Chapter 1

"Damn it, Jeff! I don't care that your wife is a raving lunatic, you can't be going off like that and whacking her leg off with a chainsaw!"

"Awww come on Sheriff, you know that the crazy ones are always the most fun in bed. Besides, for the about the twentieth time now, I did not cut off her leg with a chainsaw. I used my belt knife!"

Confused? Well so was I. My darling bride of just two years had become pissed at me once again and decided to tackle, on her own, a job that I had refused too do and had seriously done herself quite a mischief. I had done nothing other than to help save her life but darned if anyone one else was quite seeing it that way.

I wasn't annoyed with the Sheriff; he was just doing his job. Besides we were old buddies and teammates together at Ohio State, still watched football together most weekends in season and bowled together on Wednesday nights. I had no doubt I'd get a fair shake from him, but it was the County Attorney that was pressing his buttons now.

I shut my eyes for a second and counted to ten and gave my story another go.

It seems all silly now but the start of the biggest row we had ever had in our marriage began when I wouldn't throw away my old, well-broken-in, large Igloo ice cooler. You've got to understand that, in my work as a large animal veterinarian, you just can't have too many ice chests kicking around. Frankly I have days that I've wished I had a few more sitting around in the garage. But my wife Leanne didn't quite see it that way ... but then again nowadays we didn't see eye to eye on much of anything anymore.

Leanne and I dated during our last two years together at Ohio State while I was finishing my Vet degree and she was completing her B.A. in Literature. She was always the one pushing our relationship onwards ... I don't even remember actually proposing to her! We were great together in bed (the crazy ones really are more fun in bed), but the rest of the time we, frankly, really struggled to be able to communicate at all with one another. I'm fun loving and extremely laid back, while she's 'just a tad' high strung and excitable ... and extremely high maintenance, financially and emotionally. We kept staying together for the high-octane wild sex and hoped that it would be enough to keep us together.

Frankly I have no clue how or why we ended up getting married after graduation, but I'm pretty sure it was her idea — and I'm equally sure that we both regret it now. The word 'divorce' was starting to enter into my thoughts more than occasionally and as far as I was concerned, the timing now couldn't have been better. I'd had more than enough of her shit. The Igloo incident was pretty much just the frosting on the cake.

Once I started my first vet job and bought our house in the wilds of Ohio I thought we had our clear and separate empires well delineated. She was currently a stay at home housewife (she considered secretary work and teaching quite beneath her and an insult to her intelligence) and I let her have absolute rule over everything inside the house. In return I was supposed to have free reign over our barn and the converted garage that is my home office. In other words she promised to keep her hands entirely off of my work related areas. In practice, however, Leanne's empire of control continued to remorselessly expand outwards. Hence, the previous Tuesday evening, I came home late from my practice to find that she had been cleaning my work areas again, and my largest (and favorite) ice cooler was now sitting out by the County farm road curb to await our monthly trash pickup on Friday morning.

I was dead-beat tired — it was spring calving season and I was working very long and erratic hours. Without a doubt this was my busiest time of year (and potentially the most lucrative). The last thing in the world I needed was more trouble at home this particular week. I picked up my Igloo, dusted it off and put it right back into my office and didn't give it another thought. Odds were that I would need it sometime this week anyway.

The very next evening, Wednesday, I again arrived home even later (it was almost Thursday) to find that, once again, my best big cooler was sitting out in the trash. I ground my molars a bit and retrieved it and carefully hid it behind a hay pile in the barn this time. As Leanne had already gone to bed (no supper waiting for me either) I resolved to keep my powder dry and fight it out with her once and for all later this weekend. It may sound like a small thing to you, but we had rules ... she was supposed to stay out of my things, or at least not move anything when she went snooping around trying to catch me at something. I didn't have any secrets to hide — I just needed to know that my tools and other materials would be right where they were supposed to be in case I needed anything in the middle of the night for an emergency call.

