Excerpt from Jack by Marilynne Robinson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She stopped, her head lowered. "Oh."

"Let me guess. Your father's favorite daughter is wandering the night with a disreputable white man. Barefoot. In a cemetery. If she's caught at it, the scandal will echo down the ages, into the farthest reaches of Tennessee, all its strange particulars scrutinized. Forever. And he was once so proud of you."

"It's not a joke."

"I wasn't joking."

"I'd like to sit down."

"We'll find a bench."

"No, here. Just for a minute." And she sank down on the grass. "Let me think."

"There's not much to think about, except how much worse your clothes are going to look if you keep sitting there in the damp like that. I'm trying to spare you added regret. We lost souls have to wander till the cock crows, nothing to be done. Maybe keep ourselves a little presentable if we can." He held out his hand to her and she took it and he helped her up. He didn't hold her hand a second longer than he should have.

She said, "You shouldn't call yourself that. 'Disreputable.'"

"I'm looking at the situation the way your father would. Loitering at night in a cemetery. Just that one fact would finish me off. Then there's all the rest. Actual years of it, I'm afraid. Hardly a day goes by."

"Well, what would your father say if he saw you here in the middle of the night, arm in arm with a colored gal?"

"He'd say, Thank God he's not alone. He'd thank Jesus with his eyes closed. He's not a man of the world, my father, and he might start fretting about particulars. But that would be his first thought. And we aren't arm in arm. Not that that would make any difference."

"It wouldn't make a bit of difference." She put her hand in the crook of his elbow. "Oh!"

"What?"

"I forgot my shoes! I left them back there, wherever we were! I'll probably never find them. Everything just gets worse and worse."

"Well, maybe, but I have them right here, your shoes. I picked them up."

She shook her head. "I'm walking along barefoot in the dark and you're carrying my shoes. And I don't even know you. This is the strangest situation I've ever been in in my life. You better give them to me."

He did, and then he said, "I'm going to take my shoes off, too. That might make things less awkward, I believe."

"Why would it?"

"We can just try it out. We'll see. I could be right. There." He slipped off his shoes, pocketed his socks. His feet, where they showed beyond his trouser cuffs, had a dim lunar pallor even in all that dark. They looked very naked, not quite his and startlingly his. Sometimes he thought of the naked man who lived in his clothes, that bare, forked animal. He had dreamed a thousand times that he was somewhere public, wearing less than decency allowed. That was the feeling. Utter vulnerability. Then again, the cold of the grass was sharp and pleasing, like river water.

She said, "You were right. This is better." And laughed, which pleased him. And then they walked for a while, she holding his arm, her head at his shoulder, quiet. They were feeling that same odd cold together, and hearing the same night sounds, stranger to her than to him, he thought. He was introducing her to them, really. It was one thing to hear them from a porch or through a window screen, another to step into darkness itself where they were native and undistracted, making the dark spacious by the here and there of their rasping and chirruping. There was a soft clash of leaves when the wind stirred. Maybe another time when he was benighted he had imagined her walking beside him, more felt than seen, pensive as she was. By turning toward her he might dispel the illusion that she was there in the way of the dream, a soul, perhaps his own soul, in the now untroubled trust of her noiseless steps. The air smelled freshly come from somewhere new, if there was such a place.

She said, "Maybe everything else is strange."

Well, this happened to be a thing his soul had said to him any number of times, wordlessly, it was true, but with a similar inflection, like an echo, like the shadow of a sound. She, the actual Della, might not have spoken at all, since the thought was so familiar to him. So he did look at her, her head lowered pensively, and he asked her what she had said. "Your voice is very soft."

Excerpted from Jack by Marilynne Robinson. Copyright © 2020 by Marilynne Robinson. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.