Carmine Pisano was a worker. His skin was brown from the California sun. His arms were stout and muscular, and his frame was short and sturdy. His dark brown hair, though it was beginning to thin out a little at the top – at forty-two you expected such things – was still abundant and wavy.

After his US Army service in World War II, Carmine did two things that altered the course of his life. He married a girl who was a devout Catholic, and he joined the Communist Party. His unhappy marriage ended in a separation, though his wife never agreed to a divorce. His affiliation to the Party continued through Party reorganizations and Congressional witch hunts. After early confusions and false starts, Carmine's life finally became simple. He lived alone in a small house trailer that held all his possessions.

During the good months from May to October he spent his days with a road crew, skillfully wielding a 200-pound jackhammer and sweating honest sweat constructing and repairing roads and bridges, highways and dams. From a bridge high over the Sacramento River, he might straighten up from his work to take off his helmet and wipe his face and neck with a handkerchief. Sometimes he would notice truckloads of braceros being transported to do stoop labor in the fields of factory farms.

In the bad months from November to April, Carmine's work crew disbanded. “Bud” Kelly, the burly red-haired construction contractor, went home to his wife and kids in the big frame house in Sacramento, to drink Irish whisky on the terraced lawn under the eucalyptus trees and dream about investing the season's profits. Carmine hitched his little house trailer behind his old Ford and headed for a place not too far from San Francisco, between Yuba City and Marysville, near the great Oroville dam he had helped build. There he rented trailer space for the season from a farmer who owned an olive orchard.

Carmine attached a butane tank to his trailer to fuel his two-burner stove and his heater. He pumped water from the farmer's artesian well and linked up to the power line that ran from the farmer's house to a packing shed in the orchard. He had use of the outhouse the farmer had built for the olive pickers. Inside the trailer, scores of books spilled over from the shelves he had made for them and piled up on the card table, the army cot and in every corner and crevice, leaving just room for him to sleep and eat. Carmine felt that he had all the comforts he needed to meet the winter season.

Carmine enjoyed his life. In the mornings, he washed and shaved in front of the mirror over the trailer sink. He noticed with satisfaction the crisscross furrows running from the bridge of his wide nose to the corners of his generous mouth. Even the dark brown stubble of beard that appeared overnight did not hide the creases, the evidence of twenty-five years of hard labor in the open air.

When he trimmed his fingernails, he squinted at the thick yellow calluses on his hands formed by resisting the upward pressure of the pneumatic drill. When he pulled off his work shirt in the evening, he noted with pride the hard thick bulges in his upper arms and shoulders, where he had thrown the weight of his powerful body against the machine.

When he became lonely and longed for the warmth and feel and smell of a woman, he brought home for a night the slender dark-haired waitress named Irene Madison who worked at the diner in Yuba City. Irene had once lived with him for six months in his trailer, and his bachelor quarters had begun to smell of perfume and face powder and become cluttered with nylon stockings, pastel plastic shoes and cigarette butts smudged with lipstick. Carmine had found his lack of privacy and freedom intolerable, and had asked her to move out. Angry and hurt at being rejected, Irene for a time refused to see him.

Then she began seeing him again, more casually than before, only once in a while, and she didn't seem to resent his independence any more or to ask him for a more permanent relationship. He thought she probably had other lovers, and that was all right with him.

The times he could sit alone in his trailer and read and study were the most precious moments of his life. Even though he had left school before finishing high school, as many first-generation Italians in his time had done, he valued knowledge. He believed that knowledge was power, and that one day workers like him would win political power. But first they would have to learn history, law, economics and political science, just as he was doing.

On his shelves were books on law, encyclopedias, annotated works on ancient and modern history, and many writings on Marxism: Marx's Capital, in two volumes; Engels's On Religion, The Communist Manifesto, the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, and a series of red-covered volumes containing the complete works of Lenin, with an embossed profile of Lenin on the front cover. And, of course, there was a stack of copies of the Peoples World that Carmine was saving up to distribute.

Whenever he could, Carmine invited his union buddies over to drink coffee and browse in his library. He lent books out and encouraged his borrowers to read them and discuss them with him. Sometimes his friends teased him, calling him the “commie professor;” but they liked him and respected his opinions.

On a brisk day in January, 1959, Alfred Watts, a prominent Party leader from San Francisco, paid a surprise visit to Carmine. Alfred wore a suit and tie, and carried a leather briefcase. He was a tall thin man with a pale, serious face, and when he greeted Carmine, his voice was a shade abrupt and his handshake a trifle brusque.

“How are you, Carmine?” Alfred asked.

“Fine, just fine, Al,” Carmine answered.