There was no cooler out by the trash late Thursday night. The barn had been definitely ransacked, but she hadn't found it. Leanne saw the snug look on my face and glared daggers at me. She stomped off to bed without a word, and without fixing any dinner for me again

Getting home the following night, it was early Saturday morning this time, I was knackered beyond words when I got home, but awoke with a jolt when I discovered that my Igloo was now sitting out on the front porch with the firewood axe theatrically chopped right into the center of the lid. My wife was standing next to it looking intensely pleased with herself. I could tell with a quick look into the barn that a tornado must have pass through it. Leanne had literally moved everything not nailed into the ground to find where I had hidden away the ice chest. She was so insanely stubborn that she just couldn't let the matter rest ... and she also had to have the last word in any fight, no matter how petty.

The axe did indeed look tempting ... but I resisted the urge go "Jack Nicholson" and use it on her. I had other urgent plans instead and we launched right into the first round of World War Three.

"You had no right to keep hauling back that old stinky ice chest you keep dead animals and icky bloody body parts in. It was awful and disgusting! If you absolutely have to have an ice chest go get a nice clean modern one that you can keep non filthy!" I hate it when she starts off the fight. It puts me on the defensive right from the start and makes it nearly impossible to win — not that I've ever won a fight with her anyway.

"You had absolutely no right to go into my office and my barn work areas and take my personal veterinary tools and make an arbitrary decision to dispose of my property. I do not treat your clothes, linens or anything else that is yours with that contempt. Besides, that old cooler was spotlessly clean inside and had many good years of life left in it. Buying a new one this size would cost me nearly $100 and I might even have to go to the Sam's in Cleveland to get one this large ... if they even make these anymore." It was a good start, keeping the debate on the moral high ground ... but ultimately pointless. Leanne might be able to spell the word 'logic' but it was a very alien concept to her.

Discussion soon turned into shouting. It invariably did. Leanne was definitely a firm believer in the theory that whatever your argument lacks in soundness you can make up for it with loudness, and she did so with a vengeance. If Leanne has a worst personality trait, it is that she gets "looped" on things from time to time. She's more than a bit obsessive-compulsive and once gets an idea into her head, it's nearly impossible to change it. In one of these phases (which have been coming far too frequently lately) she's like a broken record or old auto-reverse cassette deck, playing the same bit of sound over and over and over again. She stays completely fixated upon that one single small point until it gets resolved — indefinitely. Days or weeks, it just doesn't seem to matter to her.

Leanne was most definitely looping now; just rehashing her point that she was furious that I hadn't allowed her to throw it out when it so obviously had to be done. Accordingly, I was disrespecting her by not permitting her to have free reign anywhere and that I must respect her wishes (cough command cough) that the Igloo MUST go!

Fat chance. It was a good thing that our nearest neighbor was nearly a mile away because the going got pretty loud for awhile. We didn't come to blows and miraculously the "D" word was never used (I could not take control of the conversation long enough to bring it up) but I did let her know in no uncertain terms that I was tired of her psychotic ravings and had no intention of speaking with her again about anything until she stopped looping about that damned ice chest!

She let me know in uncertain terms she was sick of living in "Green Acres" surrounded by country bumpkins and that she was even more sick of me and didn't need or want me around if I couldn't respect her wishes.

"Fine by me!" I let her know and covered my ears so she couldn't get another word in edgewise. Well, she did keep ranting, but it didn't count since I obviously couldn't hear it.

With that I stomped off into the barn to sleep. I have got a fairly comfortable cot and a blanket out there, and the cool temperature inside the barn was far warmer than the arctic chill that my wife would radiate in our bedroom. I went right to sleep until I was woken up by the loud sound of the barn door slamming sometime, obscenely early in the morning. I didn't think too much about it and was nearly back asleep again when the sound of my chainsaw starting up woke me up just about completely. If I wasn't 100% awake already, the bloody curdling scream I heard just a few moments later finished the job. I leaped out of my cot and ran outside into the barnyard.

