The black car that came for me at nine the next morning was a long, quiet sedan driven by a young man in a gray cap, and the iron gates that opened for us on the edge of Huntsville were taller than the house where I grew up. A winding drive of white gravel led up through oaks, past a pond with a stone bridge, to a broad brick building with white columns and a wide front porch. Mr. Whitfield sat beside me in the back seat with his briefcase on his knees. I had worn my church dress and my good shoes and the pearls of my mother. I felt like a girl on the way to the principal.
“Mrs. Harmon is waiting in the garden room,” he said. “She is ninety one. She does not rise quickly anymore, but she insisted on meeting you at the door.” He was as good as his word. When the car stopped at the foot of the steps, a tiny figure in a lavender suit and a church hat was standing at the top of them, one hand on the rail and the other on a cane. Behind her stood a tall silver haired man and two women of about my own age. When I climbed out, the old woman raised a trembling hand and said, in a clear, small voice, “Carolyn. There you are.”
I do not remember climbing the steps. I remember her arms, light as paper, wrapping around my waist, and the smell of lavender, and a single tear dropping on the back of my hand. “Fifty eight years,” she whispered. “I looked for a girl with pigtails. Instead I found a grandmother.” I laughed through my own tears. “I am afraid the pigtails went with the Eisenhower years,” I said. She laughed too, a dry, silvery laugh, and drew me into the house.
The garden room was all glass and ferns, with a long white table set for tea. Eula Mae introduced her children one by one. Walter, who was fifty eight and the president of a bank. Loretta, fifty seven, a pediatrician. Dorothy, fifty five, a school principal. The three babies of 1968. They stood in a row beside the table like people about to receive a medal, and each took my hand, and none of them could speak. At last the doctor said, in a low voice, “My mother told us there was a little girl with a twenty dollar bill. We grew up on that story.”
A twelve year old girl spends her birthday money on formula for a stranger, and fifty eight years later, the children of that stranger shake her hand.
Eula Mae poured tea with a hand that shook only a little. She told me how it had been. Her husband was killed at the Decatur plant in the first week of November 1968, a steel beam falling from a crane. She was twenty six, with an infant, a toddler, and a four year old, and no savings. She had come to the Piggly Wiggly with the last of her pennies to buy formula, and a girl in pigtails had handed the clerk a twenty dollar bill and fled. “I ran out after you,” she said. “But your mother had already led you into a car.”
“I promised myself that day that I would repay it,” she said. “I did not know your name, only that your mother called you Carolyn. I started a little business. I made preserves in my kitchen and sold them from a card table outside the church. Then pickles. Then pies. In 1975 I rented a storefront. I called it Harmon Pantry. I kept a ledger for a fund I called the Pigtail Account, in which I put a dollar from every jar sold. I did not touch it. I told my children, someday we will find her.”
She nodded to Mr. Whitfield, and he opened his briefcase and set a heavy black ledger on the white tablecloth. The columns ran for fifty eight years. Dollars, then tens, then thousands. At the bottom, in the firm hand of a lawyer, he had written a figure. I read it twice. I counted the zeros. Four million, three hundred and twelve thousand dollars. “That is the Pigtail Account,” Eula Mae said calmly. “It is yours. It has been yours since 1968.” I put my hand over my mouth. I felt as if the floor had gone soft beneath me.
I told her at once that I could not accept it. I said I had not earned it, that it had been the gesture of a child, twenty dollars of birthday money that my mother had whipped me for losing. She reached across the table and covered my hand with her small, dry palm. “Carolyn,” she said, “you gave a hungry baby a bottle when no one else would. That baby grew up to run a bank. You cannot put a price on that, and I will not insult you by trying. This is not payment. It is a thank you with interest.”
We talked until the shadows lengthened across the garden. Her children told me about their lives. Walter had been the baby in the Piggly Wiggly cart, and he showed me a photograph of himself at eight months, chubby and bald, with a bottle in his fist. “That is the one,” he said, grinning. “That is the bottle.” I wept. I think we all did. Eula Mae sat at the head of the table with her cane across her knees and her eyes bright, a tiny woman who had spent her whole life repaying a twenty dollar debt.
I did not keep all of it. After a night of prayer, I called Mr. Whitfield and asked him to set up a foundation in the name of the Pigtail Account, with Eula Mae and me as the first board members. Its purpose, we wrote, would be to see that no child in North Alabama ever goes without formula, milk, or a hot supper. We named it Carolyn and Eula Mae Table. Within a year it had stocked forty pantries and provided two hundred thousand meals. The Kroger on Whitesburg Drive donates every Tuesday.
Eula Mae died the following spring, at ninety two, in her sleep, with her hand in mine. At the funeral, her three children asked me to sit with the family. In the pew in front of us rested a small basket of twenty dollar bills, one for every child who had attended the table that month. When the minister called the congregation forward to leave a rose on the casket, I took a crisp bill from my purse and laid it among the petals. It was my birthday money, I told her, finally returned.