The Tuesday Voicemail · Mid-June 2002
A Chapter in the Story of Joshua Blake Hargrove
I. The Message
There is a voicemail I keep.
He left it on a Tuesday in the middle of June 2002. He was on a mission trip. He had arrived wherever he had arrived. He called home to tell his mother and me that he had gotten there safely.
The message is short.
Hey. I’m okay. We got here safe. No crash, no burn. Love y’all.
That is what it says. In his voice. In the register of a young man who wants his parents to know that everything is fine and he is not in trouble and he is not hurt and there is nothing they need to worry about.
No crash, no burn.
That was the reassurance.
II. The Words
He said it because it was what parents wanted to hear.
No crash, no burn was the offhand phrase of a boy at the age when a boy has just started driving long distances and has just begun to understand that his parents’ worry is about the road and not about him. He was closing the loop for us. He was telling us the drive had gone fine. He was saying we could exhale.
He was doing what a good son does when he has been on the road with his church youth group.
He had no idea what the words would become.
He had no idea that within a few days a truck would come across the center line on Highway 62 near Buna, Texas, and that one of the two things he had just told us had not happened — would happen. He had no idea that his mother and I would sit for twenty-four years afterward with a recording of his voice reassuring us that he had not crashed and had not burned, and that we would listen to it and be unable to make his voice change what had already been said.
No crash, no burn.
He meant it.
He was right, that Tuesday.
He was wrong days later.
III. What It Means Now
I have listened to that voicemail more times than I can count.
I have listened to it in the truck. In the kitchen. In the office. In the middle of the night when I could not sleep. I have listened to it because it is the last extended piece of him that exists in his own voice — longer than a text, longer than any single letter, longer than most of what he wrote.
Every time I listen I hear the same thing.
Hey. I’m okay.
I hear a boy on a mission trip calling home to reassure his parents that everything is fine. I hear the ordinary tenderness of a son who did not want his mother to worry. I hear the small joke he made — no crash, no burn — that was meant as comfort and has become the sentence I cannot escape.
I do not listen to it for the phrase.
I listen to it for the voice.
The voice does not know what is coming. The voice is telling the truth of a Tuesday afternoon in June 2002. The voice is a boy in a moment when everything he says is what he means and none of it has yet been contradicted by anything.
That voice is not going to be added to.
IV. What It Cannot Say
The voicemail is stopped.
It says what it says. It cannot say more. He cannot record another one. There will not be another Tuesday when he called home to tell us he had gotten there safely. There will not be another love y’all in the voice of a boy on the road with his youth group. What is on the recording is the whole of the voicemail archive he will ever leave.
That is what makes the few seconds of that message the most important audio in this family’s possession.
It is not because of what it says.
It is because it is the last long stretch of him speaking.
I have preserved it. I do not intend to lose it. Some things in this life must be kept because they are all that is left, and this is one of them. A father who has buried a son knows that a voice is not a small thing. A voice is a body without weight, a person without extension, a boy without a future. It is the closest thing to him I still have on this side.
Hey. I’m okay. We got here safe.
He was okay. He did get there safely.
No crash, no burn.
Those words were true when he spoke them.
They stopped being true on a highway near Buna, Texas, at 12:50 a.m. on the twenty-second of June, 2002.
And I still play the recording.
Because he is still speaking.
But only what he already said.
Joshua Blake Hargrove
April 9, 1984 — June 22, 2002
Poet. Warrior. Son of Light.