Leanne had never used my chainsaw, or any other chainsaw, before as far as I knew. Mine was a big and fairly powerful one with a definite mind of it's own that doesn't tolerate a light hand. Leanne was none too tall or very physically strong in the upper body and probably could barely lift the darn thing. It's amazing the amount of strength that insane anger can give you though. She had started the damned thing up and had hoisted it to attempt to finish the job on my Igloo that the axe had started last night. She had made the terrible mistake of holding the ice chest steady using her left foot on top so it wouldn't move when she cut into the cooler.

Instead, the chain bounced off of the top of the lid under her weak grasp and found something softer instead to cut into — her left foot just above her ankle.

The wound was bad, and there was an awful lot of blood. It also didn't help that she was now flailing about and screaming like a banshee while in utter shock. I ripped off my belt (it was a good thing I slept still dressed in the barn) and attempted to use it to make a tourniquet around her bleeding leg, but she kept thrashing about and even kicking at me with her remaining good leg. The way her stump was bleeding she was going to bleed out soon if I didn't act. In the end, I had to sit on her to get her still long enough to get the tourniquet on and get my first good look at her wound.

I didn't like what I saw. She had cut cleanly through the entire leg, both the tibia and fibula, and all of the muscle. The only thing even holding her ankle still connected to her leg was about a ¾ inch wide bit of fragile skin. This was very bad. I wasn't an MD but you do learn enough in vet school (especially in the large animal program) to know exactly how and what needs to be done in this situation. Thank goodness it was a weekend and I was still home, if she had done this yesterday there is no doubt she would have bleed out in the state of shock she was in.

I took out my trusty belt knife and bent over to slice off that last bit of skin connecting the amputated limb. Leanne screamed bloody murder and just kept yelling "No! No! No!" But I ignored her — I was pretty sure the handling and treatment of severed limbs wasn't covered in any of her literature classes, even in her extensive reading of the Italian Renaissance poets. She was now going to be very, very glad I still had my ice chest (and still mostly undamaged), because if there was to be any hope of surgical reattachment her lopped off ankle and foot were going to need to be as chilled as I could get it.

I called County 911 to give them the bad news. The worse news was that the nearest unit on call was over 20 minutes away from us, but I did some fast coordinating and got then to plan on meeting us at Taft Grove, the nearest town in between our two locations. With her limb iced down in the chest and with every scrap of ice we had in our freezer, I forced Leanne into the passenger seat of my truck and proceeded to haul ass down the road to meet the EMS techs at Taft. They arrived there about the same time we did, and after giving my wife a quick look-over the two techs gave my first-aid measures their complete and unreserved full approval.

"Damned good work!" One of them even said during our ride to County Hospital. "She should have no problems getting it reattached and working again!" Leanne didn't much see that point of view and kept telling everyone who would listen that it was all my fault and that I had done this to her!

I'm not sure I expected gratitude from her ... Hell! I did expect at least a little gratitude! Even if she wasn't feeling particularly happy there was no cause for telling the EMS techs that I was an attempted chainsaw murderer! Fortunately we had a lot of driving time getting to the hospital for me to explain the true facts and Leanne was mostly in too much shock to argue.

County Hospital emergency receiving took one look at her and scheduled an immediate Life-Flight to a bigger hospital in Cleveland. They didn't have a neurosurgeon on-staff here that could properly reattach her limb but they could at least give her some drugs to knock her out a bit. Her attending physician also concurred with the quality of my first-aid and declared it to be "Perfect — just what was needed to be done".

Two hours later she was in surgery where her foot was reattached, hopefully for a more permanent association. Unfortunately, her semi-insane raving that I had caused and had been responsible for her injury continued. I made statements to every attending doctor and even to a pair of Cleveland Police officers that arrived in her hospital room to take a statement from her. Everyone (except Leanne) was well content with my true account of the facts.