The Last Hand Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    When first Angus and then Seth reached the age of having eighteen-year-old girlfriends who did not become pregnant, he considered that his job as a father was done, and done well. Neither of the boys had ever consulted him about sex, thank God. Salter understood that they had had hours of expert instruction in school during the time that used to be set aside for religious studies. He had made no comment (except to Annie) when first Angus and then Seth had found lovers. Just so long as … etc., etc., which included their being entirely responsible for any consequences, not hurting anyone’s feelings, and, for a long time, not forcing Salter to be aware of their activities.
    When they were growing up there had been a few formal conversations around the Salter hearth that turned on personal morality, and the boys had slid successfully into adulthood with inherited assumptions about right ethical behavior without any specific citations of Judaic or Christian codes.
    Questions of public morality were far more likely to generate heat, because Angus had graduated with his eye on the good life, a firm believer in the necessity of capitalism and his ability to profit from it, while Seth, apparently not sharing Angus’s needs nor caring much for his toys, had sidled to the left and spent his time and energy looking for other satisfactions. He never actually joined those who came to the door on bitter January nights seeking money to save the forests, or the wetlands, or the lakes, but his instincts just seemed more charitable than Angus’s. Yet Angus, while saying that panhandlers ought to get jobs, was the one who had the most trouble refusing money to an actual poor wretch wrapped in a blanket in a shop doorway, holding out a thin, dirty hand.
    Together the two boys constituted the usual problem for theorists of the origins of human character, because, identical in genetic makeup as well as in nurture, only the possible effect of being born first or last allowed any room for a theory that would account for the difference between them.
    â€œDoes Tatti’s mother know what?” Seth asked in response to Salter’s last question.
    â€œI was joking. You know. Pretending you were still a kid, keeping a neighbor’s daughter out late. She’s a grown-up, too. Nothing to do
with her mother who her daughter sleeps with, is it?”
    Seth looked as if he had been slapped. “This isn’t about fucking, Dad. It’s about living together, being with each other.”
    For a moment Salter felt almost admonished, but in another moment had bitten back an apology, because as well as the idyll Seth had constructed, of course it was about fucking. “I just wondered if her mother would see it that way. Where’s she from? Grenoble? Old Quebec family? Very traditional values they get from the Church about what is a good girl, by which they mean one who doesn’t sleep with her boyfriend. I just wondered.”
    â€œThey’re Catholic. Is that okay?” Seth said it quietly, but it was a challenge. No one talked much about religion in Salter’s house. Salter had inherited a wispy association with Anglicanism, an association that would last him to his funeral, so that he felt slightly less uncomfortable inside an Anglican church than in a religious building of any other denomination. Annie had left her own, much stronger Anglican connections behind in the Maritimes; she had had the boys christened because her own mother expected it, but there ended the lesson. When Annie’s mother visited from Prince Edward Island, the two women went to church and Annie came home cheered by having been able to sing a couple of favorite hymns again, but she never went on her own. Now Seth was genuinely asking, in the absence of any information that he could remember: were the Salters, as a family, anti-Catholic?
    â€œIf you’re planning to get married, son, I’d’ve preferred