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.