Tales of the Peculiar (illustrated)

The Locust

here was once a hard-working immigrant from Norway named Edvard who went to America to seek his fortune. This was back in the days when only the eastern third of America had been settled by Europeans. Most of its western lands still belonged to the peoples that had roamed it since the last Ice Age. The fertile plains in the middle were known as the “Frontier”—a wild place of great opportunity and great risk—and this was where Edvard settled.

He had sold everything he owned in Norway, and with that money had bought land and farming equipment in a place known then as the Dakota Territory, where many other new arrivals from Norway had also settled. He built a simple house and established a small farm, and after a few years of hard work even prospered a little.

People in town told him he should find a wife and start a family. “You’re a strapping young lad,” they said. “It’s the natural order of things!”

But Edvard resisted marrying. He loved his farm so much that he wasn’t sure he had room in his heart to love a wife, too. He’d always felt love was impractical, that it got in the way of more important things. As a young man in Norway, Edvard had watched his best mate throw away what could have been a life of adventure and fortune when he fell in love with a girl who couldn’t bear to leave her family in Norway. There was no money to be made in the old country, and now his old friend had a wife and children he could barely feed—sentenced to a life of compromise and deprivation—all thanks to a whim of his youthful heart.

And yet, as fate would have it, even Edvard met a girl he took a fancy to. He found room in his heart to love both his farm and a wife, and he married her. He thought he could not possibly be happier—that his tough little heart was now full to bursting—so when his wife asked him to give her a child, he resisted. How could he possibly love a farm, a wife, and a child? And yet, when Edvard’s wife became pregnant, he was surprised by the joy that filled him, and looked forward to the birth with tremendous anticipation.

Nine months later, they welcomed a baby boy into the world. It was a difficult birth that left Edvard’s wife weak and ailing. There was something wrong with the baby, too: its heart was so big that one side of its chest was noticeably larger than the other.

“Will he live?” Edvard asked the doctor.

“Time will tell,” the doctor replied.

Unsatisfied, Edvard took his child to see old Erick, a healer who’d made a reputation for himself in the old country as an uncommonly wise man. He put his hands on the boy, and within moments his eyebrows shot up. “This boy is peculiar!” Erick exclaimed.

“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.

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.

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 paying attention. He had curled up in a corner and gone to sleep.

“Hey, I’m talking to you!” the boy shouted, and kicked the cage. “I LOVE YOU!”

But he did not, nor could he force himself to, and when Ollie began making locust shrieks all night, the family gave up and sold Ollie to their neighbor. He was an old hunter with no family and little experience in matters of the heart, and after a few feeble attempts to show the boy love, he abandoned the effort and sent Ollie outside to live with the hunting dogs. Ollie much preferred the dogs’ company to the man’s. He ate with them and slept alongside them in their doghouse, and though they were afraid of him at first, Ollie was so gentle and kind that they soon grew accustomed to him, and he became one of the pack. In fact, he felt so accepted by them that one day the hunter found he was missing a giant locust but had gained an extra-large dog.

The months Ollie spent as a dog were some of the happiest of his life. But then came hunting season, when the dogs were expected to work. On the first day, the hunter brought the pack out to a field of tall grass. He shouted a command and all the dogs began to run, barking, through the field. Ollie followed along, barking and making a fuss. It was good fun! Then, suddenly, he tripped over a goose in the grass. The goose leaped into the air and started to fly away, but before it could get anywhere there was a loud crack and it fell back to earth, dead. Ollie stared at its body in horror. A moment later, another dog trotted up to him and said, “What are you waiting for? Aren’t you going to take it back to Master?”

“Of course not!” Ollie said.

“Suit yourself,” said the dog, “but if Master finds out, he’ll shoot you.” And then he grasped the dead goose in his jaws and trotted away.

The next morning, Ollie was gone. He’d run away with the geese, chasing their V-shaped migration from the ground.

When Edvard heard that his son had been found and then lost again, he sank into a despair from which those who knew him worried he’d never emerge. He stopped leaving his house. He let all his fields lie fallow. If old Erick had not brought him food once a week, he may well have starved. But like the locust plague, Edvard’s time of darkness eventually passed, and he began to tend his farm again and to turn up at the market in town and in his old pew in church on Sundays. And after a time he fell in love again and married, and he and his wife had a child, a girl they called Asgard.

