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.
Without his friends to help protect him, it wasn’t long before a group of boys was able to sneak up on Ollie while he was sleeping and capture him in a net. They were the same boys who had tormented Ollie at school. The oldest one slung Ollie over his shoulder as they skipped back to town, singing and celebrating. “We’re going to turn him back into a boy, and then we’ll get Edvard’s whole farm!” They cheered. “We’ll be rich!”
They kept Ollie in a cage in their house and waited. When, after a week, he stubbornly remained a locust, they switched tactics.
“Tell it you love it,” the boys’ mother suggested.
“I love you!” the youngest boy shouted through the bars of Ollie’s cage, but he could hardly get the words out before he started laughing.
“At least keep a straight face when you say it,” the older boy said, and then he gave it a try. “I love you, locust.”
But Ollie wasn’t