Schuylkill Blythe

jessie leitzel

Walking along the highway, Frey couldn’t get the doe out of her mind. It was her dad who had heard it first: the stifled moans, low and echoing. He told her to come look, come see what death had done that day, and they peered into the chasm where the earth had caved in, a reopened mine shaft. The doe’s cries echoed up from below. He told Frey it was already tens of feet down, that it was black dark down there. Years from then, and the memory stuck to her mind like sap. She could imagine the deer falling: legs snapping as it hit each wall, fluid pooling as its body tried to fill the gaps. She rattled her head, trying to shake the image.

The intersection between Schuylkill and Blythe county was sealed by the Barbery mountains. They came out of the ground like a sudden tide, always poking into the horizon, the air falling off of the peaks and onto everyone’s neck. The shiver of winter was called Barbery breath. It was in these mountains that Frey grew up, and onto the main highway that she trekked now. The other teens she smoked with at gas stations while she still lived there had given her a certain respect for living among them, which had always seemed odd to her, but she listened to them talk about them anyway, how wherever they drove, those mountains seemed to always be in the rearview mirror, always stabbing into the skyline. Frey understood now why everyone talked about driving away from Barbery mountains. 

Barbery highway was the long way back from the burial site. This one was known for being traffic-less, which was part of the reason Frey’s mother chose the spot for the funeral. I can’t stand no damn cars while I'm mourning. I’ll leave on their tail. While Frey was still at home, her mom created a noiseless household. She hated the birds when she woke up, she hated the right corner of the fourth step because it made a long, drawn-out sigh. She hated a lot of things, and was a few inches short of insulating the whole house. Frey couldn’t stop staring at the metal railing, bordering the pavement like a twisted spine. She shivered as the open air scratched her arms.

“Don’t you think it’s too cold for March?” asked White who was walking along the road with her. Frey nodded, shook her head, and nodded again. White was named after the first deer their dad ever shot, whose body was charred into venison and whose head stood immortalized above the radio. White-tailed deer hung from those woods like ants, hidden in bark, ever-present flashes of brown. 

“You remember those stories Dad would tell us about the miners?” White asked her. Though Frey didn’t turn to look, she imagined his fists balled in the pockets of his dad’s hunting jacket. When she was babysitting him outside, she’d call him bigfoot. At that age, he was thin, thin as young boys are when they spend their hours twisting and turning. Sometimes, when he was darting in and out of the trees, she’d lose track of his body. For a split second, he was one with the woods, his torso a ribbed trunk, his arms gray as branches.

“Mom hated those stories.” Frey’s mind drifted to White’s favorite tale. It wasn’t a story at all, but a description: the miners in their stained overall straps, hiking up the mountain each morning, like one large crowd of smoke—their heads bobbing up-down, up-down, out of rhythm with each other, one gray carousel. Every minute or so when someone spotted a deer watching from the trees, there would be a doe-re-miii, a few scattered grunts for laughter, and silence.

White needed to be aware, always—at night, when she’d turn over in her sleep, there he was: eyes staring at her, past her, perfectly open. He needed to be able to monitor everything. Once, when Frey had let the dog out near ten at night, she locked her brother outside. She was young and he had eaten the whipped cream from the top of her cake, so she pushed back against the door as the six-year-old pounded into the metal. When she finally peered outside, he had plastered himself into the wall. His arms were stretched out straight on the paneling, his eyes hollow, burrowing into the trees.

For his sake, since then, they didn’t go out at night. Instead, she sat with her brother on the couch and taught him how to call canaries. She rubbed the tops of his hands with her thumbs and whistled back and forth to him, told him they were speaking birdish, gave him something else to listen to besides the branches twisting on the other side of the plaster. In the years leading up to college, she heard him whistling through the house, brushing his teeth while showering. She whistled back whenever she could.

Frey heard the cars from the funeral procession gravel past her, their tires crunching over the road, their occupants sheltered and insulated. She had been feeling itchy all day, but the cold gave her something sharp to focus on. She shivered again.

“How long you think you’ll stay?” White’s voice echoed from behind.

“I don’t know. I didn’t know I’d be back this soon.”

“I didn’t know you were coming back.”

Frey stared down at her feet. Her heels were freezing through her soles. “Of course, I was coming back.”

