COLUMBIA, S.C. — Suzy Shealy was one of those preppy Southern moms whose artistic streak found expression in what she calls "crafty-type things": cross-stitched towels, Christmas ornaments, knitted scarves.
It was stuff to give away at school auctions or offer to neighbors, stuff with little hearts and frills, the comforting, precious visual language of mother-love.
Yet here she was on a balmy June afternoon, in a studio overlooking a yard full of petunias and marigolds, painting the kill-or-be-killed scowl of an American soldier patrolling on the streets of Iraq.
Whish-whish went her brush, and as if by magic, the planes and angles of the soldier's bones emerged from a light haze of grayish paint: gun-metal cheekbones and nostrils flared and fierce. She outlined the suggestion of a right arm, and a hand clutching an M-16 assault rifle.
The snapshot she painted from was attached to the canvas with a potato-chip clip from her kitchen. In the photo, a second soldier hovered in the background, his torso emerging from a Humvee turret.
But Shealy will not paint her dead son. She is not ready.
"I'm just not," she said. "I don't know why."
Some of Sgt. Joseph Derrick's personal belongings were returned to his family in boxes. Some of it came back in little velvet jewelry bags with "UNITED STATES ARMY" embossed in golden letters. His mother has kept nearly everything, no matter how trivial: the phone card he used to call her from Baghdad, his cellphone, his boot laces, his civilian clothes.
A mother learns that every one of her children has a signature scent. The old T-shirts and sweats still smell like her first child. She can still picture him the day he was born -- those perfect hands and perfect feet, those big blue eyes. How could she throw his things away?
Among the belongings that came back from Iraq was a tiny Flash drive she had sent to him as part of a care package. It returned to her filled with more than 500 photos. Some of them were taken by Joseph. Others were taken by his fellow soldiers. Before Sept. 23, 2005 -- before the insurgent sniper fired the bullets that pierced his neck -- Joseph had told her about the pictures. He couldn't wait, he had said, to come home and deliver the stories that the pictures promised. But without their narrator, Shealy found that the photos amounted to a chain of riddles. An eternally incomplete slide show.
