Down Home Dixie by Pamela Browning

What’s chicken bog?”
    â€œLocal specialty,” Kathy Lou said. “Some people calls it chicken and rice, more soupy than the usual. I don’t recollect where the bog came from, ’less it’s because somebody was trying to impress people that we have a lot of swamp around here, though I’m not sure why anyone would want to do that, considering that all the swamp ever produced was Lizard Man, and it was a long time ago anybody saw him.”
    â€œAll right, I’ll order the chicken bog, only if you tell me about Lizard Man,” Kyle told her, and she laughed.
    â€œAround here we figure the less said about it, the better,” she told him as she dished up a plate of chicken and rice. “It involved a teenager riding home through Scape Ore Swamp with a mess of fried chicken in a take-home bucket on the seat beside him. This thing rushed out of the swamp while the kid was changing a tire, and he said it looked like a cross between a lizard and a man. It tried to steal his chicken dinner. They never found the creature, if that’s what you’re wondering.” She started a fresh pot of coffee as the lunch crowd began to converge on the only eatery in town.
    Kyle thanked Kathy Lou for the chicken bog recommendation and the Lizard Man story before leaving. As he walked out the door, several other servers clustered around Kathy Lou to “ooh” and “aah” over his magnanimous tip. He was secretly amused and made up his mind to leave an even larger one next time he stopped in.
    He rode back down Palmetto Street, spotting Dixie framed in the big window strung across the front of the Yewville Real Estate Company office. She was talking on the phone in an animated fashion, and she was beautiful.
    He wasn’t sure what to make of her. Usually he was a stickler for the accepted pacing of a relationship. In other words, first he’d call the woman in whom he’d developed an interest. Then he’d schmooze her, ask her out, and if his luck held, bed her by the third date. Yet with Dixie, he wanted to move faster than that. Dixie seemed to return his interest four times over, if he was any judge of women.
    As he pondered this, he found himself on the highway driving toward the town of Camden. He smiled at Yewville’s famous peachoid water tower as he passed it his way out of town. Dolly’s, a truck stop out on the bypass, was doing a brisk business. A short distance down the road, a decrepit motel advertised ROOMS $6 AN HOUR WEEKLY $85 CLEAN SHEETS. After that, the countryside was mostly flat and canopied with trees rising lush and green on both sides of the narrow highway.
    Before long, he found himself singing along with the radio station billing itself as “WYEW, Yew-and-Me Country.” When he realized what he was doing, he quit singing, surprised at himself. It had been a long time since he’d spontaneously sung out loud, but it was a release of something pent up inside him for far too long.
    Kyle’s first impression upon entering Camden, South Carolina, was that it offered more small-town sameness of the sort he’d found in Yewville. As a history buff, however, he was aware of Camden’s historical significance in two wars, the American Revolution and the Civil War, so he set out to discover some of its rich history.
    He found the town full of picturesque houses. One of them, the Joshua Reynolds House, was one of the oldest buildings in town. Kyle was interested to learn that it was once owned by Dr. George R.C. Todd, a Confederate surgeon who was also the brother of Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of Abraham Lincoln, a situation that must have provoked more than a few interesting discussions around the dinner table at the White House.
    After his historical tour, it was sheer luck that led him to the polo field. A man who introduced himself as Jarvis Wilfield interrupted his chore of loading horses into a trailer to walk over and talk. He