The Traveling Doll Salesman

Vee Loring · April 3, 2022

The traveling doll salesman, if you were to meet him on the road, you might mistake him for a priest leading pilgrims, or penitents. His wares follow him in an obedient line, hidden in plain traveling cloaks.

Doll salesman is a bit of a misnomer, really. Doll repairs are most of his business, and he’s a dabbling carpenter, tinker, smith, cobbler, and tailor. The only thing he can’t work is porcelain, and even there he knows some glues and fillers that can make things almost new.

The dolls who follow him are his wares, though, even if he sells only a few a year. Every market day they’re there, with the dust of the road washed from them, sitting neatly on the green while he lounges against his pack, their condition and good repair the only shingle he needs.

Not many stop by just to talk; too much time around dolls doesn’t make one a good conversationalist, and he was never in the habit of eye contact to begin with. People bring their dolls over, or the dolls of those who are too rich or busy or infirm to come to the market bring themselves over, and immediately he will spring to action and begin inspection with the impersonal familiarity of a craftsman.

Often, no one even has to say what they’re there for. He’ll merely say “reshoeing, 10p” or “I’ve got an arm that’ll fit, I can have it repainted tomorrow” and the doll or owner will nod in agreement.

May 15, 2022

One time you’ll always find the Traveling Doll Salesman in town is after a funeral. He’s always welcome; everyone can use a few extra, trustworthy hands to help with the moving and cleaning that comes with a death. He’s not there for the grieving family, though.

Doll maintenance and repair is his business, but he’s no dollmaker. If a doll Stops, it’s just spare parts to him. You’ll have to find a witch for that, and witches have no address. He knows the rumors about what forest paths you need to walk, and when, but offers no guarantees.

Sometimes a doll Stops out of grief, or whatever near inscrutable emotion dolls feel, after the death of its owner. Sometimes not. It happens without warning; one day you wake up late, the morning routine broken by silence where the clatter of dollwork should be.

That’s why the Traveling Doll Salesman is there, to lay a weathered hand on the cheek of the deceased’s doll and do his best to understand what it’s feeling, whether its secret witchmade heart is winding down.

If it is, business can commence. The doll can maybe be saved, brought back from its decline, with a change of scenery. Its owners, sentimental or not, can usually be persuaded to sell or trade their old doll for one of the salesman’s charges.

Then, it’s back to the road, usually double quick march to make up for the unscheduled interruption of his routine. The new acquisition is just one of his dolls now, dressed in plain gray, healing invisibly through the simple routine of travel.

The Crazed Doll

June 21, 2022

There’s one doll that’s a permanent member of the Traveling Doll Salesman’s troupe. She’s unsellable, in fact; too fragile for outside work, too marred for inside service.

The salesman uses her, largely, as a kind of infinitely adjustable workbench clamp; her gloved hands hold legs while he paints or glues or lacquers them. Her arms support torsos while he screws brass fittings into them.

She’s been with him for quite a while: Long ago there was a fire in a wealthy landowner’s house. The entire family perished, leaving only their doll trapped in the burning rubble. That really should have been the end of her.

If she wasn’t simply crushed into shards by the burning roof beams, the sheer physical insult of the fire and the loss of her whole family should have rendered her Still on the spot. For some reason, though, that didn’t happen.

The heat scorched her, crazed her into a fragile patchwork of cracks, but she was still a doll, intact. When the Salesman came to town the ashes were still warm and the townsfolk hadn’t been able to decide what to do with her.

She was, of course, blamed for the fire. A servant claimed the doll had forgotten to remove a bed warmer, and the coals had set the sheets alight. This is impossible; dolls don’t forget anything. They also don’t defend themselves.

The only thing that saved this crazed doll from destruction by a self-righteous mob was a vague uneasiness about unmaking something witch-made. When the doll salesman showed up they just dumped their problem on him.

The first problem, for him, was she was too fragile to walk down the street, much less from town to town. Every part of her was a spiderweb of incipient fractures, ready to propagate at the slightest shock.

After some thought, the salesman filled the crazed doll with plaster of paris and wrapped it in gauze. Mummified like this, she could move, awkwardly but without fear of shattering.

The crazed doll became his long-term project, an experiment in the art and craft of doll reconstruction. Plaster and gauze were replaced with a custom wooden skeleton, and leather cushioned her joints and soles.

She endured baths of custom-mixed glued and resins, and days curing in a borrowed baker’s oven. Cruder types like to joke that he knows her better than any man knows his wife, but this is literally true: there is no part of her he hasn’t seen.

There is no part he isn’t trying to improve. The road is still hard on the crazed doll, and his reinforcements don’t last forever. When they fail, though, he usually has another idea he wants to try, and she has the patience to accept it.