My great-uncle Donald Hustad, who would go on to become the official crusade organist for the evangelist Billy Graham, grew up with my grandfather Wes in a small town called Boone, Iowa, at a home for indigents. They weren’t orphans but their father was dead, and the Boone Biblical College and Associated Institutions took their mother, Clara, and these pale, fat-kneed boys in and gave them work and a place to sleep. For pocket money Don helped a man known as Uncle Pete hunt rabbits. Uncle Pete was no one’s uncle as far as anyone in Boone could tell, but there they were. Uncle Pete’s preferred method for catching rabbits was to send a ferret scrambling down one end of the rabbit warren while Don stood ready at the other opening, waiting for the terrified rabbits to come hurtling out. Then, fast, they snatched them up and wrung their necks and it was all over pretty quickly, bloodlessly. Knocking on doors in the late afternoon, sun cascading over nearby cornfields to stop at low-hanging eaves, Pete and Don managed to sell most of their take.
Sometimes Don took an unsold rabbit home to his mother. But Clara wasn’t comfortable accepting gifts from men, especially not Uncle Pete, and as often as not she’d push Don back out the screen door to spread his charity elsewhere. Once she sent him marching, sniffling and sad for reasons he couldn’t quite discern, dead rabbit tucked into the crook of his elbow, over to a missionary family staying down the road. This family had just returned from Africa, and after resting up in Iowa would be going back there, because more people needed to hear the good news.
