Who was Walker Dornan?
He was the child scarred by Depression era hunger and the teenager kneeling by a radio in a North Carolina textile mill, learning of “a date which will live in infamy.” He was a husband and a father, a ladies man and a man’s man, whatever that meant. He was patriotic to a point of obsession and religious to a point of convenience. He gave his heart to defeat fascism and his soul to barely break even against invisible enemies behind an “Iron Curtain” that he would never lay eyes on.
He sold insurance.
When Walker Dornan entered a room, he was the room, lank and tan and ten feet tall, with an ever-present Salem cigarette leaving a sickeningly sweet menthol trail to whatever trouble was happening to everyone next. To say he was a force of nature does him no justice. Nature was a force of him, and if nature wasn’t up to the task, there was mace in the glove box, a headache stick hidden under the seat, and a Smith and Wesson on the dash so the whole world could ascertain its immediate future if things didn’t go according to plan.
His plan.
He once won an Oldsmobile in a poker game. He traded it in on a Chrysler. He was the man you called if you had shot your bigamist husband’s other wife or just needed to be talked down from the water tower with a rifle in your hands. He was either a self-made superhero or a self-deluded super villain, depending on who was telling the story, and if he was telling the story, you were about to be entertained.
He was always the best fisherman in any boat.
For over eight decades he rolled inexorably forward, his life defined by a unique talent for turning mistakes into miracles and miracles into disasters faster than he could clean them up. Along the way he made a million friends. And nearly as many enemies.
It was the misfortune of his late-in-life, saving-the-family-name-just-in-time only son, Henry, to inherit that complicated legacy, leaving the boy, later a man, little recourse but to hang on for dear life in his father’s thrashing wake, following the poison like it was his job.
Walker Dornan was the 20th Century American man, audacious, lucky, and simultaneously foolish and cocksure. It sounds cliché, but he always made his own rules, he never slowed down, and he never looked back.
He left that to Henry.