"She used to say a thing. Some fella'd come in, big shot, wanting the best seats or wanting in free or wanting her to throw somebody out he didn't care for the look of, and he'd say, 'Don't you know who I am?' or 'Who runs this place?' And Cora'd say, 'Nobody runs this place, Mister. Everybody keeps it.'"
"Everybody keeps it," Danny repeated.
"She meant it. Literally, it turned out." Ansel got up, slowly, his knees cracking, and went to a steel cabinet in the corner behind the old carbon-arc lamphouse. He unlocked it with a key from his ring and took out a book. It was a ledger, big as a family Bible, bound in green cloth gone almost black at the corners from handling, and when he laid it on the rewind bench under the work light the spine creaked.
On the cover, in gold leaf mostly worn away, it said THE SUNFLOWER THEATRE. Underneath, smaller, hand-lettered in white ink: The Book of Aisles.
"She died in 1964," Ansel said. "No children. Never married. Everybody figured she'd leave the place to the Methodist church, or the library, or me. She didn't. She left it in trust. And she named the trustees." He opened the cover. On the first page, in a large, slanting, impatient hand, someone had written a paragraph, and Ansel didn't read it out loud. He just turned the book so Danny could see.
I leave the Sunflower Theatre, its building and its contents and whatever money it may someday have, in trust to the people of Merritt, to be governed and kept by every person who has served one full year as an usher of this house, for as long as each shall live. They shall meet once a year, on the third Saturday in August, after the last show, in the auditorium, and decide what is to be done, and the majority of those who come shall decide it. I trust them more than I trust any bank, any church, or any man who ever asked me who runs this place. —C.L., 1962
Danny read it twice. Then he looked up.
"Ushers," he said.
"Ushers."
"Every usher. Who ever made a year."
"Every one that's still living. Twelve hundred and some, all told, since 1927. Maybe four hundred still alive. Maybe two hundred still in Merritt or close by." Ansel turned the pages. They were columns of names, handwritten, each one with a date of hire and a date of completion and a signature, page after page, the ink changing from fountain pen to ballpoint, the handwriting changing from copperplate to the round bubbly script of 1970s girls who dotted their i's with circles. "They sign the book when they make their year. And the wall, on the way up, for fun. The book's the one that counts."