1st grade rurals

There was a little blonde girl named Dawn. She was the prim and proper variety, and always wore neat little dresses with her hair done just so. She was from town and not a rural, the rurals could be crude and undisciplined and there were true hillbillies in the community. People who lived in shacks and wore rags and couldn’t read or write but spoke in a mountain dialect and smelled…well…..funny. I didn’t know much about them, but there were two in my first grade class that stood out to me. Randall was a smartass kind of kid, continual challenging smirk with a look of danger in his eye. You sensed that he could and would cause trouble to you and to the general community, and he was smart enough to pull it off. He was rural but had an edge and a sharp mind that set him apart from most of that group. Billy Miller was the classic hillbilly kid. He was dumb, truly dressed in rags that were never changed, and was always unclean and smelled like something had gone wrong in his drawers. His nose was always running and he had a kind of lopsided look to his face that made him seem a little deformed, a little “wrong”. He was used to being shunned and teased and put upon, so he walked with a kind of shamble that had his feet dragging and clopping along as he stepped. I was always embarrassed about the fact that we shared the same last name – could he be a relative? Other kids were always asking me that and teasing me after they tired of teasing him. He never let on that he heard or cared about the abuse, just put his head down and shambled away, clop clop. One time he came to class with poorly applied polish on all his fingernails, this was a serious breach of manhood and I asked him what had happened. He gave me a lopsided, grim smile and said that his “sister done it”. I felt sorry for Billy – he had no defense against the world, was vulnerable even at home. I couldn’t show it but I felt real sympathy for him.