"Watch it," Cash says.
We watch it and see it falter and hang for a moment, the current building up behind it in a thick wave, submerging it for an instant before it shoots up and tumbles on.
"There it is," I say.
"Ay," Cash says.
It's there."
We look at Vernon again.
He is now flapping his arms up and down.
We move on downstream, slowly and carefully, watching Vernon.
He drops his hands.
"This is the place," Cash says.
"Well, goddamn it, let's get across, then," Jewel says, He moves the horse on.
"You wait," Cash says.
Jewel stops again.
"Well, by God—" he says.
Cash looks at the water, then he looks back at Addie.
"It aint on a balance," he says.
"Then go on back to the goddamn bridge and walk across," Jewel says.
"You and Darl both.
Let me on that wagon."
Cash does not pay him any attention.
It aint on a balance," he says.
"Yes, sir.
We got to watch it."
"Watch it, hell," Jewel says.
"You get out of that wagon and let me have it.
By God, if you're afraid to drive it over . . ." His eyes are pale as two bleached chips in his face.
Cash is looking at him.
"We'll get it over," he says.
"I tell you what you do.
You ride on back and walk across the bridge and come down the other bank and meet us with the rope.
Vernon'll take your horse home with him and keep it till we get back."
"You go to hell," Jewel says.
"You take the rope and come down the bank and be ready with it," Cash says.
"Three cant do no more than two can—one to drive and one to steady it."
"Goddamn you," Jewel says.
"Let Jewel take the end of the rope and cross upstream of us and brace it," I say.
"Will you do that, Jewel?"
Jewel watches me, hard.
He looks quick at Cash, then back at me, his eyes alert and hard.
"I dont give a damn.
Just so we do something.
Setting here, not lifting a goddamn hand ..."
"Let’s do that, Cash," I say.
"I reckon we’ll have to," Cash says.
The river itself is not a hundred yards across, and pa and Vernon and Vardaman and Dewey Dell are the only things in sight not of that single monotony of desolation leaning with, that terrific quality a little from right to left, as though we had reached the place where the motion of the wasted world accelerates just before the final precipice.
Yet they appear dwarfed.
It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality.
It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, tie distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between.
The mules stand, their fore quarters already sloped a little, their romps high.
They too are breathing now with a deep groaning sound; looking back once, their gaze sweeps across us with in their eyes a wild, sad, profound and despairing quality as though they had already seen in the thick water the shape of the disaster which they could not speak and we could not see.