Carmine bustled about, clearing a place for his visitor to sit. Although they were about the same age, Carmine felt self-conscious around Alfred. Alfred had been to college, had a degree and would certainly be a prosperous professional man if it hadn't been for Senator Joseph McCarthy and his notorious Committee. In some ways, Carmine mused, he had been luckier than Alfred. Carmine's union had stood behind him when pressure came to blacklist him off the contract jobs. Alfred hadn't fared so well. He had gone to prison for contempt of Congress for refusing to name names, and when he got out no one would hire him. So he worked for the Party, a tense, nervous man with facial tics, who spent his time raising money and attending district committee meetings.

Carmine served Alfred fresh coffee in one of the large orange mugs he reserved for special occasions. As they sat side by side on the narrow cot, Alfred related the latest news about the longshoremen's strike on the San Francisco waterfront and how the Party was helping raise bail for the strikers who had been arrested.

Carmine gave Alfred ten dollars as a personal donation and pledged to raise more money among his union brothers. Then Alfred asked Carmine if he knew how the farm workers organizing efforts were progressing. Was it true that the farmers were importing large numbers of contract workers from Mexico to try and break the hoped-for union? Did Carmine think the Party should raise money to help the organizing committee? Carmine said he had seen many braceros lately being trucked into the fields. He would look into the situation, he said, and let Alfred know what he could find out.

“Good,” Alfred said. Carmine waited patiently. He knew that Alfred Watts hadn't come there on an unannounced visit just to discuss the farm workers' union.

When they finished their coffee, Alfred coughed a dry nervous little cough and smiled. “Carmine, there's been a request from the San Francisco-East Bay Youth Club to have an older comrade speak to them on the relation between revolutionary theory and practice. The committee thought of you right away. You are an outstanding example of what a dedicated and loyal cadre can achieve, both as a worker and a theoretician.”

Carmine blushed. Although he was proud of his achievements, it embarrassed him to hear them praised in such a flowery way. “There are probably others who would be much better as speakers,” he said.

“No, no, not at all. The committee has given this much thought. You are the right man, Carmine. You understand, of course, how the younger comrades are impatient for change. They come into the Party with bold dreams for the transformation of the bourgeois system.. When they realize that the struggle is for the duration, they often leave. We want to educate them so that they will want to stay in the Party. You can help in that. We must turn them from petit-bourgeois into workers. You see how important that is.”

“I am honored by your invitation, but ...”

“I can pick you up two weeks from this Thursday,” Alfred interrupted.

Carmine couldn't picture himself being chauffeured. “Don't think I'll need a ride. I can drive myself down,” Carmine said.

“All right, good,” Alfred said, and the matter seemed settled.

After Alfred left, Carmine paced up and down the little trailer. His thoughts wouldn't coalesce into any coherent pattern. All that first week he tried to resolve his problem, and by the end of the week he felt a depression that he couldn't seem to overcome. He should be honored by the invitation, he told himself, honored to speak before a youth club, honored by the fact that the committee had chosen him, had even thought of him, living almost a hermit's existence in the winter months in the country. And yet, the closer the day of the talk approached, the more impossible the task seemed.

Glancing through his books on Marxism, he prepared an outline for the talk: his ideas on combining work, organizing and knowledge in such a way as to form that beautiful unity, which he had tried all his working life to achieve. He felt, however, that when the moment came for him to get up and speak to the group he would not be able to say any of these inspired things. He would end up pointing to the muscle in his arm and laughing at himself, and then sit down, his cap in his lap, feeling like an old and tired fool.

It occurred to him that perhaps all he needed was a distraction from the morbid preoccupation with the talk. He invited Irene over and they made love. But when it was over and Irene had smoked her last cigarette and left, he felt more depressed than ever.

Finally, he decided what to do. He wrote a note to Alfred explaining that he had a serious cold and would be unable to attend the “birthday party.” Alfred would have plenty of time to find a replacement. Now, Carmine thought, the problem is solved.

The next week he felt both guilty and relieved. He read more than usual and drank a lot of strong coffee. He pictured the work crew that would reassemble in a couple of months, and vowed to rededicate himself to being a better worker and to being more active in his union.

By Thursday, he had almost forgotten about the talk. Then suddenly, in the midst of reading Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he heard a knock on the door. Still deep in the revolutionary politics of nineteenth-century France, Carmine opened the trailer door. There stood Alfred, blinking and smiling. Behind him, Carmine saw five young people. When the men and women filed into the trailer, filling his little room, and when they sat on the floor, taking up every last inch of space, the depression that had been on the edge of his awareness for the last two weeks disappeared. Carmine felt a warm glow of comradeship.

He served coffee in mugs, and while the Youth Club members drank and talked to one another in low voices, Carmine knew that he would be able to tell them about the wonderful unity of work, organizing and revolutionary knowledge. Now that they were in his trailer, drinking his coffee and sharing his books, that unity was becoming a reality.

--ALICE KESNER -- a free-lance writer and longtime activist for civil liberties, peace and women’s rights --- has been an instructor of sociology, community education specialist and counselor. Her writings have appeared in Seventeen, The People’s World, Journal of Human Stress, Voices International, The Humanist and Z magazine.