“So the doctor told me,” said Edvard. “His heart is too large.”
“It’s more than just that,” said Erick, “though precisely what’s special about him may not manifest itself for years.”19
“But will he live?” asked Edvard.
“Time will tell,” Erick replied.
Edvard’s son did live, but his wife only grew weaker, and finally she died. At first Edvard was devastated, and then he grew angry. He was angry with himself for allowing love to disrupt his plans for a practical life. Now he had a farm to work and an infant to care for—and no wife to help him! He was angry, too, at the child, for being strange and special and delicate, but especially for sending his wife to the grave on his way into the world. He knew this was not the child’s fault, of course, and that being angry at an infant made no sense, but he couldn’t help it. All the love he had unwisely allowed to blossom inside him had turned to bitterness, and now that it was there, lodged in him like a gallstone, he didn’t know how to get rid of it.
He named the boy Ollie and raised him alone. He sent Ollie to school, where he learned English and other subjects Edvard knew little about. In some ways the boy was recognizably his son: he looked like Edvard and worked just as hard, tilling and plowing beside his father every hour that he wasn’t at school or asleep, and never complaining. But in other ways the boy was a stranger. He spoke Norwegian with a flat American accent. He seemed to believe that the world had good things in store for him, a peculiarly American idea. Worst of all, the boy was enslaved to the whims of his too-large heart. He fell in love in an instant. By the age of seven he had proposed marriage to a classmate, a neighbor girl, and the young woman who played the organ at church, fifteen years his senior. If ever a bird should fall from the sky, Ollie would sniffle and cry over it for days. When he realized that the meat on his dinner plate came from animals, he refused to eat it ever again. The boy’s insides were made of goo.
The real trouble with Ollie started when he was fourteen—the year the locusts came. No one in Dakota had seen anything like it before: swarms big enough to blot out the sun, miles wide, like a curse from God. People could not walk outdoors without crushing insects under their feet by the hundreds. The locusts ate everything green they could find, and when they ran out of grass they moved on to corn and wheat, and when that was gone they devoured wood and fiber and leather and roofs made of sod. They would strip the wool from sheep in the fields. One poor soul was caught in a swarm of them and had the clothes eaten off his back.20
It was a scourge that threatened to destroy the livelihood of every settler on the frontier, Edvard’s included, and the settlers tried everything they could think of to combat it. They used fire and smoke and poison to try to drive the bugs away. They pushed heavy stone rollers over the ground to squash them. The town near Edvard’s farm mandated that every person over the age of ten deliver thirty pounds of dead locusts to the dump every week, or be fined. Edvard threw himself into the task enthusiastically, but his son refused to kill a single locust. When Ollie walked outdoors, he even shuffled his feet so as not to accidentally squash one. It nearly drove his father to distraction.
“They’ve eaten all our crops!” Edvard shouted at him. “They’re ruining our farm!”
“They’re just hungry,” his son replied. “They’re not hurting us on purpose, so it isn’t fair to hurt them on purpose.”
“Fairness doesn’t enter into it,” Edvard said, straining to control his temper. “Sometimes in life you have to kill in order to survive.”
“Not in this case,” said Ollie. “Killing them hasn’t done any good at all.”
By this point, Edvard had gone completely red in the face. “Smash that locust!” he demanded, pointing at one on the ground.
“I will not!” Ollie said.
Edvard was livid. He slapped his disobedient son, and still he refused to kill them, so Edvard thrashed him with his belt and sent the boy to his room without supper. As he listened to Ollie crying through the wall, he stared out the window at a haze of locusts rising from his ruined fields and felt his heart hardening against his son.
Word spread among the settlers that Ollie had refused to kill locusts, and people got angry. The town fined his father. Ollie’s classmates pinned him down and tried to make him eat one. People Ollie hardly knew hurled insults at him on the street. His father was so angry and embarrassed that he stopped speaking to his son. Suddenly, Ollie found himself with no friends and no one to talk to, and he became so lonely that one day he adopted a pet. It was the only living creature who would tolerate his presence: a locust. He named it Thor after the old Norse god and kept it hidden under his bed in a cigar box. He fed it dinner scraps and sugar water and talked to it late at night when he was supposed to be sleeping.
“It’s not your fault everyone hates you,” he whispered to Thor. “You were just doing what you were made to do.”
“Chirp-churrup!” replied the locust, rubbing its wings together.
“Shhh!” Ollie said, and he slipped a few grains of rice into the box and closed it.
Ollie began to carry Thor with him everywhere he went. He grew very fond of the little insect, who perched on his shoulder and chirped when the sun shone and would hop about merrily when Ollie whistled a tune. Then one day his father discovered Thor’s box. Enraged, he snatched the locust out, took it to the hearth, and threw it into the flames. There was a high-pitched whine and a quiet pop, and Thor was gone.