Ben Compton and Nick Gigli

Ben Compton and Nick Gigli’s friendship turns a temporary job at a road camp into an education in class solidarity. Nick challenges Ben’s ambitions and assumptions, and when a strike exposes the cost of siding with the workers, the two leave together. Their companionship is brief, but it gives Ben both a practical example of solidarity and a lasting direction for his studies.

Meeting at the Construction Camp

Ben spends two months at a road job, earning ten dollars a week and his keep. He learns to drive a team and keep books while working at a camp canteen run by Hiram Volle, who cheats the construction workers in their accounts. At first Ben gives little thought to the practice because most of the men are Italian immigrants. His friendship with Nick, a young worker from northern Italy, unsettles that detachment. Nick regularly spends time with Ben after the canteen closes, and on Sundays they walk into the country with a newspaper, lying in the sun and discussing its magazine articles. Conversation, rather than a formal meeting or lecture, becomes the setting in which Ben begins to reconsider what he owes the people around him.

Nick’s own experience gives force to his political arguments. His father and older brothers are anarchists, and Nick shares their beliefs. He tells Ben about Bakunin and Malatesta and insists that a person seeking education should use it in the service of workers rather than pursue wealth. In Nick’s account, becoming a businessman means joining the exploiters, exemplified by Volle; changing employers would not solve the problem, since Nick sees the same injustice across capitalist businesses. He advises patience until a larger political change becomes possible. Ben takes Nick seriously, admiring the life experience behind his convictions: Nick has worked as a sailor, miner, dishwasher, and factory hand, among other jobs, and has spent time in jail after the Paterson strike. Around camp, the other workers’ familiar calls asking where Nick is when Ben is alone show how quickly the friendship becomes visible to their community.

Nick’s influence is not limited to political instruction. He teaches Ben to roll cigarettes and talks about women who are interested in him, while also warning that romantic entanglements can distract a worker from political aims. This mixture of everyday advice and ideological argument makes their bond an informal apprenticeship. Nick does not simply tell Ben what to think; he shares a way of interpreting work, money, and personal ambition, repeatedly bringing those subjects back to the workers whose labor sustains the camp.

The Strike and Their Choice

The friendship acquires practical stakes when workers argue about their pay. One Friday, after a dispute near the pay window, Nick tells Ben that the bosses have been cheating the men on their hours and that a strike is planned for the following morning. Ben says he will join them if they walk out. Nick welcomes his decision as an act of comradeship and embraces him with a kiss on each cheek. For Ben, the commitment is a break with his former indifference: the injustice he had treated as someone else’s concern now determines what he will do.

When the next day’s whistle sounds, only a few of the pick-and-shovel workers refuse to report. Ben waits uncertainly near the cookshack until Volle orders him to take a team to the station. Ben declines, explaining that he is on strike. Volle treats the decision as a joke, then answers it with an ethnic insult and a threat of dismissal. Ben rejects the insult and identifies himself as American-born, but insists that his allegiance is to his class. His response makes the principle Nick had argued for concrete: solidarity is not just sympathy for the workers but a choice that can cost Ben his job.

The camp’s managers and supervisors arrive armed, deliver speeches in English and Sicilian, deny that the business has treated its laborers unfairly, and warn that anyone who stays away when the whistle sounds again will be fired. They also invoke Pennsylvania’s vagrancy laws, turning the threat of lost work into pressure to leave the camp. When the whistle blows, the other workers return to their jobs. Ben and Nick are the only two who do not. They walk away with their belongings, and Nick grieves that the workers have not yet learned their collective strength. Their departure is both a defeat for the immediate strike and the clearest proof of their shared commitment: neither abandons the other when the rest of the workforce returns.

Shared Hardship and Parting

That night, Ben and Nick reach a disused schoolhouse on a hill above a river. They have bought bread and peanut butter, but no bedding or covering. Nick shows Ben how to use his jacket while sleeping against the wall, practical care that accompanies the political instruction he has already offered. During the night, a noise outside frightens them. They block the door with benches and cover the lower part of a broken window with boards. Nick places his sailor’s knife between them and lets Ben feel its catch as they listen together. The episode does not resolve into a confrontation; its significance lies in the two men responding to uncertainty as companions, sharing what little protection and reassurance they have.

They spend the following day without sleep, then help a man repair a truck and get a ride to Scranton. There they find work washing dishes in a restaurant. The new job gives them a brief way forward after leaving the camp, but it does not become a permanent partnership. After a couple of weeks, Ben decides to return home; he has saved enough for the ticket and wants to find winter work that will leave time for study. Nick stays behind because a girl at a candy store has fallen for him, and he later intends to go to Allentown, where his brother has work in a steel mill.

At the station, Nick sends Ben off with a final appeal to study, become useful to the working class, and be wary of distractions. Ben hates leaving him, but the parting does not erase the friendship’s influence. Back home, Ben matriculates at the College of the City of New York, finds evening work, reads Marx’s Capital at the library, and joins the Socialist Party. Those choices have their own causes and costs, but they follow the direction Nick had urged: education should be made an instrument for working people. The book presents their relationship not as a lifelong alliance but as a concentrated encounter in which shared work, a failed strike, and a difficult parting help change how Ben understands his future.