When Ollie cried for his dead friend, Edvard kicked him out.
“No one sheds tears for a locust in my house!” he shouted, and pushed his son outside.
Ollie spent the night shivering in the fields. The next morning, his father felt bad for being so harsh and went outside to find the boy, but instead he came upon a giant locust sleeping between rows of ruined wheat. Edvard recoiled in disgust. The creature was as big as a mastiff, with thighs like Christmas hams and antennae as long as riding crops. Edvard ran into the house to fetch his gun, but when he came back to shoot the thing, locusts swarmed around him and flew into the barrel of his rifle, clogging it. Then they swirled in the air before him and divided themselves into letters that spelled a word:
O-L-L-I-E
Edvard dropped his gun in shock and stared at the giant locust, which was now standing on its hind legs, as a human would. It didn’t have black eyes, like locusts do, but blue ones, like Ollie’s.
“No,” Edvard said. “It’s not possible!”
But then he noticed that the torn collar of his son’s shirt was around the creature’s neck, and a cuff of Ollie’s pants was attached to its leg.
“Ollie?” he said tentatively. “Is that you?”
In what seemed to be a nod, the bug moved its head up and down.
Edvard’s skin prickled strangely. He felt as if he were watching the scene from outside his body.
His son had turned into a locust.
“Can you speak?” Edvard asked.
Ollie rubbed his hind legs together and made a high-pitched noise, but it seemed that was the best he could do.
Edvard didn’t know how to react. He was disgusted by the very sight of Ollie, but still—something had to be done for the boy. He didn’t want everyone finding out, though, so rather than call the town doctor, who had a big mouth, he sent for wise old Erick.
Erick came hobbling out into the field to have a look. After his initial shock, he said, “It’s just as I predicted. It took years, but he’s finally manifesting his peculiar trait.”
“Yes, obviously,” said Edvard, “but why? And how can it be reversed?”
Erick consulted a tattered old book that he’d brought with him—a folk manual of peculiar conditions, which had passed down through generations of his family from a great-grandmother who had herself been peculiar.21 “Ah, here we go,” he said, licking his thumb to turn a page. “It says that when a person with a certain peculiar temperament and a large and generous heart no longer feels loved by his own kind, he’ll take on the form of whatever creature he feels most connected to.”
Erick gave Edvard a strange look that made Edvard feel ashamed.
“The boy had a locust friend?”
“A pet, yes,” said Edvard. “I threw it into the fire.”
Erick clicked his tongue and shook his head. “Perhaps you were a bit hard on him.”
“He’s too soft for this world,” Edvard grumbled, “but never mind. How do we fix him?”
“I don’t need a book to tell me that,” Erick said, closing the tattered volume. “You have to love him, Edvard.”
Erick wished him good luck and left Edvard alone with the creature that was once his son. He stared at its long, papery wings and its awful mandibles, and he shuddered. How could he love such a thing? Still, he made an attempt, but he was filled with resentment and his efforts were not sincere. Instead of showing the boy kindness, Edvard spent all day lecturing him.
“Don’t I love you, boy? Don’t I feed you and give you a roof to sleep under? I had to give up school and go to work at the age of eight, but don’t I let you bury your head in books and schoolwork to your heart’s content? What do you call that, if not love? What more do I owe you, you entitled American brat?”
And so on. When night fell, Edvard couldn’t bear to let Ollie into the house, so he made him a place to sleep in the barn and left a few table scraps in a pail for him to eat. Toughness makes a man, Edvard believed, and being soft on Ollie now would only encourage more of the weakhearted behavior that had turned him into a locust in the first place.
In the morning his son was gone. Edvard searched every inch of the barn and every row of his fields, but the boy was nowhere to be found. When he hadn’t returned after three days, Edvard began to wonder if he’d taken the wrong approach with Ollie. He had stuck to his principles—but for what? He had driven away his only son. Now that Ollie was gone, Edvard realized how little his farm meant to him by comparison. But it was a lesson learned too late.
Edvard became so sad and sorry that he went into town and admitted to everyone what had happened. “I turned my son into a locust,” he said, “and now I’ve lost everything.”
No one believed him at first, so he asked old Erick to corroborate his story.
“It’s true,” Erick said to anyone who asked. “His son is an enormous locust. He’s the size of a dog.”
Edvard made the townspeople an offer. “My heart is like an old, shriveled apple,” he said. “I can’t help my son, but if anyone can love him enough to turn him back into a boy, I’ll give you my farm.”
This excited the townspeople tremendously. For such a rich prize, they said, they could make themselves love nearly anything. Of course, first they had to find the locust boy, so they set out in search parties and began to comb the roads and fields.
Ollie, who had super-sensitive locust ears, heard everything. He’d heard his father talking about him, he heard the footsteps of the people searching for him, and he wanted no part of it. He hid in the field of a neighboring farm with his new locust friends, and anytime someone came near, the locusts would swarm up and surround the person, creating a wall that gave Ollie time to escape. But a few days later, the locusts ran out of food and took to the sky to migrate elsewhere. Ollie tried to join them, but he was too big and too heavy to fly. Being unsentimental creatures, not a single locust stayed behind to keep Ollie company, and he was left alone again.