Some local kids went away when the school year ended, but a different batch arrived. The town was an energy town and employment there favored men, although it didn’t support marriage well. Although they had a core of civilization — schools, churches, hospitals — oil and gas towns were rough places, and women tended not to stay.

So the children arrived beginning in late May, depending on where they lived during the winter and when their school terms ended, and trickled in through the middle of June. Their fathers scrambled to find child care and sign them up for swimming lessons and hiking clubs.

The town had been founded by men who had fond memories, and maybe faux ones, of East Coast traditions. It was platted around a square on which was erected a wooden approximation of a Greek Revival courthouse. Alas, the arc of another town surpassed those of this particular place, which never became the county seat. In fact, its fortunes sunk so low that its incorporation was allowed to lapse. In another place and time, the town might have become a bedroom community or the houses might have been bought up for second homes, but it was in the middle nowhere exotic, within commuting distance only of towns just like itself. Although it didn’t die, the town languished. The courthouse burned, and the square became a weed patch.

Still, it was surrounded on two sides by active, if not lucrative, businesses and on the other two sides by the big houses built by the town’s ambitious fathers. In this nearly-forgotten community, the homes were owned by small town bankers, doctors, lawyers and widows. The three-story homes were expensive to heat and impossible to keep up, but owning one was a dear aspiration of many of the town’s residents, including some who overreached. One had recently fallen into foreclosure, and the owners of the house on either side collaborated to acquire it, each contributing just four-figure sums to buy it outright at the sheriff’s sale, which ordinarily would have been held on the steps of the courthouse that no longer stood.

The new owners replaced the antique boiler with central heat and air conditioning, renovated the kitchen, and then, after careful background checks, they leased the house to four energy-company workers, two engineers and two geologists who would pay ridiculously low rent in exchange for their skills in forestalling further deterioration of the 150-year-old house. They didn’t intend to stay long — they were the ones who opened new fields and brought wells into production, not the workers who hung around for day-to-day operation — but their educations separated them slightly from the oilpatch workers who lived in the trailer developments. They could appreciate the bones of the old house, with its high ceilings, double-hung windows, big kitchen and rooms for all their children, who would arrive to spend the summer.

The children in the other big houses had long ago, maybe three generations or more, established a ball diamond of sorts on the square. Common sense dictated that the intersection of the two blocks of shops be home base, backstopped by a V-for-victory of lilacs planted after World War I and a row of gnarled crabapple trees outside the lilacs. The outfield streets were lined with locust trees, and the houses were set well back from the street, offering windows some safety from fly balls.

That part of the design worked well; the rest was of a decidedly makeshift character. An upstart hackberry tree served as first base, a slight depression as second, and the path between third and home was a crumbling sidewalk that had once led around the side of the courthouse. The outfield was beyond an alley that still saw occasional traffic, but everyone in town knew not to drive through on summer evenings. Outfielders backing up to catch pop flies always looked over their shoulder to avoid the fire hydrant.

When the oil-field exploration employees arrived, they saw the first pickup games of the spring framed by a backdrop of lilacs and pink crabapple blossoms, and, in the way of newcomers, they saw immediately what could be done to improve the situation. Borrowing a backhoe to rip out the remains of the old sidewalk was no big deal for a petroleum engineer. The other engineer modified a fertilizer spreader to use discarded, weevil-infested flour from the local mill to chalk baselines.

The fathers in the other houses joined the project. One scoured yard sales for gloves — new gloves require years of breaking in — and purist-approved wooden bats, while another ordered a case of real baseballs.

Hoses were strung across the street from several houses. After the weeds were mowed, the old buffalo grass began to look healthier. The dads filled prairie-dog holes every night, until the rodents wised up and moved elsewhere, including the lawns of some of the big houses. By Father’s Day weekend, when the last of the summer children hauled their suitcases awkwardly from their fathers’ work trucks, the square looked like a real ballfield.

Because the collective wisdom of the dads prevailed, that’s as far as the organization went. There were no organized games, no matching t-shirts, no umpires. Instead, there was this:

In the early evening, with the smells of supper still hanging in the air, boys and girls drifted to the square, bringing whatever gear they had. The crack of a ball on a bat, and the shouts and laughter of children mingled with the shirree of the cicadas and only a little bit of advice: “Keep your eye on the ball.” The dads squared up batters, and shagged flies to outfielders, and one was generally there with a glove when a ball was about to strike a young skull, but otherwise, they stayed out of the game. The youngsters played every night until the light faded and the nighthawks and bats swooped down for mosquitoes.

By the next summer, the dads and their part-time kids were off to a different field. The county, when asked by an enterprising mom whether some money could be found to help organize a formal softball/baseball program, had taken the position that a “real” baseball diamond incurred more liability than a weedy lot and couldn’t be allowed. The town kids still played there, but without the extras, there weren’t enough for a full rotation.

For one golden summer, though, the courthouse square was a perfect, magical place. The wind stirred the stop of the trees but never reached the children playing beneath them. The dads wouldn’t have been surprised to see Shoeless Joe Jackson step out from between the locust trees, or hear the ghosts of Dizzy Dean and Harry Caray broadcasting the games. None of those thoughts would have occurred to the kids, but they knew their fathers had created something special to share with them.