Edvard was determined to love Asgard as he had failed to love Ollie, and as she grew up he did his best to keep his heart open. He let her love stray animals and cry over silly things, and he never scolded her for acting out of kindness. When she was eight years old, Edvard had a hard season. The crops failed and they had only turnips to eat. Then one day a flock of geese was passing overhead, and one of them left the formation and landed near Edvard’s house. It was very large, nearly twice the size of a normal goose, and because it didn’t seem afraid, Edvard was able to walk right up to it and grab it.

“You’ll make a good dinner tonight!” Edvard said, and he carried the goose inside and locked it in a cage.

It had been weeks since they’d had meat on their dinner table, and Edvard’s wife was excited. She stoked a fire and prepared the cooking pot while Edvard sharpened his carving knife. But when Asgard came into the kitchen and saw what was happening, she became upset.

“You can’t kill it!” she cried. “It’s a nice goose, and it didn’t do anything to us! It isn’t fair!”

“Fairness doesn’t enter into it,” Edvard told her. “In life, sometimes you have to kill in order to survive.”

“But we don’t have to kill it,” she said. “We can eat turnip soup again tonight—I don’t mind!”

And then she collapsed in front of the goose’s cage and began to weep.

At another time in Edvard’s life, he might have scolded his daughter and lectured her about the perils of softheartedness—but now he remembered his son.

“Oh, all right, we won’t kill it,” he said, kneeling down to comfort her.

Asgard stopped crying. “Thank you, Papa! May we keep it?”

“Only if it wants to stay,” said Edvard. “It’s a wild thing, so keeping it in a cage would be cruel.”

He opened the cage. The goose waddled out and Asgard threw her arms around its neck.

“I love you, Mister Goose!”

“Waak!” the goose replied.

That night they ate turnip soup and went to bed with their stomachs grumbling, happy as could be.

The goose became Asgard’s beloved pet. It slept in the barn, followed Asgard to school every morning, and sat honking on the schoolhouse roof all day while she was inside. She let everyone know the goose was her best friend and that no one was allowed to shoot it or make it into soup, and they let it be. Asgard made up fantastic stories about adventures she had with her goose, like the time she rode Goose to the moon so they could see what moon-cheese tasted like, and she regaled her parents with these tales at dinnertime. That’s why they weren’t terribly surprised when Asgard woke them up one morning in a state of excitement and announced that Goose had turned into a young man.

“Go back to sleep,” Edvard said, yawning. “Even the rooster isn’t awake yet!”

“I’m serious!” Asgard cried. “Come and see for yourself!” And she tugged her tired father out of bed by his arm.

Edvard nearly fainted when he got inside barn. There, standing in a nest of straw, was his long-lost son. Ollie was grown now, six feet tall with strong features and a stubbled chin. He wore a burlap sack around his waist that he’d found on the floor of the barn.

“See, I wasn’t lying!” Asgard said, and she ran to Ollie and hugged him hard. “What are you doing, silly Goose?”

Ollie broke into a big smile. “Hello, Father,” he said. “Did you miss me?”

“Very much,” said Edvard. His heart hurt so much that he began to cry, and he went to his son and hugged him. “I hope you can forgive me,” he whispered.

“I did years ago,” Ollie replied. “It just took some time to find my way back.”

“Father?” said Asgard. “What’s happening?”

Edvard let Ollie go, wiped his tears, and turned to his daughter. “This is your older brother,” he said. “The one I told you about.”

“Who turned into a bug?” she said, eyes growing wide. “And ran away?”

“The same,” Ollie said, and put out his hand for Asgard to shake. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Ollie.”

“No,” she said, “you’re Goose!” And she ignored Ollie’s extended hand and hugged him again. “How’d you become a goose, anyway?”

Ollie hugged his sister back. “It’s rather a long story,” he said.

“Good!” said Asgard. “I love stories.”

“He’ll tell us over breakfast,” said Edvard. “Won’t you, son?”

Ollie grinned. “I’d love to.”

Edvard took him by one hand and Asgard by the other, and they led him into the house. After Edvard’s wife had recovered from the shock, they sat together and ate a breakfast of turnips on toast while Ollie told them all about his years as a goose. From that day forward he was a member of the family. Edvard loved his son unconditionally, and never again did Ollie lose his human form. And they lived happily ever after.