Johnny Southpaw McGrath used to be a happy, ordinary teenager living in a rural Mississippi town called Goonberry Gulch. He went to school, church, had a girlfriend and, most importantly, he played baseball. Then things went terribly wrong...

With his father missing on the battlefields of Europe, his mother dead from cancer, and the bank days away from foreclosing on the family farm, Johnny finds himself destined for an orphanage. Unable to accept his father is dead, and refusing to go to the orphanage, Johnny flees into the woods, where the voice of an old man lures him to an abandoned...