“I didn’t know that.”

The rock face on the left side of Frey was looming. The county places thin black tarps over drops like that, in places where they gutted the mountain to form roadways. That rock was jagged, all points and knives. There was one above the gas station near their house. One day while her dad pumped gas, Frey remembered seeing a rabbit tumble down, its muscles slicing with each hit. She never saw it touch the ground. They mountains gone break one day! one man in a ripped poncho had proclaimed. Lord, they comin'!

“You hear canaries too, Frey?” White asked.

Frey’s lips twitched. At this point, she was cold, really cold. Her body cut off circulation when she soaked in winter for too long. Frostbite always started with her ears. They’d turn the blue of an ancient glacier, the kind she had learned how to carbon date. Now, though she couldn’t see her ears, she couldn’t shake the notion that they were black.

Frey could hear White’s footsteps stumbling behind her, but she refused to turn. Her mind was on the coal. The last family branch of mine was her grandfather. He had died of black lung. She saw her grandfather as he descended, his eyelids peeled open, jolting cables lowering down the esophagus of the mountain. She rubbed her lobes and brought her fingers back smudged in coal dust. 

Frey thought she heard White round the corner, or maybe kneeling behind her. She was somewhere else entirely. The rock face in front of her was looming and pointed, and she snapped her head up as gravel hit the cracks, tumbled down. 

The coroners told her it was a slip of the foot. A step too far to the left, too close to the right. They claimed he had probably crossed over the metal railing. That there was darkness everywhere and it was so black that he couldn’t make out the trees from the rest of the mountain, that maybe he could have seen the outline of the top of the mountain from the moonlight, but if so, barely. Most likely, he only saw the branches later, when they whisked by so blurredly that they tied together, knotted and crossed to catch him.

Her mind, however, knew nature much better. Living in the rurals of Pennsylvania is something they had to learn. They never lived within the trees. They lived among them. Knew them as live entities. The aspens walked at night, peered into windows, watched through walls. 

He had been found in an abandoned mineshaft. A hundred or so feet down the ravine. The part they didn’t talk about, but that Frey knew, was that the entrance was a quarter mile away from where he would have landed. He would have had to crawl, ruptured tibias and snapped femurs, thirteen hundred feet across the forest floor. That he would have reached the entrance in complete black. That he fell down its throat, slipped fifty feet. That he lay there for hours, unable to see what might have been breathing in front of him.

Frey’s brother, young and fifteen and walking along Barbery highway at night. She never thought he would try it, but standing at the funeral, staring and the box that held the idea of a brother because his body was too mangled for a viewing, she could hear the canary that he did. As if on his heels, she followed him out onto the highway. Heard every misshapen whistle he made, heard the bird calling back, moving deeper into the woods. He climbed the road until the chirps stopped. The sound of creaking branches replaced them. Frey pictured him standing there on the traffic-less road, whistling for a response, the trees looming, their shadows licking his neck, the branches silently pushing him over.

Frey was burning. It started with her ears. They crumbled like day-old snow, like rusted car hoods, breaking off in chunks, her cells hitting the pavement, blackened and dead and charred into venison. “White?” she chirped, but his body was decaying for four days before they found him. She knew this. She tasted metal and spat it out. The itch stretched across her skin now, pulled tight like a layer of plastic. She dragged her tongue along her teeth, trying to dislodge them.

The woods were awake. The cold wet of the road had soaked through her boots, but she had a long way to walk. She rounded the corner. She could see the whole mountain now—how Pennsylvania stretched on, how disillusioned of a place it was, how one moment you see twenty feet of pavement and the next you see all of it. Hundreds of meters ahead, crawling down the road, was the funeral procession. The trees, speckling the mountain like ants, bowed.

Jessie Leitzel was born in the mountains of Pennsylvania and raised in Charleston, SC. They are a YoungArts Award Winner with Distinction, a 2024 Presidential Scholar in the Arts, and a gold medalist of the Scholastic Writing Awards. Leitzel’s work has been featured in Rattle, Beyond Queer Words, Lucky Jefferson, Jasper Magazine, Eucalyptus Lit, and more. Pieces from their collection The Small Hours have been recognized by YoungArts, Poetry Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The co-founding editor of Trace Fossils Review, Leitzel will study biomedical engineering at Harvard College in the fall.