Free Ginny Gall by Charlie Smith

Day reached over and whacked the figure with the broom handle. Delvin was angry too and he socked the figure in the thigh with the flat of his hand. The figure cried out in a boy’s cracked voice. He writhed on the crumbly dirt.
    “Stand back,” Bunny Boy cried, and before anybody could move he flung a bucket of dishwater on the figure and on Delvin who was still holding one of his legs.
    The water revealed the albino Winston Morgred. Delvin hadn’t seen him since the day he left the africano foundlings home. His orange hair was so thick the water beaded on it and on his pale freckled skin, his flattened nose and pursy lips.
    He could pass—easy, Delvin thought, if he cut off that face.
    Morgred kicked and Delvin struck him again on the thigh. Morgred moaned and began to cry.
    Delvin got up off the ground and fetched Morgred a kick that struck his bare ankle.
    The boy glared at him but he said nothing.
    Delvin was ashamed even as he made the kick or at least right afterwards, but he knew he hadn’t been able to stop himself. In disgust, at Morgred, dirty and peculiar and smelling of shit, scrabbling in the muck, and at himself for even being in that backyard, he turned away from the gathering and went down to the wash shed and cleaned himself with water from the big tub.
    From the window propped open with a hickory pole he watched them beat the boy with rough straw brooms and with sticks. Bunny Boy and the others and a few of the women were in on it. One woman swung what looked like a white china figurine at him, but she didn’t hit him. Another poked him with a riding crop. Morgred rolled on the ground, crying for them to leave him alone. People called him the Ghost; Delvin remembered that.
    “I aint done done it,” the boy cried.
    Done what? Delvin wondered and then he guessed it was the peeping that he was probably up to, but how could you tell? It could have been anything, maybe even just an outcast looking for a place where he could be left in peace. He had struck him hard in the thigh and meant to and now he was sorry.
    Miss Ellereen came out on the back porch and stood watching the boy get his thrashing.
    “Don’t you kill him,” she said.
    “You could pinch his head off and it wouldn’t kill him,” Bunny Boy said, but maybe they thought they were about to because the hitters stopped. Bunny Boy’s face gleamed with sweat. The womenwrapped their housedresses around them and flounced off, one of them, Aphelia, with a broom twirling on her shoulder.
    Avoiding the scene, Delvin crossed the yard back to the porch looking for Kattie, the cook’s helper, but she was gone into the kitchen.
    “Don’t you have something else to do?” Miss Ellereen said, giving him a sharp look.
    “Yessum, I guess.”
    “Then you best haul along and do it.”
    For a second he felt it would cost him his life not to peek into the kitchen after Kattie, but he would have to knock Miss Ellereen down to do it so he stepped back and headed around the side of the house, in his chest a scuff of frustration and another feeling like a weakness, some low-water place where nothing was. He stopped to look back and saw the boy Morgred crawling on his hands and knees. Blood dripped from his heavy, listless mouth. The water tossed on him made the pale red dust on his torn khaki shirt redder, its color for the moment deeper even than the blood. His drenched clothes were torn nearly from his body, and as he watched, Morgred’s pink penis swung loose from his mucky torn trousers and hung free. One of the girls on the steps whistled and Bunny Boy and Joe laughed. Morgred reached and fumbled with himself and tucked the member into his clothes but it wouldn’t stay and he had to hold himself with one hand as he crawled. As he crawled, lurching on his knees, the penis began to extend itself in an erection. He had begun to cry. The tears dropped unimpeded into the dirt.
    Delvin wanted to run back and put a stop—to what? To the painful feeling,