One autumn day after the leaves had faded and fallen, Nathan was busy husking corn, with less thought upon his task and the growing pile of yellow ears than of a promised partridge hunt on the morrow with his good friend Job. His father was chopping in a new clearing. Silas had been sent with the oxen to take some logs to Lemon Fair Mill. His mother grew uneasy at her spinning, for Seth did not come home to dinner, nor yet when the afternoon was half spent. After many times anxiously looking and listening in the direction of the clearing, and as often saying to herself, “What does keep father so?” she called to Nathan.
“I guess you’d better go and see what henders father so. I can’t think what it is. I hope it hain’t anything.”
“Perhaps he’s gone over to Callenders or some o’ the neighbors,” said Nathan. “I hain’t heard a tree fall for ever so long nor his axe a goin’ for a long time.”
“Mebby he’s cut his foot or something,” said Martha, beginning to cry.
“I can’t hear nothin’ of him for all the air’s so holler and everything sounds so plain,” said Ruth, listening again. “You’d better go and see what henders him. Mebby he can’t git home.”
As the boy anxiously hastened to the new clearing, the intense stillness of the woods filled him with undefined dread. His ears ached for some sound, the tapping of a woodpecker, the cry of a jay, but most of all, for the sound of axe strokes or his father’s voice. Silence pervaded the clearing also.
There, on a stump, was his father’s blue frock, one bit of color in the sombre scene. And yes, there was some slight flitting movement near the last tree that had been felled and lay untrimmed just as it had fallen, but it was only a bevy of chickadees peering curiously at something on the ground beneath them, yet voiceless as if their perennial cheerfulness was dumb in the pervading silence. So sick with dread he could scarcely move, the boy forced himself to approach the spot, and look upon that which he felt was awaiting him, his father lying dead beneath the huge, prone tree, that had crushed him in its fall.
The glowing sunset sky and the glistening waters of the lake grew black, the earth reeled. With a piteous groan of “Father! father!” the boy sank down as lifeless, for a space, as the beloved form that lay beside him in eternal sleep.
He awoke as from a terrible dream to the miserable realization that it was not a dream. Then walking, as still in a dream, not noting how he went nor by any familiar object marking his way, he bore home the woeful tidings.
Simple as were the funeral rites in the primitive communities, they were not lacking in the impressiveness of heartfelt sorrow nor in the homely expressions of sympathy for the bereaved and respect for the dead. So Seth Beeman’s neighbors reverently laid him to rest in the soil his own hand had uncovered to the sunlight. They set at his head a rough slate stone, whose rude lettering could be read half a century later, telling his name and age, and the manner of his death.