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Frogmore, meet Zebina.
My job at cousin Ralph Burke's dove shoot at his farm in the suburban sprawl of Zebina, Ga., was to cook Frogmore Stew.
Our Lowcountry staple was to be a special treat for the 50 men and the few wives and children who gather beneath the pecan trees in Ralph's yard on the opening day of dove season.
I'd never been to a dove shoot. At our house, a big hunt is throwing a tennis ball to the dog.
I expected dogs yelping from metal crates in the beds of pickup trucks to set the tune for the dove shoot. But there weren't any dogs. There were plenty of pickups, but the only panting and pawing at the dirt was coming from the camouflaged hunters, checking guns, sniffing the sky and politely waiting for lunch.
We nibbled on warm boiled peanuts, fresh from the salty pot and fresh from the soil. They were made by a farmer who plants hundreds of acres of peanuts.
And somebody told an old story about the poor guy who let himself get talked into getting married on the opening day of dove season. The tragedy, it had to be spelled out to me, is that his whole life was shot. He was always having to observe an anniversary when he should be at the dove shoot.
They do a lot of hunting around Zebina. It's not far from Waynesboro, Ga., "The Bird Dog Capital of the World." If it's solitude you want, try walking through the streets of Waynesboro on a Saturday afternoon during dove season when the Georgia Bulldogs are playing football.
The local weekly newspaper once ran a column about the dangers of walking around Jefferson County during deer hunting season. Over the byline of a man named Uncle D.D. was this perfect headline: "How to get yourself killed without even going to Atlanta."
At a dove shoot, the eating starts at noon and the shooting at 1 p.m.
Ralph had warned me that the hunters weren't going to do much socializing once the blessing had been said. I heard one of my cousins pray, "Lord, bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies and, Lord, keep us safe today," but I think they heard: "Gentlemen, start your engines!"
The fellows went through 25 pounds of South Carolina's finest shrimp, 12 pounds of smoked sausage and a bushel of white corn. They lapped it up like pups eating grits.
Thank goodness Ralph's wife, Ann, made a mountain of potato salad and heated a bunch of rolls. We managed to get everybody fed, and by the time I got to Fannie Belle's famous apple cobbler, the first shot was fired.
It was quickly apparent that the dove shoot wasn't going to take place way off in the woods, where I thought all hunting took place. It was going to happen in the open fields right out beyond Ralph's scuppernong vines and 100-year-old smoke house.
Ralph answered my feeble question -- which translated would be, "Do y'all know what you're doing?" -- by telling me that the trick to a dove shoot is that everybody shoots into the air.
You've never heard such shooting. It was a cross between the Civil War and the county fair. We could smell the gunpowder and sometimes hear the shot rain down through the trees over our heads.
And let me tell you something. When 50 men armed to the teeth circle a field, it doesn't take long to know why they call these poor birds "mourning doves." By the time Ralph rang the old family dinner bell to end the hunt, most of the guys had gotten their limit of 12 doves.
And to my great astonishment, they all came out alive.
