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The Call - Eleven The Call - Eleven dream was upsetting enough. As a hobby, his mother raised Chihuahua puppies at that time and was very fond of her two main breeders, Corky and Dolly. She made comfortable quarters for them in the basement of the house, and there were several small puppies for whom she had great hopes. One morning at breakfast, Ted told his mother of the strange dream he’d had during the night. “IT dreamed I got up,” he explained, “and went to the basement door because I was concerned about the dogs. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I felt that something dis- turbing had happened to them. I opened the basement door, and that’s when I realized that a fire had been burning down ere. “T went down the stairs and walked around their beds,” he continued, “and I saw that all the puppies had been burned to death. It was really awful. Then I saw that Corky had been only slightly burned and was still alive. Dolly was injured, too, hovering between life and death. She was in bad shape, but I thought that with good medical treatment Dolly might survive. Still, it was so sad to know that all the puppies were gone.” He was very depressed by the dream, and Mrs. Rice com- miserated, but since it had only been a dream, she thought very little about it. And Ted put it out of his mind, too, never thinking that the dream might have had any extraordinary meaning. In less than a month, however, the Chihuahuas were all stricken by a serious illness. Although the veterinarian did his best to save the pets, one by one the puppies succumbed. Corky was the least affected and soon recovered. Dolly, the favorite, suffered for a long time before finally pulling through, but her health was permanently scarred. Ted and Mrs. Rice remembered the dream about the fire, and they realized that in some way it had been prophetic of the illness. The realization made them both very uneasy, especially Ted. He didn’t want any psychic abilities to show him such sad events, which he could do nothing to change. There were other dreams, too, just as disturbing. Once he dreamed of the death of a relative, and again he told his Masquerade of Angels 102 mother the next morning. After what had happened with the Chihuahuas, it was hard for Ted to dismiss the second dream. And when, three weeks later, the family received a phone call announcing the relative’s death, Ted became seriously concerned. So did Mrs. Rice, who insisted that he must quit having such dreams. Ted would gladly have obeyed her, but he was helpless to shut down the flow of images in his mind. The most impressive of his prophetic dreams was the third one, and this time the details were sharp and clear. It began with a view of a dark, cloudy sky. Rain was falling, and the air was cold. He saw a rotunda in a large building, and in the center stood a casket draped with an American flag. In the dream, Ted approached the coffin, coming near enough to see a woman lying in it. He didn’t recognize the woman, but he could tell that it was a solemn occasion, one of great importance. When he awoke the next day, he described the dream to his family, yet none of them could see any significance in the details. Later, however, those details proved exact. George Wallace had been the governor of Alabama since 1963, but by 1967 he had served all the time allowed by the state’s constitution. It was a period of racial turmoil in the south, as in the rest of the country, and the political forces Governor Wallace represented were unwilling to give up control of the state. With no possibility of serving another term, he chose to put his wife Lurlene into the race for the governorship. She would certainly win, and through her he could continue to fight for the principles he held. And as his- tory shows, that is exactly what happened. But at the time of Ted’s dream, no one had any idea that Lurlene Wallace would become governor of Alabama. His family did have a remote connection to the Wallace family, however, because Ted had become friends with a young man in Tuscaloosa who dated Governor Wallace’s daughter for a while. It was exciting to be that close to the historical figure, especially since Wallace’s stand against integration had propelled him into the national spotlight. And when Lurlene Wallace won the governor’s race and Masquerade of Angels 103