Where did he go then that brother that was already almost not? He went further. I am told in that year while my father was in the hospital, and then in rehabilitation, in that year that I was mostly with Agnes the neighbor, my brother roamed free in the town. He did not turn up to high school where he was expected, and he did not come home, and he was not seen anywhere, but he was somewhere. Somewhere loose and away from us. He was free and alone and allowed to his thoughts.
Then when my father returned there was a cooling between them, or a cooling of a cooling, a further divide, and whatever delicate or tentative thing might have been there once was bitterly disrupted. Perhaps it was the intensive care unit. Perhaps it was the residual anger of the brain in disarray. They did not, it seemed, ever resolve this dissolution.
There is the matter of the cowboy hat and the band of turkey feathers. My father had a black felt hat, and had another made for my brother, and on both a band was sewn of wild turkey feathers which my father hunted, finally, in his slow lurch back into the woods.
He had his hat specially shaped, my brother tells me years later. We had to go to another state to get it done. I had one just like it. But this was already after the rural purge, and the feathered hat was a thing of another era, it was not the right thing for the time.