One man had a son. He had already grown up big, but he never called his father father.
“Kuzma,” the son shouts at his father, “go plow!” Kuzma, drive the pigs into the barn!
It’s a shame for my father, but what can you do: I didn’t relearn it from childhood, but now...
People laugh at Kuzmina's son.
“You fool,” they say, “how can you not respect your father!”
But at least he doesn’t listen to his father or people.
Once Kuzma and his son went to buy hay. They loaded the carts and are going home: the father on one cart, the son on the other.
They passed a flat road and entered the forest. There were bumps and potholes here.
The father got down from the hay, walked to the side, keeping an eye on the cart so that it didn’t tip over. And the son lies on his cart and just shouts:
- Kuzma, there’s a pit, support the cart! Kuzma, lead my horse along the side of the road, otherwise the wheel will hit the stump!
The father runs from cart to cart, but cannot cope. And his son just mocks him:
- Well done, Kuzma! You're trying hard. The father got angry and stopped running to his cart. In one place, a cart of hay fell into a deep pothole and overturned...
The son fell with his nose in the mud.
He stood up and scolded his father:
- See, Kuzma, what you’ve done!
They picked up the cart and moved on.
The son has not even climbed up the hay. He walks to the side and keeps grumbling at his father.
We reached a sharp turn. The father supported his cart with his shoulder and drove around the bend, but the son did not want to waste his energy. The cart turned over and crushed him under itself.
- Kuzma! - the son shouts from under the hay. - Raise the cart!
The father is silent, as if he had filled his mouth with water. He took a tobacco pouch out of his pocket and lit a pipe. “Just lie there, since you’re so smart,” he thinks.
The son called and called Kuzma, but he became deaf. The son can barely breathe. He got scared and screamed in a voice that was not his own:
- Dad, save me!
Kuzma was glad that his son finally called him father. He picked up the cart and said to his son, grinning:
“If you live in the world, brother, you’ll make a lot of money, and you’ll call Kuzma your father!”
From then on this saying began.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru