The time is the early 1950s. The era is suggested by the popularity of Gene Autry movies and by reference to America's foreign enemies as "Commie Japs," a ludicrous lumping of the United States' old enemy from the Second World War and its new enemy in the Cold War. Only summer's boundaries are marked: the ride in the deputy's car to the farm after the closing of school and the return of the deputy when school is set to re-open.

The place is a farm forty miles north of an unspecified Midwestern city, so rural that the road to the farm is eight miles of unpaved, mud rut track. The nearest "town" is a collection of four dilapidated buildings, the centerpiece of which is the roughhewn "Lumberjack Lownge." Inside the farmhouse cooking is done by woodstove, laundry by hand, and interior illumination by Coleman lamp. The main stage...