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says we got more orders than ever. Course, we ain't spinnin thread no more... It's all polyester chord for tires now-a-days."

"Your hands holdin up all right?"

"Steady as ever."

"You goin up to the competition again this year?"

"You know that's right... I get a bonus if I win, and I like winnin."

"You'll win, Lucius. You always have before." Myrtle said this as if she were speaking about something holy, something that faith should be sustained with. For Myrtle, and he realized that it must be the same with any number of others up here on the Mill Hill, life was just that way: what they know, they know for certain. For Lucius it was both humbling and worrisome. It is never easy being a heroespecially when you didn't ask to be one.

"I dunno, that kid... You know, Norman Montgomery's boy? Works over at Groves? He give me a pretty good run last year.

Myrtle chuckled and it turned into another deep, painful cough that made Lucius whence just to hear it. He'd heard coughing like that from too many good people over the years, people whose lungs had filled with so much cotton dust that they had gone over brown', as they all called it.

After a body developed that cough, it wasn't long before the oxygen bottles came, and then a long number of years of misery, everyone waiting for the end, when the last, wheezing breath would rattle the poor soul off from this tiresome life. Like coal miners in West Virginia or Kentucky, it was a condition of life among a working class of Americans, which were slowly, wheezily, disappearing along with the industries they worked.

Myrtle, however, had never set foot in a Mill. Arby had. Lucius' best friend since childhood, he had died by accident at work; his arm pulled off of his body the way a small child might pull a wing from a fly. Lucius had time only to hold his friend and look in his eyes as all the life gushed out of him. His last breath had been for his wife: "...Take care of Myrtle, for me Luc-"

Myrtle gathered her breath and continued as if the cough had never happened.

"Lucius..." She placed her hand over his knee, "You always win. You won the State Championship in football dang near all by yourself way back when the school still had new paint. You the best in softball, even against men years younger, and you are hands down the best doffer in the business for the last forty years! Only thing you never won at was love, and that I still don't understand."

She looked away and shook her head.

"You'll win it again, Lucius. You

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