Corwin Peace Character Analysis

The day after Easter Monday, in the little alcove on the school playground, I kissed Corwin Peace. Our kiss was hard, passionate, strangely mature. Afterward, I walked home alone. I walked very slowly. Halfway there, I stopped and stared at a piece of the sidewalk I’d crossed a thousand times and knew intimately. There was a crack in it—deep, long, jagged, and dark. It was the day when the huge old cottonwood trees shed cotton. The air was filled with falling down and the ditch grass and gutters were plump with a snow of light. I had expected to feel joy but instead felt a confusion of sorrow, or maybe fear, for it seemed that my life was a hungry story and I its source, and with this kiss I had now begun to deliver myself into the words.

Mooshum really did follow through with what had seemed like a drunken threat. He cast his lot in with the traditionals not long afterward and started attending ceremonies […]

“There is a moment in a man’s life when he knows exactly who he is. Old Hop Along did not mean to, but he helped me to that moment. […] Seraph Milk had a full-blood mother who died of sorrow with no help from the priest. I saw that I was the son of that good woman, silent though she was. Also, I was getting nowhere with the Catholic ladies. I thought that I might find a few good-looking ones out in the bush.”

“That’s not much of a reason.”

“You are wrong there, it is the best reason.”

And Mooshum winked at me as if he knew that I went to church because I hoped to see Corwin.

As I came to the end of my small leopard-print diary (its key useless as my brother had broken the clasp), I wrote down as much of Mooshum’s story as I could remember, and then the relatives of everyone I knew—parents, grandparents, way on back in time. I traced the blood history of the murders through my classmates and friends until I could draw out elaborate spider webs of lines and intersecting circles. I drew in pencil. There were a few people, one of them being Corwin Peace, whose chart was so complicated that I erased parts of it until I wore right through the paper. Still, I could not erase the questions underneath.

In spite of my conviction that he was probably incorrigible, I was intrigued by Corwin’s unusual treatment of the instrument. I could not help thinking of his ancestors, the Peace brothers, Henri and Lafayette. Perhaps there was a dormant talent. And perhaps as they had saved my grandfather, I was meant to rescue their descendant. These sorts of complications are simply part of tribal justice. I decided to take advantage of my prerogative to use tribally based traditions in sentencing and to set precedent. First, I cleared my decision with Shamengwa. Then I sentenced Corwin to apprentice himself […] He would either learn to play the violin, or he would do time. In truth, I didn’t know who was being punished, the boy or the old man. But now at least, from the house we began to hear the violin.

That fiddle had searched long for Corwin. I had no doubt. For what stuck in my mind, what woke me in the middle of the night, after the fact of reading it, was the date on the letter. 1888 was the year. But the violin spoke to Shamengwa and called him out onto the lake in a dream almost twenty years later.

“How about that?” I said to Geraldine. “Can you explain such a thing?”

She looked at me steadily.

“We know nothing” is what she said.

I was to marry her. […] I do my work. I do my best to make the small decisions well, and I try not to hunger for the great things, for the deeper explanations. For I am sentenced to keep watch over this small patch of earth, to judge its miseries and tell its stories. That’s who I am. Mii’sago iw.

I do think of how I have grown up in the certainty of my parents’ love, and how that is a rare thing and how, given that they love me, my breakdown is my own fault and shameful. I think of how history works itself out in the living. The Buckendorfs, the other Wildstrands, the Peace family, all of these people whose backgrounds tangled in the hanging.

I think of all the men who hanged Corwin’s great-uncle Cuthbert, Asiginak, and Holy Track. I see Wildstrand’s strained whipsaw body, and Gostlin walk off slapping his hat on his thigh. Now that some of us have mixed in the spring of our existence both guilt and victim, there is no unraveling the rope.

[…] Sometimes doves seem to hover in this room. At night, when I can’t sleep, I hear the flutter of their wings.

The playing of the violin is the only thing in the world and in that music there is dark assurance. The music understands, and it will be there whether we stay in pain or gain our sanity, which is also painful. I am small. I am whole. Nothing matters. Things are startling and immense. When the music is just reverberations, I stand up. The nurse is checking her watch and frowning at it first, then down at Warren, then at her watch again. I stand next to Corwin as he carefully replaces his violin in its case and snaps the latches down. I look at my cousin and he looks at me—under those eyebrows, he gives his wicked, shy grin and points his lips in a kiss, toward the door.

“I can’t leave here,” I say.

And I walk out of that place.

Judge Coutts was unwilling to confess and be absolved of his sins […] so they were married by the tribal judge who preceded Judge Coutts, on a gentle swell of earth overlooking a field of half-grown hay in which the sage and alfalfa and buffalo grass stood heavy—Mooshum’s old allotment land.

Corwin played for us of course—he was the only entertainment. When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t know what would happen to me, bad or good, or whether I could bear it either way. But Corwin’s playing of a wordless tune my uncle had taught him brightened the air. As I walked away I kept on hearing that music.

