Simplicity of the Mind

Lizzie Webber was well into her fifties when she gave birth to her only son, Tommy. Soon after his birth, her husband, Eustis, died, leaving the woman alone to raise her son as best as she could in the rural reaches of southern Appalachia when times were bad at best and far worse for Lizzie and her child.

Tommy wasn't like the other children when he was a small boy. Most folk said he was simple-minded; but as he grew older, young folk called him just plain crazy the way he carried on about ghosts and goblins and was so afraid of the dark.

The old woman and her boy lived in a shack on a river bottom, long before overfarmed by the owner until the dirt was too poor to grow anything more than a few meager root crops for Lizzie and Tommy's own use.

The place where they lived in the North Georgia mountains had seen bad times. It had seen times of horror, too, and somehow Tommy could still see them. He saw them when the sun gave way to the moon and the day slipped into night, and even though his old mama discouraged his ramblings, he told stories of what he had seen and heard to folks who came to visit the widow and her son.

The school kids often played impish pranks on Tommy and his mother by throwing rocks on top of the tin roof of their home at night, bringing the boy to tears. He feared the goblins were there to take him away.

The strange stories were known long before Tommy brought them to attention once more; they had just died down over the years. Since the families in many of these stories still lived scattered about the hills, it didn't help to keep them alive. Some things were better off forgotten. Tommy had never known the people or the stories before, yet somehow he could hear the voices calling in the wind at sunset and into the night.

"That little baby cried at the spring, Mama," he said once. "I hear her at night. That little girl that drowned."

"No, Tommy," his mama said. "There's no baby crying. You're just imagining it."

"No, no, Mama," he said. "I heard it. Then the wind cried and now it cried all the time. You can see it blowing and hear it too, all the time. It's calling that little baby."

Lizzie never turned the lights off at night. It seemed to be the darkest of darkness when the daylight left their little shack. It always seemed to throw the boy into some kind of terrified fit when he couldn't see, and Lizzie felt safer too now that she had begun to hear the crying from the spring. She never saw any sign of a child but knew one had mysteriously drowned many years earlier. She noticed the wind, after Tommy mentioned it peculiar blowing, and it did blow in a circular movement all the time. An eerieness was beginning to creep across the old river bottom.

"It felt like something evil was coming back to maybe take anybody living on this land. Maybe it's cursed. I just wanted Tommy away and safe so we moved to town. The only empty house was just another shack near the church cemetery, but we took it anyway. Tommy knew they was dead folk planted over there, but they was supposed to be," the old woman said, sure she had done the right thing as she comforted the big man-child by patting him on the arm.

The old river bottom still remains unformed and unlived on, grown high with pine trees that whirl and twist in a crying wind.

Folks living nearby say they believe Tommy's stories. They, too, have felt something strange shrouding them when they walked down to the river to fish. They say they've heard the crying from the spring and also heard the splashing sound of perhaps a child falling into the water.

Maybe the ghosts did call out to Tommy, seeing perhaps another life to join them, or maybe Tommy called out to them in his lonely simple-mindedness.