Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig hfwal.com. NS
Answer
hfwal.com. 5 NS ns-374.awsdns-46.com.
hfwal.com. 5 NS ns-301.awsdns-37.com.
hfwal.com. 5 NS ns-89.awsdns-11.com.
hfwal.com. 5 NS ns-1034.awsdns-01.org.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0