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 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: gunmetal 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-bag 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 came back in little velvet jewelry bags with "United States Army" embossed in gold 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 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.
She didn't know what to do with the images. And yet she kept coming back to them, cycling through them on her laptop. The blurred street scenes, taken from a Humvee window. The anonymous, laughing Iraqi policemen her son had trained. The American soldiers trying to make phone calls home, hiding behind their warrior faces in the streets or mugging like boys from the relative safety of a barracks bunk.
There were enigmatic landmarks: concrete blocks and minarets. Captured ammunition lined up in the dust.
Eventually she decided she would paint them. Maybe she would even paint them all. Never mind that she knew little about oil on canvas. She would paint what the soldiers saw: this alien world of washed-out sand hues that she barely understood, this place so far from her comfortable South Carolina home. This last world her son would inhabit.
On that June afternoon, Shealy, 53, received a guest on her generous front porch, offering homemade sweet tea. A fan spun lazily overhead. Rangy and well-toned from tennis, she was dressed casually: a Ralph Lauren sailor shirt and gold-leaf earrings, pink nail polish and sensible sandals.
The death and the notification had come nearly three years earlier. But when she dredged them up from her memory, her voice began to wobble and crack, the prelude to a deeper, lupine yowl.
Her daughter Elizabeth, 22, trained her eyes on her mother and cried along with her, in a kind of awful duet. A breeze blew Shealy's wind chimes gently into one another as she plowed through the details yet again:
"It was small-arms fire. . . . went into his neck and devastated his carotid artery. . . . Patterson pulled him under the vehicle so they wouldn't shoot him anymore. . . . They cracked open his chest. . . . and he was two weeks from coming home."
Shealy grew up comfortably middle-class, with seven years of piano lessons. Her grandfather had been an artist and a jazz musician, and something of a layabout. Her mother said: better to major in business and help run the family's fast-food franchises.
Shealy was a sorority sister at the University of South Carolina whose most rebellious act was playing too much bridge. Joseph was the product of her first marriage -- a failed one -- just after college.
He would soon have a loving stepfather, a younger brother and sister, and a big house in the suburbs of Columbia. He would play army in the creeks and culverts with a neighbor named Johnny. When he didn't have a toy gun, he would pick up a stick.
