He is the mayor and the assistant fire chief, and his day job is as a rural mail carrier. If the four employees of the local water utility don’t show up, he knows enough about the system to keep the water flowing, too.

“There’s a handful of us — we can go get stuff taken care of,” he said.

So when he was away from work for a week after contracting Covid-19 at the beginning of the year, the worn engine of small town governance and administration in Marvell, about a 90-minute drive southwest from Memphis, sputtered and coughed, but it chugged on.