ONE OF the great modem stories is the story of the sensitive child born to a brutal or unthinking parent. The child cannot help but be impressed by the parent, cannot help but love the parent, and as its awareness grows, this love cannot help but turn into a deep anger that often verges on hatred ? an anger based essentially on the fact that the child was unable to communicate with this adult who meant so much to it. Fred Stenson's novel Last One Home (NeWest Press, 158 pages, $8.95 paper) sets this story in the Southern Alberta prairie. The child is a boy named Gabriel, one?quarter Indian, three?quarters white, and the parent is his father Hank, a white farmer who has always treated his son with a sort of bullying contempt. As the novel opens, Gabriel ?now a young man recently graduated from university who has left home years before ? has to go back to the farm because his father has become ill and can no longer take care of it. It is early April, still winter, and the livestock will die if they're not fed. Stenson writes with real authority about farm life and the landscape and climate of southern Alberta, and his portrayal of the tension between Gabriel and Hank ? who hardly appears in the book, and is seen mostly by way of Gabriel's memories of him ? is reiniii?kable. Equally remarkable, though more limited, is his portrayal of Gabriel's younger brother Joe, an oafish pig of a boy for whom Gabriel feels a kind of irritated sense of responsibility. The chief weakness of the book is that it isn't very well structured. It starts well, holds your interest, is quite convincing; but about twothirds of the way through the plot begins to skid, and by the end both the novel and Gabriel himself are just drifting from one thing to the next.