Why this is written down at all

It is said of the Children that we would never explain ourselves. We explained ourselves continually, for a hundred and ten years, to any man who walked up to the hall and asked, and the difficulty was never that we refused him. The difficulty was that what we had to tell him was short, and did not improve by being said twice, and no one who heard it ever went away satisfied. A thing can be perfectly true and still be a disappointment to the man who came a long way for it.

I set it down here at length because the keeping is concluding, and within the year there will be nobody at the hall to walk up to. What follows is not a defense. We have never been accused of anything a court would agree to hear.

What is meant by the second heaven

The first heaven is over the ground. Everyone has seen it. We have never claimed one thing in it, and no member of this assembly has ever been promised anything above the roofline, which is a good deal more than most assemblies will tell you plainly.

The second heaven is under the water line. It is not a place that could be pointed out to you on a county map, although it lies under a place that is on one, and the difference between those two statements is the greater part of our doctrine. It is under the low ground at the northeast, where the water rises, and it does not begin at the water and it does not end anywhere we have been able to establish. It was there before the valley was surveyed, before it was patented, and before any of the eight families put a foot in it. It did not come. It was not brought. Nothing was opened.

Of a third heaven we do not speak. This is not modesty. We do not speak of it because we have not been given anything about it to say, and a man who tells you what is in the third heaven is describing the inside of his own head and charging you for the tour.

What the reading is, and what it is not

Our people did not discover anything. This is the first thing to get right and it is the thing most often got wrong by those who have written about us, of whom there have been four that I know of, none of whom troubled to come up the road.

In 1851 a government surveyor crossed this valley and recorded a spring on the low ground — water rising cold and constant, is what he set down, four words — and then his fieldbook ends in the middle of the entry. The fair copy was never completed. A great deal has been made of this by people who enjoy that sort of thing. I will say only that the county has never once, in a hundred and forty-six years, sent anyone up here to ask why the entry stops.

What our families did was read what was already written. The ground says what it is to anyone who stands on it long enough and is not in a hurry to be somewhere else. Most men are in a hurry. That is the whole of the mystery, and I am aware it is not much of one.

What is tendered, and what is received

The arrangement is old and it is plain, and it is set out in the charter in language a lawyer drew, which is the only language the county would accept for it. What is owed is tendered on the eighth day of May, at the water, at first dark. What is received is quiet enjoyment of the ground, increase in due season, and the keeping of the families, for so long as the covenant is kept.

I will put that in terms a child of the families would recognize, since the legal words have never fed anybody. In the year the valley lost its orchards to the blight, this assembly lost four trees. Four. The county agent came out twice and wrote in his report that our people were fortunate in the drainage. We did not correct him. Every one of you reading this has eaten off that arrangement every day of your life, and I include myself, and I have never once found a way to be sorry about it that survived a winter.

Of the young of the families

No child is enrolled. A child is born enrolled. The rolls set the birth down some days afterward, when there is time and someone remembers, but the covenant has already set it down, and the rolls only copy what is there. I know how this reads to an outsider. I have never been able to put it any other way without lying about it.

The instruction is read aloud at the hall on the evening before the Observance, the child standing. It is short. The children are told that the water is cold, and that it is not cold to those who are received, and that this is the whole of the difference. They are told to stand where they are put. They are told not to speak to the water, and that if the water speaks, they are not to answer it. They are afraid, most of them, the first year or two. It passes.

Of two who were unwilling

Twice in a hundred and ten years. I will not set down the names, because both families are still in the valley and both were treated well and both have said so since.

Both were young. Both were sat with through the night by their own people, and nobody was held, and nothing was done to either of them that you could not do to a person at a kitchen table. Both went down glad in the morning. I have heard it said that gladness arrived at because a room full of your own relations sat with you until sunrise is not gladness. I would answer that gladness is not asked of anyone at the beginning. It is given at the end, and it is not ours to give, and I have never yet met the man who could tell the two kinds apart from the outside.

Of leaving the valley

The families do not leave. People assume there is a rule about it. There is no rule about it, and there never was, and anyone who has read the charter looking for one has finished the charter by now and found nothing.

Three have gone, in the whole of the keeping. All three reached the county line. The Children did not send anybody after them and were not required to send anybody after them. I am aware of how that sentence will be read by a stranger, and I have decided to leave it standing, because altering it would be the first dishonest thing in this account.

Of the eighth day itself

I have been asked to describe the Observance and I am not going to. Not because it is secret — it is not secret, it is only ours — but because every account of a thing like this that has ever been written down has made it sound either grander or filthier than it is, and it is neither. The rolls are read. What is owed is tendered. What is given is received. People stand in the cold in their good coats and go home afterward and are quiet for a day or so. That is all I am prepared to put on paper and it is also, as it happens, all there is.

Of the conclusion

The covenant is satisfied. It was satisfied in full at the Observance of May 1997, which was the last, and the fullest, and I was there. The keeping concludes because a keeping is a thing that can be completed, and ours has been. It does not conclude because we tired of it, or lost faith in it, or were talked out of it by anybody.

The rolls are closed. The hall is conveyed. The ground is kept, as it has always been kept, and it does not require us now, and there is no part of that sentence I would change.

Last

If you have read this far and you are not of the families, then you went looking, and I am not going to tell you to stop. I will tell you only this, and then I am finished. The ground has never required anybody's belief. It did not require ours. That is the entire difference between this assembly and a church, and it is why we were never one, and it is why nothing you decide about any of this will matter to it in the slightest.

E. C., at the hall.