The chief executive of the racing company stood in the middle of the Shelbyville fairgrounds, in the golden light of the evening, with the trophy of my husband Harlan cradled in both hands like a baby. He was a tall man named Mr. Whitlow, and he had come to our county to present me with an award for the starting gate patent that had made me wealthy. I am Marjorie Pettibone, eighty two years old, and I stood beside him in my good blue dress. He turned to me and said, very quietly, “Mrs. Pettibone, I know the man who bought this.”
He pointed with his chin, across the crowd, to a heavyset man in a cream colored hat who was leaning on the rail of the show ring with a paper cup of coffee. Mr. Whitlow told me, in a low voice, that the man was named Delbert Crane, a dealer from Kentucky who had been banned from three racing museums for buying memorabilia from families in trouble and selling it for ten times the price. He recognized him because Crane had once tried to sell the company its own first trophy. And Crane had a stall, that very night, at the Nashville flea market.
I felt my knees go weak. For eleven weeks, since the morning I had found the glass cabinet empty, I had told no one except the sheriff what had happened. My grandson Justin, twenty nine years old, thin as a rail and in the grip of the methamphetamine, had carried forty four trophies of my husband out of the house in a laundry basket and sold them for six hundred dollars to a stranger at a flea market. Forty four ribbons, silver cups and brass horses that Harlan had won from 1961 to 2009, one for every season of his life.
A starting gate patent turned over in a horse show crowd gave one grandmother the evening to bring her grandson home to Shelbyville.
I gave my terms standing in the grass, with my hand on the arm of Mr. Whitlow. “I want every one of those trophies back, and I want the sheriff to be the one who goes to ask for them. I do not want Mr. Crane harmed, and I do not want Justin hurt, and I do not want a single word said about this in front of the horses. Afterward I want my grandson to come home with me. If he is willing to go to a hospital in Murfreesboro, I will pay for it. If he is not, I will sit beside him until he is.”
Sheriff Tate was a patient man, and he came across the field with two deputies, quiet as church. Mr. Crane saw them coming and set down his coffee. He reached for the canvas bag at his feet, the one with the clasp, and I understood at once what was inside. It was a trophy, the biggest one, the silver cup of the Walking Horse Celebration of 1987, which my husband had loved best. Crane clutched it against his coat and began to push his way backward through the crowd of ladies in their summer hats, toward the parking field.
He did not get past the Pettibone Stable crew. My husband had employed the same four men for thirty years, and they had come to the show in their clean white shirts to see me honored. When Crane came backing out of the crowd, red faced, they simply stepped into a line behind him, shoulder to shoulder. Old Walter, the head groom, who was eighty years old and could still lift a saddle, plucked the cup out of the arms of Crane the way you take a toy from a child. “I believe this belongs to Miss Marjorie,” he said, quietly.
The Sheriff arrived in time to read the man his rights, and the crowd, which had gone absolutely silent, let out its breath. Mr. Whitlow gave me his handkerchief, and I used it. Then I saw Justin. He had come to the show in a borrowed jacket, hiding by the barn, because he had heard that I would be honored. He stood at the edge of the light with tears running down his face and his hands hanging empty at his sides. I walked across the grass to him as quickly as my old legs would carry me.
The money consequences were swift. Crane was arrested for receiving stolen property, and his stall in Nashville yielded all forty four trophies, and thirty more from other families. Not one was missing. Justin entered the hospital in Murfreesboro the next morning and stayed one hundred days. The seven point two million dollars from the starting gate patent was placed in a trust, with the share of Justin to be paid on every birthday that he remained well. The company also erected, at its own expense, a glass case in the Shelbyville fairgrounds hall.
In the name of Harlan, who passed in 2020, I started the Harlan Pettibone Fund. It pays for treatment beds, family counseling and the return of stolen keepsakes to older families, in Bedford, Marshall and Lincoln counties. In the first year we placed twenty eight young people in treatment and recovered keepsakes for nineteen families. One was a widow from Lewisburg whose nephew had sold the war medals of her husband to a pawn shop. When the medals came back in their velvet box, she pinned them on her own blouse and wore them to church.
On an evening in October, I stood with Justin in the new trophy hall at the fairgrounds, and we looked at the forty four pieces of silver and brass shining under the lights. He was fourteen months well, strong and brown from working at the stables. He read the name on each one, aloud, in a low voice, the way a man reads names on a wall. When he reached the last one he put his arm around me and said, “Grandma, I held every one of these in my hands, and I did not know what they were.” I told him he knew now.
