by Ronnie Egerton

Created on: September 02, 2011

Aunt Fern  left the small, dusty central Texas town of Davilla and went to California around 1940. Rumor has it that she fell in with a bad crowd. All I've ever heard was that she got involved with a devil worshiping cult, and took some kind of drugs that ruined her mind. Someone in the family went to collect her and bring her home to Texas.

It's all pretty hazy in family lore and legend. Whatever happened had driven her quite mad by the time I came into the world and she had been taken to the Texas State Mental Hospital in Austin. In the few pictures I ever saw of Aunt Fern from that time period, she looked disheveled, but quite beautiful,in a fragile sort of way.

The family home was a rambling old farmhouse that was over a hundred years old. Built with unpainted clapboards and square nails, it stood on five acres of  on the edge of the little community.My fraternal grandmother and her second husband lived there alone during that time . It had been home to eight children back in the depression days and soon would be Aunt Fern's home once again.

Someone, No one remembers who, decided to go to the state hospital and bring her home to Davilla to live with her mother and stepfather. I'm sure that the hospital was pretty much of a snake pit back in those days. but from what I saw, her treatment at home was little better.

I remember she stayed in a small room off a back screened in porch. She had to come out of her room onto the back porch to gain entry into the main house. When we were there visiting, she would seek me out and show me her scrapbooks filled with pictures of her imaginary friends cut from the society pages of some ancient California newspaper. Even as a child, I knew they weren't true, but they were so creatively told and woven with such finesse, they all sounded quite believable.

By that time she was about sixty years old, with soft gray curls that tumbled down around her shoulders. She usually wore some sort of little cotton house dress that was as pale as she was. She always seemed sweet but out of touch with reality.

As I recall, Aunt Fern was treated very poorly by everyone, except my mother, who often tried to interact with her. She was never allowed to eat with the family and only allowed to eat in the kitchen after everyone else was finished.  Then it was her job to wash all the dishes and clean the kitchen  My mother and I could not understand why she wasn't allowed to eat with the family. What could she have possibly done to deserve such treatment?

Often, when I was out on the back porch, I could hear her thrashing around in her room. It sounded as is she would take in a quick, deep breath and exhale just as quickly, as she slammed her fist into the clapboard walls. The walls rattled all over the house, but no-one else seemed to notice.

One day she came out into the living room and sat in a wooden rocker, in the corner of the room. Six or seven family members were there that day and everyone was babbling at once, each trying to talk over the other.

I focused my attention on Aunt Fern, sitting alone in the corner looking at a magazine that she was holding upside down. After awhile, she lowered the magazine to just below her nose and looked directly at me.

"And they think I'm crazy," she whispered with a smile.

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