The old man stood in the square where his father had stood. Where his father’s father had stood with torches.

They’re letting them vote again.

The mayor watched from the window. The crowd gathering like weather.

It’s the law.

Law’s just words.

Sometimes that’s all that holds.

The old man spat. His sons beside him. Hard men. Certain men. The mayor had seen their kind before. In different clothes. Different times. The same eyes.

We remember when it was different.

I know you do.

You just gonna stand there.

Yes.

The crowd grew. Faces he knew. The baker. The farmer. Good men turned. Or maybe just revealed. He could never tell which. His deputy came in.

They’re talking about the courthouse.

Let them talk.

And if they do more than talk.

The mayor looked at him. At his young face. His unlined certainty.

Then you’ll see what you’re made of. We all will.

Night came. The voices carried. Old songs. Old hatreds. Dressed up as new ones or not dressed up at all. The mayor sat. His pistol on the desk. Loaded. Untouched. He thought about his father. About the stories. The times things broke. The times they held.

How does it hold, he’d asked once.

Barely, his father said. Always barely.

Dawn. The crowd dispersed. Drifting back to their farms. Their shops. Their lives. The courthouse stood. The mayor walked through the square. Broken glass. Burnt wood. The residue of rage.

His wife met him.

Did we win.

No.

Did we lose.

Not yet.

She looked at him. Tired. Knowing.

How many times, she said.

He didn’t answer. There was no answer. The thing came in waves. In cycles. In generations. You beat it back or you didn’t. You held the line or the line moved. The exposure imprinted or it didn’t. The body learned or it forgot.

The deputy found him at noon.

They’re saying they’ll be back.

I expect so.

What do we do.

We’re here. They see us here. Maybe that’s enough.

Is it.

The mayor looked out at the empty square. The courthouse. The gallows long gone but the space where it stood still there. Still felt. The ground remembering what the people forgot.

It has to be, he said.

The deputy left. The mayor sat. The sun wheeling overhead. The same sun. The same square. The same test again and again until the patient died or developed resistance. Until the fever broke or burned everything down.

Either way the answer would come.