her living children and to the imagined return of the one who’s missing.

  • Devoutly religious: Always with her rosary, she trusts in ritual and scripture, convinced her dead “are sitting at the right hand of the Lord.” Faith is her language for what can’t be controlled.
  • Stoic and resilient: Before the loss, “Mom never cried.” She runs the camp with a “watchful and exacting eye,” maintaining order until grief strips her composure—only for resilience to re-form as endurance.
  • Fiercely protective: She greets Ben and Mae from residential school “like they were made of gold,” and later stands with Lewis against the Indian agent to keep the family intact.
  • Unwaveringly hopeful: She refuses to count Ruthie among the dead, saving the small winter boots—“She’ll need them when she comes home”—as a daily, defiant ritual of belief.
  • Pragmatic caretaker: With “no tolerance for waste,” she knows her children’s temperaments precisely—Mae’s restlessness, Joe’s sensitivity—and meets them with the right mixture of firmness and gentleness.

Character Journey

Her arc begins with unbroken composure and authority, then shatters when Ruthie disappears: she wails “in the ancient language” and collapses in grief, her stoicism broken by the enormity of loss. Over years, she disciplines that grief into a steady, unshowy hope: Ruthie lives—somewhere—and must be ready to come home. This stance becomes her coping strategy and moral backbone as further losses accumulate: the deaths of her son Charlie and her husband, and the near loss of Joe to accident and illness. She does not “get over” anything; she remakes herself into someone who can carry sorrow without setting it down, letting faith and mother-love govern what despair cannot.

Key Relationships

  • Ruthie: The loss of Ruthie, whose face mirrors her own, is the defining rupture of her life. Hoping for Ruthie’s return is not denial; it’s the structure of her survival. By saving the boots and the sock doll, she keeps a daily space open at the table of her heart.

  • Joe: With Joe, she refuses the easy cruelty of blame. “This isn’t your fault,” she insists, shielding him from the corrosive narratives grief can create. Their intimacy—her hands in his hair, her eyes reading his thoughts—turns mutual care into a lifeline as his later illness reopens old wounds.

  • Lewis: Her partnership with Lewis is united in protection but divided in trust. While she leans on the church and its rituals, he warns, “You put too much faith in these people.” Their loving friction exposes the tension between spiritual refuge and justified skepticism.

  • Mae: She understands Mae’s restless soul, seeing not disobedience but a spirit that needs direction. Mae’s clumsy attempt to learn knitting becomes a small, saving grace—tugging her mother from the abyss by reminding her that the living children still need her hands.

Defining Moments

Her story unfolds in scenes where ordinary gestures become sacraments—of love, of defiance, of memory.

  • Reuniting with Ben and Mae: She seizes their faces “like they were made of gold.” Why it matters: The tactile reverence turns survival into something holy, asserting her children’s pricelessness after the violence of residential school.

  • The search for Ruthie: From frantic searching to collapsing over an “invisible footprint,” grief wrenches her voice into the “ancient language.” Why it matters: The invisible print captures absence made physical; the language shift signals grief that exceeds English and institution.

  • Confronting the police: After a dismissive response, she tells Lewis, “You knew they were never going to help us.” Why it matters: Clear-eyed, she names the pattern of neglect at the heart of the Indigenous experience, tying personal loss to systemic injustice without surrendering agency.

  • Saving Ruthie’s boots (and sock doll): She keeps them by the door—refusing closure. Why it matters: The boots become a ritual of hope, a daily refusal of despair that organizes her life and quiets the chaos grief invites.

  • Facing the Indian agent: Standing beside Lewis and the shotgun, she helps bar state power from breaking her family again. Why it matters: Maternal protection becomes resistance; love is enacted as political defense.

Essential Quotes

“Don’t you worry, Joe,” Mom said. “She probably just wandered too far. Someone’ll find her. You just don’t worry now.”

In the most terrifying hours, she centers Joe, not herself. The repeated “don’t you worry” is a lullaby of control in a moment of helplessness, showing how her first instinct is to mother—organizing fear into hope, even if the hope is fragile.

“You knew they were never going to help us, Lewis. You put too much faith in these people.”

This line fuses grief with political clarity. She recognizes institutional abandonment as a pattern, not a one-off failure—an awareness that hardens her resolve to depend on kin, community, and faith rather than on systems that have already failed them.

“Don’t, Mae. You don’t know what it’s like to lose a child. And I pray you don’t ever find out. Her boots are staying there until I say they aren’t.”

Both rebuke and blessing. She protects Mae from the knowledge she carries while asserting authority over the ritual of the boots, claiming the right to define her grief and the timeline of her hope.

“You didn’t lose nobody, Joe. And don’t you go carrying that on your shoulders. This isn’t your fault. Seems like my children are just ripe for leaving, one way or another. Ben and Mae came back from that school. Ruthie will come back, too, don’t you worry.”

She re-narrates tragedy away from blame, expanding the frame from personal failure to a wider history of parting and return. By pairing the pain of “leaving” with the possibility of “coming back,” she converts loss into expectation—hope as an ethic, not a feeling.