The day after Easter Monday, in the little alcove on the school playground, I kissed Corwin Peace. Our kiss was hard, passionate, strangely mature. Afterward, I walked home alone. I walked very slowly. Halfway there, I stopped and stared at a piece of the sidewalk I’d crossed a thousand times and knew intimately. There was a crack in it—deep, long, jagged, and dark. It was the day when the huge old cottonwood trees shed cotton. The air was filled with falling down and the ditch grass and gutters were plump with a snow of light. I had expected to feel joy but instead felt a confusion of sorrow, or maybe fear, for it seemed that my life was a hungry story and I its source, and with this kiss I had now begun to deliver myself into the words.

Mooshum really did follow through with what had seemed like a drunken threat. He cast his lot in with the traditionals not long afterward and started attending ceremonies […]

“There is a moment in a man’s life when he knows exactly who he is. Old Hop Along did not mean to, but he helped me to that moment. […] Seraph Milk had a full-blood mother who died of sorrow with no help from the priest. I saw that I was the son of that good woman, silent though she was. Also, I was getting nowhere with the Catholic ladies. I thought that I might find a few good-looking ones out in the bush.”

“That’s not much of a reason.”

“You are wrong there, it is the best reason.”

And Mooshum winked at me as if he knew that I went to church because I hoped to see Corwin.

As I came to the end of my small leopard-print diary (its key useless as my brother had broken the clasp), I wrote down as much of Mooshum’s story as I could remember, and then the relatives of everyone I knew—parents, grandparents, way on back in time. I traced the blood history of the murders through my classmates and friends until I could draw out elaborate spider webs of lines and intersecting circles. I drew in pencil. There were a few people, one of them being Corwin Peace, whose chart was so complicated that I erased parts of it until I wore right through the paper. Still, I could not erase the questions underneath.

In spite of my conviction that he was probably incorrigible, I was intrigued by Corwin’s unusual treatment of the instrument. I could not help thinking of his ancestors, the Peace brothers, Henri and Lafayette. Perhaps there was a dormant talent. And perhaps as they had saved my grandfather, I was meant to rescue their descendant. These sorts of complications are simply part of tribal justice. I decided to take advantage of my prerogative to use tribally based traditions in sentencing and to set precedent. First, I cleared my decision with Shamengwa. Then I sentenced Corwin to apprentice himself […] He would either learn to play the violin, or he would do time. In truth, I didn’t know who was being punished, the boy or the old man. But now at least, from the house we began to hear the violin.

That fiddle had searched long for Corwin. I had no doubt. For what stuck in my mind, what woke me in the middle of the night, after the fact of reading it, was the date on the letter. 1888 was the year. But the violin spoke to Shamengwa and called him out onto the lake in a dream almost twenty years later.

“How about that?” I said to Geraldine. “Can you explain such a thing?”

She looked at me steadily.

“We know nothing” is what she said.

I was to marry her. […] I do my work. I do my best to make the small decisions well, and I try not to hunger for the great things, for the deeper explanations. For I am sentenced to keep watch over this small patch of earth, to judge its miseries and tell its stories. That’s who I am. Mii’sago iw.

I do think of how I have grown up in the certainty of my parents’ love, and how that is a rare thing and how, given that they love me, my breakdown is my own fault and shameful. I think of how history works itself out in the living. The Buckendorfs, the other Wildstrands, the Peace family, all of these people whose backgrounds tangled in the hanging.

I think of all the men who hanged Corwin’s great-uncle Cuthbert, Asiginak, and Holy Track. I see Wildstrand’s strained whipsaw body, and Gostlin walk off slapping his hat on his thigh. Now that some of us have mixed in the spring of our existence both guilt and victim, there is no unraveling the rope.

[…] Sometimes doves seem to hover in this room. At night, when I can’t sleep, I hear the flutter of their wings.

The playing of the violin is the only thing in the world and in that music there is dark assurance. The music understands, and it will be there whether we stay in pain or gain our sanity, which is also painful. I am small. I am whole. Nothing matters. Things are startling and immense. When the music is just reverberations, I stand up. The nurse is checking her watch and frowning at it first, then down at Warren, then at her watch again. I stand next to Corwin as he carefully replaces his violin in its case and snaps the latches down. I look at my cousin and he looks at me—under those eyebrows, he gives his wicked, shy grin and points his lips in a kiss, toward the door.

“I can’t leave here,” I say.

And I walk out of that place.

Judge Coutts was unwilling to confess and be absolved of his sins […] so they were married by the tribal judge who preceded Judge Coutts, on a gentle swell of earth overlooking a field of half-grown hay in which the sage and alfalfa and buffalo grass stood heavy—Mooshum’s old allotment land.

Corwin played for us of course—he was the only entertainment. When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t know what would happen to me, bad or good, or whether I could bear it either way. But Corwin’s playing of a wordless tune my uncle had taught him brightened the air. As I walked away I kept on hearing that music.