The most chilling sentence in "The Accident" is also the most casual: "'Course, like I say, Gram could see in the dark." It arrives just before the gunshot, tossed in as if it were a harmless family fact. A few lines earlier we learned it was a new moon, the darkest night of the month. Gram has just announced that she can't sleep under either a full or a new moon, and the narrator uses her supposed night vision to explain why she fires at a shape on the lawn. The shape turns out to be "Daddy lying dead on the ground."
Mary F. C. Pratt tells the story in a voice that sounds like someone recounting a family anecdote, with no poetic decoration. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines run at the length of speech, and the idioms are rural and spoken: "'coons," "real quiet," "my sister and me." The setting is sketched in a single clause, "so close by the river," which explains why minks might raid the henhouse. That economy suits the poem's idea. Everything in the telling is practical and reasonable, and that reasonableness is what makes the ending so shocking.
Look at how the poem leans on the word "So." Gram is awake, "So she was just lying there wakeful." The hens panic, "So Gram got up and got her gun." She sees the bear, "So she took aim and shot." Each "so" presents the next action as the natural consequence of the last, a chain of cause and effect with no gaps. The effect is that of someone building a defence. By the time the chain reaches the trigger, the shot feels almost inevitable. The final line then breaks the pattern. It begins with "and" instead of "so," because nothing follows logically from a dead father.
The narrator's phrasing also tells us a good deal. "Said she never could" means we receive Gram's sleeplessness as hearsay, her own account passed down. "Like I say" suggests a story that has been told many times, and the reasoning has hardened into a script. The poem never states what the title implies, that this was a blameless mistake, but the voice is working hard to keep it that way. Even the verbs are careful. Gram goes out "real quiet" and "sneaked around back," like a hunter who knows her business. Her competence is established in every detail, which makes the error more terrible.
The bear is the poem's quiet horror. He is "standing on his hind legs, coming up towards the house," and he is called "he," a creature with enough presence to be a person. Pratt never says a man was mistaken for an animal. She lets us understand it, and she leaves unanswered why Daddy was outside in the dark, walking toward the house. Perhaps the hens' racket had something to do with it, but that is only a guess from the text, and the poem gives no further information. The gap is deliberate. Because the explanation is missing, we feel the same shock as the children.
The children arrive in the final lines, and they are the only ones to react. "My sister and me / came running out in our nightdresses." The detail of the nightdresses makes them small and unprotected, in contrast with Gram holding her gun. The odd phrase "When we heard" doesn't even name what they heard. The shot goes unmentioned, as if the narrator still can't bring herself to say it. Then the poem simply stops. No one speaks, nobody cries out, and no comfort is offered. Gram is left "standing with the gun in her hand," frozen in the posture of the act itself.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. It treats a family tragedy through the flattest possible language, and the silence around the facts does the emotional work. It also shows how people talk about disasters they can't undo: by repeating the reasons, insisting on the competence, and calling it an accident. The title may be true, but the poem makes us hear the effort it takes to keep saying so.